Bill Scott

Presentations

Designing for Interesting Moments

Did you know that there are at least 16 different moments of interaction during drag and drop? And that there are at least a half-dozen elements on the page that conspire with these points in time to form a drag and drop interaction? With almost all user interactions there are lots of interesting moments that you can use to enhance the user experience -- or worse to create confusion in the user's mind.

These are conveniently summarized in six over-arching design principles.

Input where you output. Require a light footprint. Maintain flow. Invite interaction. Show transitions Be reactive. This talk goes hand-in-hand with Bill Scott & Theresa Neil's book, Designing Web Interfaces and will provide you with dozens of clear take-aways for designing rich interactions on the web.

In this talk, Bill slows down time and puts dozens of interactions under the microscope to study what works and what doesn't work when creating interactive applications. Nuances from 80+ examples illustrate both what should be emulated (design patterns and best practice tips) as well as what should be avoided (design anti-patterns).

Anti-Patterns: When Designers Get Too Clever. Avoiding the Traps of Bad Design

When the first web sites appeared, pages were filled with horrific elements, such as blinking text, dancing graphics, auto-playing theme music, pattern-filled backgrounds, and who could forget the "skip intro" splash pages. Created by well-meaning designers who wanted to add flair to their designs, it quickly became clear these stylistic elements weren't enhancing the user's experience.

Now, here we are with new interaction tools and, as happens, history is repeating itself. In an attempt to add pizzazz, designers are making serious interaction design mistakes, embedding gratuitous, unnecessary, and often frustrating usage modes into their designs. And, like the web sites of years past, they often reach production without the designers realizing the traps they've fallen into.

For the last few years, Bill Scott has assembled an amazing collection of these grievous design travesties and in this talk he brings them out for your perusal and amusement. Bill shows us where designers committed acts of egregious drag-and-drop, tiny close buttons, and menus that fly across the screen, all in the name of creating delightful experiences.

But, the fun doesn't stop there. Bill has also gleaned important design lessons from each of these examples. We'll see counterexamples that what would've happened, had the designers made different choices. We'll walk away with a ton of ideas on what we can (and shouldn't) do to make the user's experience more effective and delightful.

Some of the anti-patterns explored are:

meandering way borg idiom tiny targets hover and cover pogo stick navigation novel notions metaphor mismatch double duty linkitus windows aplenty animation gone wild misguided misdirections missed moments one at a time non-symmetrical actions