The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. A good UI is often one when a user can "get through" the function quickly. An often missed point of good UI is to think about creating short cursor movements when planning the layout/UI of the app. As UI designers the copy writing and styling are concerns that sometimes overshadow our minds. I have to remind myself to work towards the shortest cursor path to complete a task or move between tasks.

Practical Usage

In LessAccounting we use fixed position buttons.

Issue with the example

Most people love the fixed position buttons, but some people are so accustom to seeing the buttons at the bottom of the form they "miss" the button bar. We're still trying to figure out how to make them more noticeable without being annoying. Got any ideas? We'd love to hear them.

I'm thinking what did we do this year? It's been a blur, let's recall some of the highlights.

• Released LovdbyLess.com, so far it's been download over 23,000 times!
• Steve admitted to not wearing pants.
• Launched LessTimeSpent.com
• I told the world who I am
• Made major improvements to LessAccounting.com
• The amount of money being tracked in LessAccounting: 1,679,369,407.34
• Steve and I grew awesome 'staches
• Blog readership grew 6x, from 1 person (my Mom) to 5 people + you.
• We show why we're so productive.
• Steve called your idea worthless.
• We stopped supporting IE6. 37signals followed suit just a few days later.
• Launched RailsCities.com.
• Launched LessFriends.com.
• Steve spoke at a bunch of conferences including Dynamic Languages World Europe 08. (Love his pic with the eye patch, my business partner is a laugh riot.)
• I did some design work for John Resig of Mozilla and JQuery Dromaeo.com
• Steve and Obie head butted each other, ouch.
• Allan said SVN UP BITCHES!

2008 was a warm up for 2009, just wait!

Kuumba means creativity. Today we focus on our creative side. We search for new ways to help people and build things that makes people’s lives easier. Creativity can take many forms and the important thing is not to judge the outcome, but rather enjoy the process of creating. Regardless of what you create, take time today to create something. It will be wonderful.

And if you can launch it too.

Nia means purpose, so on this the fifth day of Kwanzaa we should be reflecting on what our individual and collective purposes are, and what we can do to improve both ourselves and our community.

This is also a good day to think about that project you’ve been working on. What is its purpose? Does it really need all of those features to be what people need it to be? Or maybe some of them can wait. Maybe you’ve gotten so into the details that it no longer does what it needs to. Take the day and reflect on the your purpose and how you affect the world through your work and your actions.

Ujima means “collective work and responsibility.” Today we think on a very personal level about how the problems of our community are our problems. How we can help others to make this a better world for everyone. Throughout today, let’s all pay special attention to how we can do little things to help our community.

On the second day of Kwanzaa we recognize Kujichagulia, Self-Determination. This day is about taking responsibility for ourselves and standing up to be counted. It is about getting in the game and not just watching from the sidelines. It is about liberation. The liberation that comes from free choice. The choice to be who I want to be and not apologize or be ashamed of it. Embrace yourself, love yourself, be yourself, be proud of yourself, and make choices that are good for you—like launching.

Happy Kwanzaa to you today. As you may already know, today is the first day of the seven day holiday, Kwanzaa. Every year we celebrate Kwnazaa from Dec 26 to Jan 1. Each of the seven days represents a different principle. On the first day of Kwanzaa we we reflect on Umoja which means unity. It is a chance to pause and think about the unity of families, nations and all people. How we can gain strength and harmony through the unity of our lives. It is a day to feel connected with one another. As many of us go back to work, or back to the mall, let’s think about the unity between ourselves and the people we interact with. Let’s silently wish them well as we realize that they are all our brothers and sisters.

I just realized we hadn't blogged episode #4, we just tweeted the link.

So here is episode #4, like others before, Steve doesn't know I am recording him. Enjoy watching Steve ramble about how he doesn't wear pants to work anymore and how that his "new thing".

The backstory, a few weeks ago Steve recently had a small spill on his motorcycle which resulted in some nice scraps.

In this episode you will see...
A Scab
Removing of a Scab.
Me being a good friend, encouraging others to do gross and horrible things.
Steve successfully grossing me out.

Most people familiar with Ruby are familiar with the Ruby operator ||=. What it does is assign the value of the right to the variable on the left if left is nil (or false). Here is an example:

Most people however are not familiar with the corollary operator &&=. What it does is assign the value of the right to the variable on the left if left is not nil (or false). Here is an example:

Here is an example of how one might use &&=. The idea is that you have an array of something and you only really care if they all completed or not. I used AR::Base.save to show a poor man’s transactions.

I see so many good designs floating around the internet, these designs would be great if only slight changes were made. These small change are usually better because they emphasize or de-emphasize parts of the page, improving the visual hierarchy.

Good design is a series of small decisions that collectively turn into a good design. The difference between a good design and a great design might be a very small overlooked detail. No design is ever finished, there's always room to improve. Here's a good design that I made some very very small changes to that make it better. The image you first see if the original design, it's fantastic. Take your mouse and hover over it and wait a second, you'll see my changes. It might take your eye a second to see the changes.

What I did...

I enlarged the font size on the navigation so your eye picks up on it more quickly. I gave the individual stories a little more spacing and separated the columns a tad as well. The date on the article I made less eye catching, it's just not that important. Are these changes mind blowing? No, they're minor changes that can greatly affect the outcome of the design.


if you're in firefox, click on the image and you'll see my noted changes

The Problem...

As a designer I have a tendency to cram things into a site, this isn't a good thing. You need to give you visitors eye breathing room. The original design "www.GOOD.is" had was cramped. It caused my eye to speed up and hurry thru the elements. Give your user's eyes white space/open space it's a key piece of good design.

With so many Photoshop tutorials floating around everyone thinks they're designers. There's nothing wrong with tutorials or Photoshop but Photoshop isn't the foundation of good design. Good design is about visual balance, a font hierarchy, color weight, alignment and proximity, these pillars are how you, the designer, guide the viewer's eyes around the page to the places you want them to be.

Below is a simple design, but very effective. The spacing is clear and the alignments are perfect.

My design journal on Flickr
Design journal RSS Feed

Simple alignments make a difference.

See the consistent spacing?

I turned 28 today, so here's some self-reflection.

• I grew up cleaning cars at my family's car washes.
• I have scars from being a former college offensive lineman.
• I have a passion for design and brainstorm about ideas.
• I leave the toilet seat up.
• I am in love with my wife and I need to take her on a romantic date soon.
• I enjoy seeing anything inspiring.
• I love my family more than myself and enjoy nothing more than being around them.
• I have the greatest job in the world and the most amazing business partner.
• I want to help everyone I meet.
• I will tear up during ABC's Extreme Home Makeover and I insist those are tears of jealousy.
• I enjoy my everyday life, it's so close to perfect.
• I am 28 and I still just want to make my parents proud of me.
• I know I'm blessed for everything I have and I take nothing for granted.
• I eat too much and it shows.
• I make too many jokes and I laugh at my jokes more than others do.
• I have an OCD about washing my hands and I wash them all day.
• I am scared of sharks and I don't like snakes either.
• I am pretty sure my clothes shrink magically in my closet.
• I pick my nose and sometimes flick the boogers.
• I keep dental floss at my desk.
• I am trying to curse less often.
• I would stop drinking caffeine before giving up listening to music. I love Journey.
• I tear up when I think about how much I love my wife and son.
• I want everyone to be as happy as I am.

That's me, take it or leave it.

We hope you enjoy this on your Thanksgiving Day holiday. (And yes, I am working today.)

Background:

A week and a half ago I wrote an article called Guy Kawasaki is an Idiot. As usual, I tweeted about it and then Allan tweeted about it. Then something unexpected happened: Guy Kawasaki, showing that he is a good sport, retweeted it. But Guy retweeted Allan’s tweet, not mine. For the rest of the day Allan kept getting emails and followers and people tweeting and blogging about him. It became a very popular post for us, our daily traffic more than tripled.

Everyone knows that Allan is the popular, funny one while I am the smart, sexy one. Most people don’t know that I have always been a bit jealous of his popularity. At non-tech conferences people are always coming up to me and saying “Are you Less Allan?”

So this day I was giving Allan a bit of a hard time for not telling people that it was me that wrote the post. The video starts off with me looking pretty bad but I think it ends well. Allan did his trick of not telling me it was recording.

So here is another unedited, backstage glimpse into Less.

If your content seems to be failing you and people aren't catching on to what you have to say you're probably boring them to death with long droning content. No one wants to spend 10-minutes reading your blog post. Time is money, make it snappy!

Keep it Focused

Quickly settle on your main point. Don't let your topic go into left field on tangents (if you have tangents, those might be good alternative articles). Your first line should cover what the entire article is going to be about - directly.

Trim the Fat

Make it lean. Keep it Minimal.

• Quickly jot your main point(s) keep it to less than three if you can or divide it up nicely.
• Talk/Write like a human-being not a robot. These days, people hate formality so stop stressing on getting it grammatically correct and just write the dang article. Trust me. You're reading our blog right?
• Leave it alone for a few hours or days then revisit and rephrase. If you don't step away for a bit you will end up spending more time than necessary on it. I usually go through my article and chop it up at a fast pace so I don't talk myself into keeping crap around. Don't try to be detailed unless it's absolutely necessary.
• If possible, send it to someone for feedback even if it happens to be your mum or your little sis.

A skeptical eye will dramatically help your articles, see Allan just ripped my article into shape. Writing less isn't about being short and dry it's about not dancing around your point. So make your point, have an opinion, the push the blog post live and move on.