As UX professionals we’ve heard them all before. The grand pronouncements and mores of web and software design that if violated result in instant failure. With the increase in interest in User Experience and the efforts of many very good researchers we are discovering that these rules that we have taken for granted are not nearly as hard and fast as was once believed. Rather than hard rules they should be considerations in the design process.

1. All important information must be above the “fold”.
Nope, research tells us that users are quite adept at scrolling and have been for quite some time. While it is advisable to to position important information prominently it is not a do or die situation to force everything high on the page. The most common user behavior is to scan the page, scroll to the bottom and back to the top.  So yes, if you can keep your data and controls on the screen without a scroll or designing a hot mess, more power to you. However generally it is better to place enough information above the fold so that a user can determine what the purpose of the page is and if it must scroll indicate that yes, the page has more data below the “fold”.

BTW- There is no “fold” any more. We are not paper but I suppose the term will be yet another archaic artifact of paper that the digital medium will inheirit much the same as the term “Leading” lines of text. (lead as in the metal if you didn’t know)

So as many of you know, I left Bank of America and took a contract with IBM’s Lotus forms UX team. The position is based out of Durham but I live some 150 miles away just north of Charlotte. Luckily the fine folks at IBM allowed me to work from home.

Initially I was really unsure how this was going to work. I had concerns that being at home would be too distracting and that I would struggle to keep productive. I’m happy to say that concern was unfounded. What I discovered was that without the hassles of getting ready for work and driving into the office I was more focused and productive.

However what I do miss is the interactions between colleagues that you have in a traditional office environment. I like impromptu work discussions and the ability to get to know your coworkers on a more personal level. Granted you can do the same in a distributed work environment but I’m used to having most of the team in one location and a few members remote. It’s quite a different experience when I am one of the remote members.  So far it’s been a good learning experience.

Oh yes, I miss my chair. Bank of America had us sitting in Herman Miller Aeron Chairs. My home office chair isn’t nearly so nice.

It’s been entirely too long since I last did any painting or drawing. Granted, I start all my interaction design work with sketches but it’s just not the same as breaking out the paints and conte crayons and gettin’ down on a big sheet of Reeves BFK.

Here we go again with the website thing.

I have discovered that after wrangling with interaction design and usability all day I am not at all interested in doing more of the same when I get home. However I do like having a web presence. As such, whatever I use for web publishing needs to be super simple or I just won’t do it. Imagine that, a usability engineer advocating simplicity. Shocking, isn’t it?

So the last iteration of humanpackmule.com was in Joomla. Granted Joomla is rather powerful CMS structure and yes I still use it for my Koi club website (www.pkwsonline.com) but the admin tools are clunky and a bit of a pain to get setup. Once you learn it it goes rather smoothly but the ramp was a bit higher than I liked. Mostly due to the fact that once I get home my motivation to continue working drops considerably. Available themes are ok, but it will take more effort than I want to expend to learn the structure to code my own themes. I found myself just finding themes and making do by tweaking.

In short, I am just like the users I design for.

This leads me to Wordpress. I’ve dabbled with it and a simple blogging tool appears to fit the bill. We’ll see how this goes.