• Ask people to help.
• Look at what people do.
• Learn from the facts you gather.
• Try it yourself.

IDEO designs an incredibly wide variety of products – corporate websites, hand-held electronics, clothing, business services, furniture, and more. With such diversity, it is no surprise that not all of the cards appear applicable to software development. I found that going through the cards and thinking about how they relate to I.T. to be interesting. I ended up classifying the relevant cards into three groups:

• Requirements: These cards provide ideas on how to gather or analyze requirements. This was the largest group by far – over one third of the total number of cards, and they spanned the four categories above. If you work in I.T., it may seem that calling tips for requirements design approaches is inappropriate. In software development there is often a divide between requirements and design. You do need to understand the client's needs and determine a solution that meets those needs, but an explicit separation in role between these activities can often hurt the final product. IDEO takes a holistic approach: determining requirements and understand the user is part of the design process and not a precursor to it.
• User Interface Design: About one-sixth of the cards presented ideas related to user interface design. These mostly fell into the Try category, with a few in Learn and Ask. Prototyping and testing of various sorts were reoccurring themes in over half of these cards.
• Software Design: Only a few cards seemed relevant to application architecture and software design. I initially found this surprising since I was expecting more. After further reflection, I realized that the commonly held understanding of design in the context of software development is very technical and narrowly focused. This 'technical' design activity (for lack of a better term) is necessary but not sufficient for creating a great piece of software. Other activities within the course of a development project that we in I.T. do not call design – activities such as requirements gathering, analysis, and usability testing – are all part of IDEO's holistic view of design.

In order to provide a concrete example of what the cards are like, I list in the table below a few of the cards I found particularly interesting. Each card explains not only a design method (the how), but also the reason for using it (the why). (Each card also briefly describes an IDEO project that used this method, but I do not list that below.)

Looking at these design methods and the many others listed in the set of IDEO cards makes me appreciate all that goes into a well-designed product, and inspires me to think more carefully about how I think about and approach design.

WordPress previously only supported categories, which I used on this site. WordPress supports associating a post with any number of categories, just like tags. So how do they differ? The first major difference is that WordPress expects categories to be predefined, whereas it allows new tags to be added without restriction. The second major difference is that the navigation element for categories is most frequently a list. Since a category list takes up much more vertical space than a tag cloud for the same number of elements, there is the expectation that the total number of categories will remain small. See the image below.

Comparing the two images, we see that the tag cloud actually takes less vertical space despite showing four times as many items. The tag cloud does use more horizontal space, but this is actually an advantage: the format of the tag cloud allows it to use almost all of the available horizontal space, unlike the category list. The tag cloud, therefore, uses the screen real estate more effectively.

Which format is more usable? The main goals of both the category list and tag cloud are to (1) provide an overview of what the site is about, and (2) help users navigate to articles of interest. I believe that the tag cloud does a better job of achieving both goals. Displaying so many more tags than the category list gives a much more complete overview of the content available on the site. There is a risk that too many tags will cause the more important content to be lost in the crowd, but this is offset by the use of larger fonts for more frequently-used tags. I suspect that navigation is generally easier for users looking for a particular topic because it is much more likely there will be a tag that corresponds to their topic. If there isn't, they do have more tags to navigate through compared to a category list, which is a disadvantage. But on average there are less articles per tag then there are per category, so they can try several tags fairly quickly. For myself, I often look up old articles while writing new ones, and I find it much easier to navigate to a specific old article via a tag than via a category. Why? I often have difficulties remembering exact what 'vague' category I filed an article under, while there is usually at least one tag I know is linked to the article.

This brings me to what I believe is the most significant advantage of tags over categories: tags correspond more closer to how our minds store and retrieve information. Categories imply a hierarchical, structured way of organizing information, with each post usually being filed in a single category. Tags imply a more arbitrary network of relationships between articles which supports multiple ways of categorizing the content. I have often struggled in the past trying to assign a post to a single category, especially when part of the post is about another category. Assigning multiple tags is much more natural in this situation.

I haven't seen any consensus on the web regarding whether tags or categories are better. Among popular social bookmarking sites Digg uses categories and Technorati uses tags. An article on Problogger about tags and categories and the resulting discussion revealed a diverse set of opinions; the article itself stated that tags compliment categories and both can co-exist on a site.

I myself am leaning towards eliminating the use of categories on my site and just using tags with the tag cloud. I would be interested in hearing your opinions on the matter. Do you prefer the tag cloud or the category list? Should I keep both? Should the tag cloud display less tags, or have a smaller size for the largest font? Please leave a comment and let me know.

I was a little surprised when I started receiving negative feedback. After the initial shock wore off, I realized that many of the changes people were recommending made sense. A common complaint was that I had too much text crammed onto the screen with insufficient white space around it. I had deliberately left out vertical spacing bars present on most websites because I didn't (and still don't) like the idea of not using that space. For my design, however, I had inadvertently gone to the opposite extreme. All that text crammed together made the articles harder to read.

Based on the feedback, I decreased the width of the article text by adding white space around it. I also increased the spacing around the article title to make it stand out more. Below are images of my website from before and after these changes.

Website Before Changes

Website After Changes

Receiving this feedback was a good experience. My web site is much improved and I increased my knowledge of web design. Handling negative feedback, however, is never easy. The natural instinct is for our ego to put us on the defensive. We defend our work rather than honestly evaluate the feedback. This is a conundrum for us as professionals. We should take pride in our work when it is done to the best of our ability. But to grow in our craft, we must set aside our ego and acknowledge our weaknesses and limitations. This is hardest for the expert: the term implies no such faults exist. In my case, I have never claimed to be a professional website designer. As a software developer I have done website design, but I know my skills in this area are not at a professional level. So this made it easier for me to seek feedback concerning my site's design.

Even with our ego set aside, evaluating feedback is not easy because it is not consistent. People have different likes and dislikes or hold contrary views. In the feedback I received there were opposing viewpoints: one person liked an aspect of the site while another criticized it. My strategy was to pay closer attention to recommendations suggested by more than one person, especially when there were no dissenting views.

If you seek feedback, then you must be prepared to act on it. While I was able to make the changes described above, I did receive other useful advice that I haven't had the time or resources to make use of yet. So don't be surprised if I make more changes to this site in the future. If you have any opinions about my website, including these recent changes, I'd love to receive the feedback.

Blogging software is typically used to create blogs. Once past the hurdle of initial setup, such software makes it very easy for a user to create blog entries. But content creation software has existed since the early days of the web, so there must be more to blogging than that. Blogs have a consistent structure: a series of entries tracked by day of entry. Such a structure matches that of a journal or diary - everyday concepts that the non-technologically-savvy person is familiar with. Thus, the mental model of a blog is very understandable, which not only makes them easy to create, but also makes them easy to read and navigate (as compared to personal websites, whose structure and content have no such regularity). This is an important usability principle: have the system's model match the user's mental model as closely as possible.

But blogs have another feature that I think is even more important from a usability point of view, and that is web feeds, also known as syndication. Before the days of web feeds, you had to manually visit someone's website to determine if they posted new content. And due to the lack of regularity in structure for personal websites, it was not always easy to tell if there was new content. Or, if there was content marked as new, did you read it last week already? The net result: few return visitors to personal websites.

Web feeds use protocols such as RSS to publish website changes to a single file on the website. New visitors to a site can use web feed reader software to monitor this special web feed file. The feed reader software will regularly poll this file, and inform the user when there is new content. This functionality offers a major boost in usability to website readers, as they can find out quickly and painlessly when there is new content on a site, and based on the summary of the change, decide whether it is of interest.

Blogs have another important feature that I haven't mentioned yet, and that's comments. The comment feature allows visitors to the blog to enter comments for a particular blog entry, which then become visible to other readers. This feature engages visitors, and allows them to participate in the blog, turning it into more of a dialog rather than a broadcast. Over time, a popular blog can end up with a regular group of readers / commentors. A related phenomenon is a group of bloggers who comment on each other's blogs and/or write blog entries in response to others' blog entries. In both these cases, the blog(s) have been transformed into an online community. Humans are social creatures and naturally form communities (social structures) of all kinds. An excellent article I came across on this topic is Building Communities with Software from the great Joel on Software site.

Besides the usability improvements for both writers and readers, blogs provide the ingredients for new communities to arise in a way that personal websites never did. I believe it is the combination of these factors that have propelled the popularity of blogs into the mainstream today.