My role at Groupon means that I now get massive quantities of email that very often require a response / action. I had been glancing at my email on my phone ("okay, this is what's going on & what I have to deal with") but not necessarily responding: I'll think about what I want my response to be (like in the car on the way to work) and compose the response when I get there.

The fail is when I THINK about something in my head and forget that I haven't actually WRITTEN the thoughts down -- and find out a few days later that the intended recipient was still waiting for an answer.

Maybe I need to just not have email on my phone.

I hate that you use SO many modals in Calendar's interaction in the first place. But if you insist, can't you at least read the fucking cursor x,y and situate the modals under my cursor instead of reading the browser's viewpane dimensions and centering? The math is actually EASIER to put the modal under my cursor than to center the thing onscreen, right?

While "Repeat" isn't something I have to do for every meeting, SAVE is. You elected to use a modal to ask me whether I want to send an invite to new guests (can't you just make it an inline option near the SAVE button that's sticky with my previous choices?), and that too is centered -- rather than being proximate to the SAVE button, where by definition my mouse just was:

Seriously, you can do better. Stop copying Outlook.

Addendum

Wordpress does it too. (I hate Wordpress, but there's something gone wonky when I've tried to migrate to Posterous.)

OmniGraffle. Who are your users? I'm guessing professional knowledge workers. The only people I've known to use it are professional designers, maybe a product manager or two. These may be people who know HTML and its structured styling examples. These are certainly people who have some basic word processing / style examples. In this case, I am in fact one of the target users.

There is nothing about this style manager interface that relates even remotely to anything I've ever seen before in any desktop publishing or graphics application:

Click on "Other", like you'd think you could if you wanted to edit, manage, or change a style. You get this totally bizarre dialog box that pops up in the middle of the screen... and god knows what next.

Google has their secret weapon: the (ugly) black toolbar that resides across all of their properties. If it weren't for that thing, my usage of Google+ would be once a day instead of twice a day. But even that won't matter in the long run if Google doesn't have the network and the content to back up G+. In addition to an overall traffic dip, average time spent on the site was down 10 percent, Hitwise says. That's not good.

• UX Researcher(s). Lead-level or starter level.
• UX Designers: Information architect / interaction design proficiency.
• UX Designers: Visual / interaction design proficiency.
• UX Designers: Mobile proficiency

You can apply via JobVite at the links above, or email me (ebeldner@groupon.com) your resume, a link to your portfolio, and your LinkedIn profile.

Back on my iPad I opened Safari and Googled for [ Potiche movie ]. The first couple of results were for IMDB (installed on my iPad) and Rotten Tomatoes (I may or may not have Flixter). Both sites took me to splash screens that suggested I download their apps. I got to thinking about why I'd gone to Google instead of using the native apps.

Ever since I discovered Google in 1999, my strategy has been the same. I go to the same reliable location (Google.com, or more recently, my browser address bar), type what I want, and I either get lucky and am there, or I click on one of the first couple of results.

It was more cognitive load for me to have to think about whether I already had the app on my device or not, and then I'd maybe swipe around to see whether it was there or not, and then open the app and enter my query. I did what I've been doing for 10 years: type what I want and get the answer, only this time I got interrupted and had to ponder whether I would use this installed thingy or the website thingy.

Technically, the only difference between an installed app and a website is that the app has access to more of your device's hardware. Platonically, from a human-need perspective, they're the exact same thing: A collection of tools and information that lets you do something.

• It's a particular garden or destination.
• You have to learn that it exists.
• You have to understand what functionality it offers or what tasks it lets you accomplish.
• You have to know how to navigate to it.
• You have to learn how to use it.
• You have to establish a relationship with it: by downloading, creating an account; paying for it.
• You have to remember it the next time you want to use it.

I don't have a ton of apps on either my iPhone or my iPad, especially compared to some people I know. If I don't find an app useful, I delete it; they add too much clutter and overhead. Some of my friends use folders on their home screen to organize their apps (I've started doing this recently for certain categories that I use occasionally -- like travel-related apps: Onavo, SPG, Skype, AirBnB, TripIt).

A couple of friends almost exclusively use the iPhone search screen to get to their apps. I almost never use Search, although as I get more apps, I'm starting to use Search to navigate to the one I want. It's starting to be faster than browsing (and using spatial memory) to get to the thing I need.

Aside from apps' technical capabilities (which are blurring as HTML5 webapps via the browser are granted more capabilities), apps are no more than bookmarks used to be pre-Google. They're pointers to functionality. Right now they graphically represent space on your start screen, but this isn't scalable for the same reason that Yahoo's and Google's site directories didn't scale. There were too many sites, and there are / will be too many apps to use spatial navigation to get to more than a few.

As we install more apps, and the number of apps to choose from becomes greater, we're simply recapitulating the same problem that Google solved for websites in 1999 or so. We'll have to develop a navigational and / or search-based approach to get to the functionality that's available via our computing devices.

Moreover, the delineation between "app that is currently installed on my device" and "app that exists but is not yet on my phone" is going to blur. If I want to OCR some text let me search for [ OCR ]. If I have an app with this functionality, take me to the app. If I don't, find the best app in the apposphere and let me use it.

For the same reason that the Google search box became the way to navigate the web (1), an equivalent search field -- effectively, a command-line interface -- may become the main way that people navigate the world available to them on their mobile devices. The major caveat is that it's mechanically more difficult to type on mobile devices, so query-driven interfaces can be extra-punishing.

Apps are no different from websites. They just have special permissions to use my device's hardware. We'll need to solve the same problem for the app world that we did with the website world.

(1) Google saw such a large proportion of navigational queries -- I personally loved the ones like [yahoo.com] -- that it became the design basis for Chrome's combined URL and query input bar.

I wasn't at LinkedIn very long -- only about 8 months. It's hard to leave: I was lucky enough to work with Steve Johnson, LinkedIn's UX director, and he's an awesome design thinker and people manager. I'll miss working with Steve and the other people on my team.

That said, Groupon is obviously a fantastic opportunity. They're thinking big and I'm excited to get to help shape their user experience as they add new features and services. Plus I'll be growing the UX team: our first hire is for a UX researcher / answer provider; if you're interested, send me email.

Disparate non-narrative thoughts:

I've lately been thinking a lot about designers' productivity, and my own now that I'm in a large busy office with both lead (talking to lots of people; making sure communication happens; "managers schedule") and IC (long stretches of uninterrupted time to concentrate) responsibilities.

A month or two ago my manager and I cleared my schedule. I just wasn't getting work done against the big project I've been working on -- I was interrupted and could rarely manage a half- or whole hour to work, unless it was from 4pm until midnight. I have three days a week that are blocked from meetings. I wear huge noise-canceling earmuffs (from Peltor) and will ignore people who try to interrupt me when I'm wearing them. Some people are respectful of this -- if they're interrupting me, it's actually important. Other people prefer to transact minor information exchanges disruptively -- in person.

Best productivity book I've ever read: Never Check Email in the Morning by Julia Morgenstern.

Designers don't have a good way of sharing design work. I suspect an easy-to-use source control system (like one of the biggies, plus a simple front end like TortoiseSVN) would make it easier for designers to work in sync WRT constantly moving targets. I've heard Adobe is working on this, but I've generally been unhappy with their collaboration products so I don't trust that they'll solve the problem.

If you're doing most of your work in Fireworks, you're probably not working fast enough.

A/B testing can move the needle a bit, and it can serve as a cover-your-ass sanity check before launching something.
But it alone won't get you to an entirely new zone of user adoption, happiness, or conversion rates. Unless you're a design thinker and understand why a particular configuration did better (or can posit a solid hypothesis) you're not going to be able to synthesize that data and jump to a new maxima. 52 Weeks of UX and Andrew Chen have some great discussions of A/B testing and the concept of a localized design maxima.

Click to download high-res PNG versions:

Google's search UI has long relied on A/B testing, such as the infamous "41 shades of blue" incident, for a number of reasons. This includes sanity-checking / CYA and an internal political function of settling disputes with data rather than politics. However - and this is I believe what Doug Bowman was complaining about - it was also because at Google, Marissa's squadron of PMs were the ones who owned the interface and the ones who made design decisions and who got to decide what did and did not get tested. Because these PMs largely did not have the theoretical background in design, human cognition, color theory, and what have you, they lacked a solid theoretical ground from which to narrow the possible set of decisions to a couple of most reasonable options.

• An outstanding usability issue with Google's results is that many people confuse the top of page ads for actual search results.
• To be fair, Google only allows an ad in the top-of-page slot if it is in fact incredibly relevant to the user's query.
• Over time, Google's ads have become formatted more and more like its search results - largely along dimensions of typographical variance. As this visualization has changed, ad clickthrough rates have been higher.
• Banner blindness / ad blindness is a well-understood phenomenon on the internet.

Thus, it makes perfect sense that having a light1 ad background would garner higher clickthroughs -- since it makes it more difficult for users to visually differentiate what is an ad from what is a result. Argumentum ad ridiculum: if Google wanted VERY high clickthrough rates (short term) it would make its ads look exactly like results and intersperse them with the organic results. Of course, this would over time damage their brand's credibility, so it would be a short punt that would eventually drive users to other services.

To make matters worse many companies aren't tracking the right metrics. Google is good about this: They have several metrics for User Happiness. But these stats are hard to track -- my understanding is that it generally requires a lot of custom coding and log analysis. Off-the-shelf stats packages (say, Google Analytics, KISSmetrics, Clicktale) do a good job of simple clicks, but they don't tell you that while initial clicks went up in experiment B, users in that group dropped off after a week and were never heard from again.

A/B testing is useful and appropriate, but for a professional designer, relying on A/B testing to develop an interface is often like watching a 5-year-old learn to read. It's true that every design is a hypothesis and that designers don't always come up with genius ideas. And it's also true that there's a particular set of cognitive skills that lets designers skip past the queue of minute optimization experiments. It's like flying first class (or, hell, premium economy) and getting to skip the security line at the airport.

So: Yes, we could A/B test 41 different button colors, or -- because you probably have bigger things to worry about than a 0.01% uptick in conversions and don't have an army of slave PMs and engineers to do your bidding -- you could just listen to your designer and get yourself optimizing on a much higher mountain than the one you're currently on.

(1) The lightness is specific to the dominant color scheme of the page. Really, "light" means "low contrast". On a black page, a pale blue background would divide the ads from the results and make it easier for users to visually skip over them. Since Google's page background is white, a low-contrast color is light blue.

That said, we didn't want to rely on the old canard that to be "woman-friendly" a visual design has to be pink. The design had to convey business = women and avoid the pitfall of Barbie-fying (thus trivializing) the use of business intelligence on a woman-focused site.

Jesse sent his first pass on the female-targeted skin with this email:

From: Jesse Venticinque
To: Ellen Beldner
Subject: Is this what women want?

<PastedGraphic-1.png>

Seems too stereotypical - though i went with the http://www.glam.com/ color

My response:

:)

So: glam.com's visual brand is sort of Avril Lavigne / Rocker punk. It's kind of this post-feminist embracing of an uber-girly color scheme (50s / Barbie Doll pink -- modes that feminism was rebelling against if you've ever read The Feminine Mystique, and if you haven't I highly recommend it) and combining them with the power-femme 80s generation that wore black and fluorescent yellow and hot pink. The 80s were really the first time when 60s feminism ("the radical notion that women are people" -- and it really was radical at the time) had been around long enough to permeate the culture somewhat. It was a time of power suits. 

These days, there's a sort of combo post-feminist attitude. For good or for ill, there's this embracing of pink as a metaphor: I can embrace this traditional feminine trope and ALSO be powerful, strong, badass, punk rock, etc. Embracing pink doesn't mean that I have to give up the carbon fiber, guns, and steel.  Think about Marissa. Think about Avril Lavigne. My first snowboard was bubblegum pink with silver stars -- and I wore it with all-black tight ski pants, a black turtleneck, and a white helmet that has a sticker of a she-devil-as-50s-pinup on it. Corine is tiny and cute and she scares the living shit out of me. It's that kind of dichotomy that so many modern women are trying to embrace. At the end of the day, the message -- the rhetoric, with our audience as men and other women -- basically comes down to "I can have a big salary and make intellectual contributions to the world around me, AND still attract men.*" It used to not be that way. 

* This is really about gender constructs, so it assumes a heteronormative standard. GLBT relationships operate under somewhat different cultural expectations & constructs.

So: that was mostly me waxing philosophical and dusting off my cultural studies nerd hat.  As I'm looking at a few brands / sites, here's what I observe: Pink AND black, and a healthy dose of white:

• http://www.renttherunway.com/ -- women, fashion. 
• http://www.glam.com/ -- yes, hot pink; but they have this very strong Swiss Modern feel as well: it's like LinkedIn Today with some hot pink. 
• http://www.aol.com/ -- new logo is hot pink! 
• http://www.flickr.com/  -- use of hot pink as a strong color, not as a femme color
• http://oxygen.com/ -- hot pink and black. This is also aimed at older women.
• http://www.maccosmetics.com/index.tmpl -- MAC cosmetics. Black and white, and they typically use a lot of flesh tones to pinks in their art direction.
• http://www.agentprovocateur.com/ -- black and pink; couture lingerie from the UK with a BDSM (strong + badass) twist to balance the cursive script.

Martha Stewart has an interesting cool-toned scheme: http://www.marthastewart.com/ She defines the look of good taste (East Coast) for women everywhere.

Planned Parenthood is primarily corporate orange and blue, but they've got a hot pink bus: http://www.plannedparenthood.org/

Interesting point: Look at the way that Wonder Woman has evolved over the years:

http://www.google.com/search?q=wonder+woman&hl=en&prmd=ivnsub&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=RLWKTfqmBY34swO_pJmeCg&ved=0CD8QsAQ&biw=1537&bih=861

And for the new & recent redesign:

http://www.komonews.com/news/entertainment/97717339.html

I think you're on the right track. The color scheme in this widget speaks to extremely broad cultural issues: the whole history of feminism and women's liberation and redefining femininity as both powerful AND attractive. We don't necessarily HAVE to attack this widget from this perspective (I.e. "chick-friendly") but I think it's a cool mini-project. And you'll get to really delve into the rhetoric of visual design & color choices for a set of people that is not you -- always a good challenge.  Consider incorporating orange; orange + pink is a strong color scheme that works for "femme". 

Try a rev that speaks to the issues above. It's probably got black in it. It may have a textured background or a background pattern. Think Sucker Punch. 

-- ELB

http://www.linkedin.com/today/computer_software

Sarah Alpern, Principal Designer.

Sarah was the designer of LinkedIn Today from its prototype stage through its alpha launch. She drove the design of the user experience from its birth as a data prototype to the structure that we see today in the finished product. Awesome work, Sarah.

Robert Martone, Web Developer.

Martone (I refer to him by his last name) did most of the front end development. He has almost killed me at several points in the past few weeks, but that's cool because he did such a kickass job.

Jesse Venticinque, Interaction Designer.

Jesse kicks ass. Sarah handed off the design to him (she's on family leave) and he's taken it through the final months of refinements and features, working closely with product manager Liz Walker.

Corine Yang, Interaction & Visual Designer.

Corine recently switched from LinkedIn's marketing design group (they're still within UED) to my cluster of designers -- the CNC team (for content and communication). And damn are we lucky to have her! Corine designed the bold, fresh header and streamlined the visual design & layout for LinkedIn Today.

Stephanie Trimble, Web Developer.

Stephanie was an awesome pinch hitter in the last couple of months of development on Today. She handled all of the introduction pages and the neat in-page product tour, and owned the Today homepage story carousel.

Vy Phan, Senior Web Developer.

Vy deals with the LinkedIn homepage and with Signal, the complementary product that lets users search through updates that other professionals have shared on LinkedIn. He's worked to integrate Signal and Today throughout the site.

Awesome work from the LinkedIn CNC design team. Congrats, all of you.

Now go check out LinkedIn Today. It is hella useful. Also, Martone, Vy, and I have a few tricks up our sleeves that will roll out in the near future, so stay tuned.

PS: Yes, I'm involved too. I took over as the CNC UE team lead from Sarah when she went on family leave a couple of months ago; so I've been also been involved in a design leadership role the past few months. In my book, the props go to the people who did the gritty work of design, iteration, mockups, prototyping, debugging, and code checkins.