Josh Evnin

I’m exhausted. Beat. Dead tired. I just got home after a long, delayed flight from Phoenix to Chicago, returning here merely 36 hours after I departed. It was a quick, gruelling trip that tested my patience.

And I loved every minute of it.

Yesterday I saw one of my oldest friends in the world, Tami, which is always a treat. We had lunch with her little sis Rebecca (who I’ve known and loved since she was a wee little one), and her boyfriend Michael. Tami and I hung out for the rest of the day and caught up, which was nice.

The real reason I was in Phoenix was for work, of course. We’re in the process of doing some Contextual Design work, which is quite possibly (no, definitely) my favorite part of being an Interaction Designer.

The first part of the Contextual Design process is Contextual Inquiry. This is where an observer (me) goes to where a user of a piece of software (or potential piece of software) and learns about that user’s context of work. The inquiry fits a master/apprentice model, where the observant teaches the observer about the ins and outs of their job. This nearly always reveals interesting results, far different from what one would expect before the observation.

It’s also really nice to get to know the people you’re designing for. And by get to know, I really mean it…I get to know them in a real way. We laugh, we talk, we joke about the hoops they have to jump through just to get their job done.

And then I take away my data and begin to redesign. Rinse. Repeat. In the end, the finished product will be much better than before. For today though, I’ll be happy enough that I am getting to do the kind of work I love to do.

First I read this. Then I read the follow up. And finally I found myself at this page, remembering, yet again, that the key to usability is readability.

Now, if what you do every day has little to do with usability, design, or typography, you might think this stuff doesn’t really matter to you. If you do something that has anything to do with the internet, software, or computers, you’re wrong. These articles say that “Web Design is 95% Typography,” but I think that all desktop computer Interface Design is greater than 95% typography. Read the articles, they’re succinct, simple, and act as a great typography tutorial.

I put some of the “100e2r” (100 Percent Easy to Read) Standards into practice on my blog. I’m still letting them sink in…but weigh in with your opinions in the comments. Here’s a record of some of the changes, as applied to the 100e2r Standard:

1. Standard font size for long texts – Default text size was changed from 0.8 ems to .95 ems. The 100e2r calls for a 1em standard…but it just didn’t look right in my layout, at least on my screen. We’ll see once I get a chance to look at it on bigger screens.
2. Active white space – I think my text already has an acceptable amount of active white space, so no change here.
3. Reader friendly line height – My line-height (leading) is set now at a little below 200%. That’s a little above the 140% recommendation, but I think it’s acceptable on my page. In fact, on my page I don’t think 140% is enough.
4. Clear color contrast – I changed the color contrast on my page a bit. The recommendation is #333 on #fff. My design features light text on a dark background, which I believe offers fine readability (but if I’m wrong, it’s your responsibility to let me know!), but the contrast was too harsh before, with white text on a #333 (deep gray) background. The white text has been changed to a slightly gray color (#ccc).
5. No text in images – No text in images was easy…I don’t do that anyway.

So the bad news is that I don’t play by the rules to the letter. The good news is that I think that’s alright. Design isn’t about sticking to hard rules, but bending them to make things work. I think my design is quite readable. I’m always hungry for feedback though, so let me know if you disagree. For now, I’m 40e2r, but that’s just fine by me…as long as you can still comfortably read the content.

So I read this design document today and I find it quite inspiring. The designer and author, Khoi Vinh, noticed an action writers around him were taking to be more productive. Understanding a bit about technology, he went about designing a software application that would fulfill these writers’ needs, without forcing them to go out and purchase a brand new (or old) tool…in this case, a typewriter.

Vinh created a short, to the point design specification for a tool he calls Blockwriter. The features of this tool are amazingly simple and well justified. He doesn’t recommend features for their own sake, but keeps the tool light and lean, with plenty of room to grow (or not grow at all).

What really impresses me about this side project is the fact that Vinh simply put his idea out on the internet, with the hope that some developer out there would make his design a reality. I hugely support this model of designer-developer interaction, where an idea can be seeded and then turned into reality by a team who knew nothing of one-another in the beginning, but who are brought together by the will of the internets.
Check out this work, and look forward to details about a little side project of my own…I’ll be starting any day now.