Month: February 2007

Only real artists ship

Another one of those colorful epigrammatic statements from Steve Jobs, meant to inspire and motivate a development team to fully complete an ambitious project, especially once the “train has left the station”: designs are largely decided, prototypes rapidly being built and approved, and back-end programming has begun, signalling that “This is for real, folks!”, no longer some design concept or skunkwork exercise. The implication: decisions gotta be called and owned up to, tradeoffs made, and just drive towards making this real for the customers.

A little googling about this reveals the broader context for this particular slogan– shipping the first release of the Macintosh computer, which at the time was way over-schedule, etc. etc.

Below is a quotation from Steven Levy’s chronicle of the first Mac, titled Insanely Great, explaining the slogan:

Jobs’s speeches were punctuated by slogans. Perhaps the most telling epigram of all was a three-word koan that Jobs scrawled on an easel in January 1983, when the project [the release of the first Mac] was months overdue. REAL ARTISTS SHIP. It was an awesome encapsulation of the ground rules in the age of technological expression. The term “starving artist” was now an oxymoron. One’s creation, quite simply, did not exist as art if it was not out there, available for consumption, doing well. Was [Douglas] Engelbart an artist? A prima donna—he didn’t ship. What were the wizards of PARC? Haughty aristocrats—they didn’t ship. The final step of an artist—the single validating act—was geting his or her work into boxes, at which point the marketing guys take over. Once you get the computers into people’s homes, you have penetrated their minds. At that point all the clever design decisions you made, all the tists and turns of the interface, the subtle dance of mode and modeless, the menu bars and trash cans and mouse buttons and everything else inside and outside your creation, becomes part of people’s lives, transforms their working habits, permeates their approach to their labor, and ultimately, their lives.

But to do that, to make a difference in the world and a dent in the universe, you had to ship. You had to ship. You had to ship.

Real artists ship.

Invisible gridlines

Grids are of course a common and valuable device for visual designers; much has been written about “the grid” from the standpoint of design criticism, theory, and history. However, it’s also important to develop a sensitivity to see the “invisible gridlines” lying behind the composition of UI controls in a dialog box, for instance…and minimize the number of intersecting lines. That’s actually how one can achieve a cleaner layout and design, with greater alignment of objects at the most tedious level of detail: x-heights, widths, outside borders, etc. It’s focus on that level of detail that can help distinguish one’s design as truly perfected, rather than merely sufficient.

Exaggerate the differences

Other times, while crafting the visual design of a UI object, you need to exaggerate the difference, to make the object more prominent as opposed to an “accident” or “mistake” that’s only slightly emphasized. For example, if a widget is supposed to appear layered on top of another object, then dramatize the pixel movement and drop shadow for depth effect. And then scale it back gradually as you consider the entire composition. Go out far for drama, then bring it back in for balance.

It’s the cumulative effect

When creating the visual design of a UI object, such as a calendar widget within a form layout, it’s important to consider the cumulative effect of multiple subtle visual cues, as opposed to several dramatic changes in color, line weight, fonts, lighting, etc, all at once. This can help prevent imbalanced visuals that awkwardly draw too much attention or visuals that are simply overpowering, thus undermining the composition overall. So, in this era of glossy, glowy visuals with drop shadow promiscuity, it’s important to remember how subtle changes can stimulate visual perception, in an eye-pleasing manner that maintains overall balance and cleanliness.

On labeling UI objects

Coming up with an accurate, memorable name for an object within the interface of an enterprise app (or any product for domain-specific audiences as well) can be a very challenging task–but it doesn’t have to be! Simply focus on getting to the essence of what “it” truly is. Keep asking, “what is it” over and over again til you nail it, avoiding any and all marketing terms and gimmicky phrasing that try to make “it” sound cool or marketable. Focus on what it is for the user, in terms of their mental model and common jargon (for that industry or domain). Avoid the gimmicky.

Often the usability problems encountered with software products are due to faulty labeling. Nailing this can in itself resolve much of the interaction design issues!