Ux - Page 1 - tgriff3

Thoughts from Trey Griffith. VP of Technology at Teleborder, former co-founder of Endorse.me.

When I came on board with my latest project three weeks ago, we spent some time defining the sort of minimal functionality that we would need to get the product out the door. We were building a sort of minimum viable product (although not as minimal as Eric Ries might like). The (non-technical) founder had done some extensive user testing with a contracted-out version of the site, and we decided we needed to really strip down the features to the bare minimum.

After defining the requirements, I set out to build a roadmap of feature building. Having never developed with nodeJS before (which we were moving to) and developing on nights and weekends with other developers who were also moonlighting, this was more guesstimating than anything. But when it came down to it, I had put together what I thought was a reasonable schedule to get all of the functionality in there.

I built in a buffer of two weeks (or a 50% increase in the schedule) for something labeled, vaguely, “Finalizing UX”. I knew that after we had built all the basic functionality, we were going to have to make some changes to how everything works based on walking through it as though we were first time users. There are some things you simply can’t vocalize as important until you see them missing from the functionality. So I put in this large chunk of time solely to finalizing the end-user experience, so we could put out a product we were proud of, while still sticking to an aggressive timetable.

Well, week 4 starts tomorrow, and we look like we’re in a position to deliver the basic functionality. But I just got off a 2 hour phone call where we decided that we need to make some changes in order to really clean up the user experience. We needed to tighten up the viral loop, which meant changing some of the approval procedures. We needed to change how posts got displayed (more client-side, less server-side), and we needed to change how we communicated with people (email, facebook, both?).

So, those two weeks will be time well-spent. Sometimes it’s just as important to know what you don’t know (or can’t know) ahead of time, and build it into the schedule anyway. It worked for me (this time).

When browsing Hacker News this morning, I clicked on the Forbes article, “Why Does Work Start at 9 A.M.?” Maybe I’m a little bit strange about this, but I like to scroll down until I see the title of the article at the top of my screen with the body of it filling my screen. Strange, I know, that I don’t want navigation and all that other crap blocking my view when I’m trying to do something like read.

While I was scrolling down to my preferred view, the page started scrolling with me. It was then that I realized that they had a horrible banner ad at the top of the page that expanded on mouseover. Not click, but mouseover. And it contracted on mouseout. The result? A page that changed inconsistently with the user’s desires.

I think it’s great that popup ads and popunder ads have largely disappeared from the (respectable) internet, but banner ads that are moving, or playing sound, or do anything on mouseover are not an improvement. They do not represent the brand well.

At this point, there are probably two groups of people who disagree with me: those who think I should simply enable AdBlock+ or use Instapaper (which I do, from time to time), and those who think I’m complaining that I get to read Forbes for free. Advertising is the business model of the internet!

My view lies somewhere between the two. I like to read an article on the author’s website because I understand that that’s the only way to have a sustainable free service (for the end user), but I want the author (or the author’s company) to respect me and respect my wishes. It’s no coincidence that popups and popunders are gone; advertising that respects the end-user is most effective and is the best representation of the brand.