DesignByNumbers

Have you ever participated in or facilitated a brainstorming session? Did you find it hard to keep track of all the ideas and organize them after the fact into a clear document that you can share and review with your co-workers and clients? Enter Freemind – a free cross-platform mind-mapping application that can help you capture,organize and work with free-form information.

In any design project, there is a discovery process where you need to collect information and generate new ideas. The process of brainstorming is a free-form and often chaotic process. The flexibility that the brainstorming process provides as a collective creative tool can make it hard to capture all of the ideas and organize them into an effective document for review after the session.

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The Eyetrack III team has published a new, outstanding summary of their research about how people view web-pages. I found several key things interesting in this article, namely:

1) The Zig-Zag pattern in which people scan the page is not new; what I found interesting is that they view the right hand side of the page second, and significantly, in comparison to the right hand page. We often use this space for “latest news” or other trend highlights, so it’s great to see that is a general eye-searching pattern.

2) Smaller type causes people to spend more time reviewing the articles – perhaps this is the web version of “Those who cannot hear an angry shout may strain to hear a whisper.”

3) Top Navigation performed best – this is a key thing to note as there is often an important design consideration on where navigation should be placed. Generally we use the left hand side for secondary or tertiary navigation just from an aesthetics standpoint; this is an additional consideration when deciding on layout.

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As developers we can sometimes overlook ease of use when creating forms. We typically focus on functionality more so than end-user experience and that can leave users frustrated. Site Reference has come up with a great list of tips to help remind us of the different ways we can keep forms functional and easy to use.

Here are a few highlights that should be mandatory on any form:

1. Never ask for duplicate information – For example, any forms that require a billing and shipping address should have the option of allowing the user to simply click a checkbox that will auto-populate the duplicate fields, if the information is the same.
2. Make sure that mandatory fields are clearly marked – This seems like a no-brainer but nothing is more frustrating for the user than continually being returned back to the form to fill in required fields. Which brings us to number three:
3. Return relevant error messages – an error message that might make sense to you as a developer may not be clear enough for the end-user. Remember, they aren’t sitting in front of a computer creating forms all day and may not be familiar with the type of information you are looking for.
4. Have your form tested out by real users before releasing it – I’ve certainly run into the scenario in the past where I’ve created a form, tested it and everything seemed fine. It wasn’t until I opened up the testing where I received feedback indicating that the form progression didn’t really make sense.

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