Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. -Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Chrome certainly makes that idea manifest. And sure, maybe somethings were taken away that I’d want, like the ability to have a color theme different from the a-bit-too-dark Bloogle blue, or access to all my favorite FireFox add-ons. Oh, and somewhat ironically, I do miss my Google toolbar, particularly the autofill feature. But I expect that will all come in time.

On the lighter side, I just love how Microsoft came out with a statement today saying they weren’t worried about Chrome competing with IE8 – the only thing preventing that from happening is the default install base on Windows PCs – if IE weren’t installed by default on so many machines, their market share would fade away so fast – IE feels like an old jalopy compared to FireFox, and I hate to say this, but FireFox, while still an amazing browser, just feels slow and tired compared to Chrome (though maybe I should give it some time and open up a gazillion tabs and get umpteen applications running and see if Chrome’s garbage collection really is as great as they sat it is) – and one reason it hurts to say that is because so much of what makes Chrome great is thanks to the sweat and hard work and dedication of the people over at Mozilla – Google even made of point saying so in their super cool comic strip about the new browser. I love how they call it a ‘book’ – hey Googlers, did you know that there also are these books out there with, like, text and stuff :)

Maybe my favorite thing about Joost is how nicely I was transitioned into this radically different desktop experience. All the buttons and ui elements feel smooth and friendly without feeling like you’re playing a children’s game or whatever. And more importantly, I didn’t really have to do much to start watching TV shows. I think it would have been really easy for the ui designers to default to asking the user to first make a selection in terms of what they wanted to see, but Joost was really smart about this, I think, in that they seemed to realize that, because this is a completely new experience for most users, what they watch at the outset is far less important than that they are watching something. I actually wasn’t even sure what the first show I watched was (Adult Swim? Some Comedy Central show?), but I didn’t care. It was fun just toying around with the app. Unfortunately, after a few minutes of that, my Joost honeymoon was over. I wanted to actually find something specific and that’s when the experience became not quite so sublime (remember, though, Joost is still in invitation-only beta mode, so the issues I’m raising are in no way a critique of the joost ux.)

My biggest complaint with the current beta is that it isn’t clear how to get out of stuff that you get into. For example, here is the default view of when you hover your mouse along the edge of the screen to display the Joost main controls…

If I click on the My Joost button, all kinds of windows and widgets slide onto the screen….

The first thing I wanted to be able to do when all that happened was to make it all go away. I would have expected that function to be nearby where the My Joost button I clicked on would be, but after hunting around on the screen for a while, I discovered that the close button was some icon that I guess sort of looks like a close button, but the problem is that that this button was already present before I clicked on the My Joost button, and there just is no clear relationship between these two elements, in terms of proximity or otherwise.

Anyway, enough complaints for now. One really cool feature of Joost, which shows that the designers of the tool really care about their work, is the little effect that is played when you exit Joost – the screen collapses into a tiny white dot on the center of the screen, which then slowly fades to black, sort of like the old tube televisions used to do.

Bottom line is that Joost rocks, and my only real concern is how addictive it is, and how I’m going to be able to get any work done when the real thing launches…

Sorry, no recycling

Rework (not to be confused with iteration) is about as close as you can get to a deadly sin in software development. By producing wireframes in Visio, which generally are delivered as images (perhaps embedded in a Word document or in a PDF file), the IA is essentially guaranteeing rework. Nothing produced in Visio can (easily) be reused by other team members, meaning that they have to waste time recreating everything already produced by the information architect. This means that content such as labels and interface copy included in the wireframe will need to be retyped by the developer and/or the visual designer, which inevitably leads to typos and more rework.

Do you speak wireframe?

Many IAs proclaim the virtues of wireframes by calling them blueprints, evoking the precisely drawn schematics used in the world of physical architecture. Unfortunately, while blueprints are based on a standardized notation, virtually every IA has their own flavor of wireframe. This, in turn, means that team members are tasked with interpreting wireframes and translating their content into the world of the web. In some cases, this is pretty straightforward, such as producing a basic form from a wireframe. But too often, this means that what the IA meant and what in fact gets built turn out to be two very different things, which essentially defeats the fundamental purpose of the specification, in which a core principal is to be as unambiguous as possible.

Design compfusion

Ever received a question from a team member to the effect of “should I refer to the wireframe or the comp when building this feature?” What they’re really telling you is that there is redundancy problem. One likely reason you are being asked this is because wireframes, since they are visual representations, inherently will contain some form of layout information, and that layout information may or may not be the same as what is appearing in the comp. This seemingly innocent question begs a larger and more fundamental question regarding the role of information architects: should information architects be in the business of specifying visual design at all? Aren’t they first forcing the visual designers hand by, say, using a 3-column layout in their wireframe? Wouldn’t it be better if wireframes contained no layout information, and that was instead defined only in the design comp? This question, of course, flies in the face of the idea behind a wireframe, but it is one that needs to be asked. Regardless of the answer, continuing to use wireframes as a specification reference after comps have been produced almost guarantees confusion among team members. Once the comp has been produced, those annotations are better served referencing the comp.

Undefined is ill defined

Wireframes do not easily allow for specifying a lot of elements that, in my view, should be specified by the information architect, such as window properties (what should happen when the user resizes the window?), and content types (this one is more doable, but can become arduous to keep consistent across multiple templates in Visio.) Some might say that this information does not belong in a wireframe, or that it is not the job of the IA to define it. Whether or not it’s the job of the IA is less important than whether or not it belongs in a wireframe.  A good specification of a web page or template should be comprehensives, i.e. everything that the person implementing that page needs to know should either be contained directly in that specification, or there should be cross-reference to the additional specification information, such as for global elements.

Think about information architecture, not about Visio

Maintaining Visio wireframes, despite efforts to modularize and streamline, can be seriously hard work – and much of that time is spent wasting your time tackling the notoriously buggy and quirky Visio software. How Visio works has nothing to do with your information architecture. Yes, there are alternatives to Visio like Omnigraffle, but you’re still spending your time thinking about how to use Omnigraffle than about information architecture.In light of the issues raised here, I am increasingly mystified by why so many information architects still cling to Visio. Is it just because that is what they assume everyone else is using so they figure they have to use it too? Or is it because they think that is what their organization requires or expects that they use? My hunch is that many information architects are using Visio because that is the tool they are comfortable with and may not really be aware of the above-described havoc they are wreaking. I am far from the first to proclaim that wireframes should cease and desist. Christina Wodtke, Nate Koechley, Thomas Vander Wal, and others, have been pleading with information architects to stop making wireframes for some time. And to be clear, I am not talking about Visio as a design tool (a personal choice), or as a tool for producing flowcharts and site maps. That is a separate discussion. This is specifically about wireframes, web pages, specifications. As web sites become increasingly sophisticated, in turn raising the bar of expectations of user experience quality, all while project lifecycles continue to grow shorter and simultaneously more demanding, I think it will become increasingly difficult for IAs to continue using Visio and still remain competitive.

Go to the beginning of the current track? Hah! Of course not! Thanks to the brilliance of the designers of the Windows Media Player, clicking on this button takes you back to the beginning of the previous track.
So how do you get back to the beginning of the current track? Well, um, let’s see. You could click on what we’ll call the “beginning-of-previous-track button,” and then click on the next track button. Or you could drag the slider to the starting point of the track progress bar. From what I can tell, there really is no clear way to perform the very basic function of returning to the beginning of the current track. With the release of version 10 of the player, I thought for sure they would have fixed this embarrassing user interface screw-up, which I think has existed since the launch of the player. I am utterly mystified by how this blunder can have survived so many releases of the player. Usually, one can make an argument one way or the other for why a design decision was made, but in this case, it just seems plain wrong. Anyone who knows why this was designed this way, please let me know.