I'm redesigning Fury again.

I know that must sound strange, since Fury's design hasn't changed significantly in nearly 5 years, but would you believe I've redesigned it at least four times since then? I have, only I've never actually built it out and pushed it live, since I was never really happy with it.

Now I have a new litmus test: If it's better than the current version I should put it out there. By that standard I'm almost certain to have a redesign up in the next week or so.

Just as a reality check, it would be helpful if you briefly commented on what part(s) of the UI or overall site that you find most valuable personally. I'd love to hear it, along with any random ideas for improvements. I already have the design in my head and halfway done, but it's not too late to make an impact.

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As I constantly iterate on the design of Fury in my head, I'm influenced here and there by things I read or anecdotal experiences I have. Today's post by Phiipp Lenssen, Context, not Navigation, is having a big impact on the virtual-Fury in my head.

Most importantly, it resonates with my awareness that the experience and motivations of the everyday reader are completely different than the google visitor, and the look and feel should reflect that.

Categories were all the rage, and are de rigeur for most blogs nowadays, but they don't scale well at all. They tend to work best when the branching factor is constant, that is when there are roughly as many items in a category as there are are categories in total. Another way of putting it is, if each post is only in one category, then your number of categories should be roughly sqrt(number of posts). This doesn't scale well when you reach 2000 posts and 45 categories, with 45 posts in each category. I actually have 91 categories, because I'm inefficient, and because many posts are in multiple categories, and, well, I am a freak.

Anyhow, the article's very thought-provoking, and I'll have to see how it impacts my twin desires to further granualize and consolidate Fury's organizational structure. I should talk more about this soon. Maybe I'll even have a demo.

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It's 12:02am and I'm downstairs in my townhouse, with my powerbook in my lap, thinking about a lot of things. To share...

Rachel and I went to dance class today and it was a lot of fun. It's a pleasure to be in any dance class Richard teaches, even (especially?) if I already know the dance. It's the only time I can really focus on technique and cure myself of bad habits on the dance floor.

We're working on costumes for the Halloween Gaskell's Masquerade Ball. We're not doing anything fantastically involved, but it should be cool if we can pull it off.

My mom's coming in to town this weekend. It's the first time in a long time that mom's come up just to see me, since I usually come down to LA more often. I'm looking forward to showing her my home. I'm so house-proud. I'm so proud that this is probably the first time I've ever actually used that term.

My dad's business is selling today. It stirs up a lot of emotion. The house is in escrow, and will close in a few weeks. Piece by piece it's coming undone. I know this feeling isn't fair, since we have the important things, the memories, the pictures, the writings, and a whole lot of stuff, but the exchange of things for cash has a dehumanizing effect even in the best of times. I'll get over it, but right now I'm still a little under it.

A handful of people at Google read my weblog, and I know a few did when I was being considered for employment, but I don't know if my coworkers know about my dad's death. It's not something that's come up in conversation, but one of my coworkers is going on vacation for two weeks with her husband and new baby to visit both sets of relatives back east. We were talking about families, and I just wanted to tell her to cherish these times, these visits, because you never know what might happen before you see them next. Playing it in my head, it all sounded so morbid. I didn't say anything.

Susie and I are both looking at getting Priuses ('Priae'?). I have a deposit down on one up here, but there's a 60-90-day wait list. They officially arrive in dealerships today, so I might be able to actually see one this weekend. I'm still looking at other options, like the Outback. I finally got another interim license until the DMV gets me my real one (another story) so I can test-drive.

Tomorrow's Friday Night Waltz. Rachel and I both need new dance shoes. I'd rather not break mine in at Gaskell's, as three hours of dancing in new shoes would kill my feet. I don't know how we'd find time to get shoes for tomorrow night.

I'm thrilled that iTunes for Windows has come out. I'm really interested in hearing the download stats for the Apple Music Store in the coming weeks and months. This is a great move for Apple, though I was surprised to read that Apple expects to do little more than break even on the music store. Instead, the whole thing is a vehicle to sell more iPods, where the real money is.

Work is fantastic, and that's enough said about that for right now.

I can't find my beard trimmer, so my goatee gets longer and longer, held in check only by a small pair of scissors in my bathroom.

The house is almost entirely unpacked, and looking good. I hosted a brunch last weekend and it felt so good to entertain. Bagels, lox, and friends. The perfect Sunday morning.

I have this weird irregular heartbeat thing about once a day. I need to get it looked at, as it's been going on for months. They'll hook me up with a portable EKG for a day or two, where I'll press a button and take notes whenever I feel anything odd. I can't really describe it other than to say my heart feels like it wants to yawn but it can't. I'm looking for a good doctor and I'll make an appointment next week.

Wednesday night Rachel and I went to a corporate night event at SF MOMA. We got to see the Chagall exhibit and a few other collections. Chagall's never blown my socks off, but they had a fascinating display of 19th century photography, a James Turell installation (if you've never seen any James Turell, find out where you can see some and do it. That stuff blows my socks off.), a gallery of the lifestyle of asian prostitutes, as well as a standing collection of mid-20th-century art including Magritte, Jasper Johns, Rothko, and Lichtenstein.

The hors devours were very yummy, but the high point of the evening was the band. They were playing good seductive lounge-y music and had a fantastic female vocalist. "Whatever Lola Wants" and the like. Bass, Guitar, Drums, lead vocals, and an exquisite Theramin player.

Theramins are so cool. I've heard them before, but usually in the context of B-movies. I'd never seen one being played, let alone so expertly played. The man could make the Theramin sound like a pedal-steel guitar, a jaw harp, or a flock of birds. Within I was playing my own 'air theramin' and I know I just have to give one a try. Turns out that at about $350, they're not as expensive as I'd thought. Even cooler, I discovered a MIDI-compatable Theramin player, which seems almost impossible, because everything about the Theramin is analog, and totally nonconducive to traditional composition.

I've been thinking more about ambient displays, looking at possibly hardware for the house, and had the realization that many ambient displays exist as the causal interface between the trajector and the landmark, that is to say, the display doesn't just convey information, its very implementation is in some way tightly related to the resulting reaction triggered by the display. When you think about it this way, any step in a causal chain could be seen as a display, and the 'interesting' displays are those that are either naturally ubiquitous, or otherwise ignorable or conditional. I don't expect this to make sense yet, but hopefully it will soon.

Fury's been getting a lot of google hits today because google thinks a post I wrote two years ago explains why The West Wing wasn't shown as expected Wednesday night. The real answer is that NBC shelved the episode for two weeks so it wouldn't compete with the Baseball playoffs or world series. West Wing will be back on October 29th.

That's it for now. I still need to get down to coding the site, and I have half a mind to do a drastic redesign, beyond the Fury 4.0 designs I was passing around a few months ago. At the very least, there will be a complete rewrite under the hood.

That ought to be some good fodder for comments. I'll talk to y'all tomorrow!

Comments? (10)

Though nobody's brought it up, I can see how someone would look at this process and say "Yeah, I suppose it could be called participatory design, but isn't this design by committee?" My answer to that would be yes and no. What's happening with the user base ("yinz") is more like screening. I get feedback, and redesign, using my discretion on which things are perceived as rough, which are difficult to understand, overly obvious, and aesthetically pleasing or not.

Nearly all the stuff we've been doing here is visual design. At the same time, talking about the visual design, which is more justifiable to do in a participatory process, I'm getting a better idea of your individual workflows. How do you use Fury? How might the interactive design suit that better? These are questions I'm learning about while we dicker over highlight colors.

The actual interaction flows are being worked on in a more structured process. They'll also have their time to be put forward, but in a front-end user-experience form, not the back-end flows and such. This sort of thing is better done in ones and twos, so I need to find and test some local fury readers. Hey, any HCII brethren care to submit to a low-fi test or two?

Anyhow, just trying to say that giving you links and talking about impressions isn't my whole HCI process, but when dealing with expert users of the intended system, as you all are, interviews like these, even en masse in comments, have their place. you can already see the difference when you go back and look at the first mocks to now.

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Like Ali, I still feel that the comment count on the OTP navbox is clunky and jarring. I'm looking for better solutions. I'm not sure how important it is to indicate the number of comments for a given post, just how new the latest one is, and if it's new to you. Basically the same functionality that's already in the timeline bar, but more explicit.

In the meantime, I'm playing with replacing salmon with a dark blue and reversed type. Fury 4.0d7 vs. Fury 4.0d8.

Considering how the OTP box would actually be used, and that it should exist on every individual entry page, I've renamed it to 'new this week' (NTW).

Oh, and in case I didn't mention, the comment popup window will go away completely. Now, lookig at comments will take you to that entry's individual page, with the comments appended to the end of the entry. Following a comments link will jump you down to those comments in that page. I don't have a quick example of that. Davezilla used to do that, but recently redesigned his site and has now gone the popup route.

Anyhow, comment away. Work continues...

Comments? (15)

Another day, another design mock.

Changes in d7 include:

• Removal of the '3d effect' except for on the masthead.
• Joining of the top property links to the masthead
• Removal of separators in the 'on this page' (OTP) navbox
• Changing () to [] for OTP comments. (I tried omitting them, or making the color/link just the number, etc. They all looked much worse, trust me.)
• Changing the 'comments' area at the end of entries. Check the first and second entries for examples. The rest are for placement only (FPO).
• 'Track this item'? What's that mean? (grin)
• Removed the legend. More navbox changes to come.

For discussion: How does the color balance look now? granted the white/grey isn't set in stone, but I feel that without the legend, the salmon isn't so overbearing. Comments? Also: When you click on a salmon comment counter in the OTP, should it take you to the oldest comment you haven't yet read, or to the first comment? What if none of the comments are new?

Comments? (66)

So, amazingly, after giving you guys this speech about how I wanted to conduct a transparent design process, I squirrel myself away, whipping up visual iterations, changing them, showing them to a few close friends, and making changes. that's exactly what I was trying to avoid.

Still, my current design thoughts have problems, and I guess it's artistic ego that doesn't want to let me show it while those problems are unsolved. Nevertheless, discussion might help solve those problems, so here goes.

The 'current' mock is Fury 4.0d5. Caveats:

• The parts that I focused on here were the masthead, the first entry on the page, and the 'on this page' nav box.
• The rest of the nav boxes haven't been touched yet, though they absolutely will, and several will be going away, and new ones replacing them.
• The HTML and CSS code are very messy. Don't worry about that. This is a design mock and the code will be optimized when I write it into the live system. CSS folk might notice that the 'on this page' nav box is all css, reducing a fair bit of table junk.
• I haven't personally tested this on any browsers other than Safari.
• The 'comments' summary after the first post is still a work in progress. I still need to put in links to the actual posts, see how it looks when there are 25 comments, and not just 2, have a clear link for adding a comment, etc.
• I removed the 'comment dots' from the timeline. They made the design even busier, and their usefulness is diminished by the 'on this page' box.
• The timeline bar items will actually be colored the same as the 'on this page' items, in a gradient (like topics is) instead of the 'new, 1day, 3 day, old' system. (Thoughts on this?)

Okay, now the known issues:

1. The color scheme is either too sterile or too patriotic.
2. The page seems too crowded. (This should be improved when the rest of the nav boxes are done)
3. I'm not sure that I'm happy with the presentation of the # and newness of comments in the 'on this page' box.
4. More I can't think of just now.

Okay, I again stress work in progress, but have at it anyhow.

For comparison and conversational fodder, check out a few earlier versions: 4.0d1, 4.0d2, 4.0d3, 4.0d4.

Comments? (35)

Sorry for the slowness of posts. This time though it's completely warranted. I've been putting a lot of effort into Fury 4.0. Right now most of the obvious work has been in the visual design of the front page.

That visual design incorporates some changes in the interactive design of fury, but most of the interactive changes (and they are substantial) will be slower in coming.

I feel the flows have to be validated more, and will require more user testing, while I feel qualified to take a good solid stab at the visual redesign based on my knowledge of user habits, relative importance of various elements, and personal asthetic.

I'll probably have the first static visual design mock up late tomorrow or Thursday. Before that I expect I'll dive in to explaining one or more of the redesigned flows. FYI, I'm redesigning (or designing the initial flow) for: reading comments, posting main comments, posting IMblog comments, registering/login.

And that's just the stuff I can recall off the top of my head.

I'll say this though, after working on the VisDe for 4.0 for the last two days, it's almost icky goving back to 3.2 to actually post...

Comments? (2)

So hey, I've long found it amusing that so many webloggers with such tight design skills do their redesigns in private, suddenly unveiling them to the world with a big "here it is!"

Trouble is, this is the antithesis of the traditional interaction design process. Showing the design around to a few of your friends shouldn't be a substitute for an actual usability experiment, for a lot of reasons, most notably an inherent bias towards the designer, a familiarity with the existing site (this is useful, but naive users should also be tested), and most importantly, the fact that a person's subjective opinion is not the same thing as the usability of a site.

So I'm going to (more or less) conduct the Fury 4.0 redesign by the numbers. I'm going to do some low-fi prototype testing, some task analysis, a smattering of cognitive walkthroughs for the identified common tasks, and some rolling usability testing as the redesign comes along.

I've already started with a lot of logfile analysis of Fury 3.2. I've identified the five categories of visitors, and their use patterns:

1. The regular subscriber - You read this site at least once every two weeks, and get here either via a bookmark, by hand-typing the URL, from your RSS aggregator (desktop app, or web-based aggregator), or by a link on your own personal links page (I'm so tempted to link to some of these as examples, but they might be private, so I won't).
   
   You read comments. Most of you use the timeline bar at the top of the screen. You might lurk, or you might post. Most of you check in at least 3 times a week. Some check several times a day.
   
   You almost never visit anywhere other than the front page, unless I linked to it in a new article.
    
2. The general referred user - You saw a link on the sidebar of another site and decided to check it out. You might look around a bit. There's a 30% chance that you'll click on one of the topics in the 'Read by Topic'. If you do, there's an 80% chance that you'll follow the 'sex' topic. There's a 90% chance that you'll be disappointed by it.
    
3. The specific referred user - A blog or news site you read linked to a specific article on fury, and you followed the link to check it out. When you do, you might visit the front page, and it's just as likely that you'll click on the 'Bio' link to find out more about where you are. You're more likely to become a regular reader than any other group.
    
4. The google searcher - You dive in and dive out. You'll almost never go anyplace other than the page you land on (unless it's to the aforementioned 'sex' link). On rare occasion you'll actually leave a comment, but if you do, there's (almost exactly, strangely enough) a 50% chance that you're either a crackpot, conspiracy theorist, extremely vulgar, immature, or some combination. Trouble for you is that, though you don't know it, almost nobody will ever know you left that comment, unless they constantly scour the archives for recent comments.
    
5. Kevin Fox - I use Fury differently than everyone else. When it doesn't suit my needs, I've built hacks in the back end so that I can do what I want. When someone leaves a comment on the site, it automatically emails the comment to me, so I never have to check back to find new content, and can respond to comments right away.
   
   I have hidden pages where I can get up-to-the-second lists of who came to what page of the site, and where they came from. I can spot new referring links easily, and see how popular that link is.
   
   I use the timeline bar as a guilt-o-meter, always wanting to see at least some dark blue on the page, lest I feel the page is growing stale.
   

I've spent the last several months with these use patterns in my head, and they have driven a few changes over the years (the timeline, color-coding, permalinks, comments, etc.) but now I've got enough new ideas that I'm doing a complete rewrite. I closely considered making it 100% CSS, but I found that while the concept of CSS is extremely elegant, in practice the compatibility differences amongst my target browsers (even between IE 5.5 and IE 6.0, browsers of the most common Fury visitors) mean that I'd have to code many kludges just to make it work right, and it would make me more reluctant to institute changes, knowing a small change could wreck the site.

Instead I'm using tables for layout, and CSS for styles, as I mostly do now.

Okay, this post is getting much longer than I intended. Back to the interaction design model, I want your input. I'd like the regular users to be the eyes over my shoulder, I want you guys to play the role of the stakeholder. I'm designing a tool both for you and the other four groups, and while I'll take your comments for what they are, and not gospel, I realize you guys have a lot of good ideas and frustrations, and as long as this post's comments inform the design, and don't drive it, I think it'll make for a better redesign all around.

So, knowing that many of the labels in the following wireframe will need description I won't delve in to until later this week, I'd like to share the preliminary Fury 4.0 home page wireframe.

Questions? Comments? Go for it.

Comments? (38)