To prevent analysis paralysis then is simple (or so it seems)—reduce the number of choices. However, some companies instead provide a plethora of options to consumers, believing that amongst those options a user will find at least one of them to be perfect for them. They believe that users want choice, and some users do, but for the majority it’s not the case. For example, although one of those options may be perfect for me, the process of narrowing down all of the options can be daunting and cause… you guessed it… paralysis.

Spaghetti. That’s the topic of this 2004 TED talk by Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point and Outliers). He talks about how one spaghetti company, at a time where providing tons of options was the norm, changed there approach and increased revenue.

Side Note: This article was inspired by the recent Smashing Magazine article Easier is Better than Better.

There are some of us who give content the respect it deserves and implement content strategies. It is for you I post this link I recently found on Firehead.net titled 1001 Content Strategy Links.

And don’t worry about it being an unwieldy list of 1001 links—it’s broken down into useful sections for easy navigation such as introduction, writing, design, and UX. And the list actually stops at 101, but you’ll see why.

Since I usually both design and code sites myself, the site diagram is very elementary and doesn’t get seen by anyone other than me. But recently when working with two other developers I found it useful to create something a little more detailed.

After a little searching, I found this Box and Arrows posting titled Site Diagrams: Mapping an Information Space useful. The author, Jason Withrow, provides some great guidelines for creating diagrams and well worth a read.

But through all the gaming, writing was always in the back of my mind, so I decided to start a column at EA.com. I call it Breaking into the Gaming Industry. In each post, I’ll be interviewing people at EA about what they do with an aim of helping readers get job in the gaming world. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Note though that both Apple and Google’s site, which have both always been fairly simple in design, have barely changed. Take Apple…

Just like Apple’s products, Apple.com has always been minimalistic, following the same basic yet effective layout. Above the fold is a huge image featuring recently announced products. Below that is a news feed. And below that, are a couple images in a row linked to other interesting products. And at the very bottom are text links to other sections of the site.

The only major difference between the site before and the site now is that where the main navigation and search function was at the bottom of the site in the past, it is now at the top. That however was changed the following year.

So what does this say about Apple? I think it says they aren’t effected by trends. They didn’t use the coolest web tricks just because they were cool at the time. Instead, they followed a philosophy that transcends trends, and that’s to focus on the products and let them speak for themselves.

The Future

We know that most sites ten years ago sucked. This was largely because of several limitations that hindered designers. First, designers had to deal with old browsers. Worse than IE6, they had to deal with IE5, and Netscape. Second, CSS was not fully developed yet, and even if it was, it wasn’t fully supported by browsers yet. And thirdly, people used 56k modems, so designers couldn’t be too flashy with there Flash, and had to be very careful about the size and amount of images on a web page.

What I’m getting at is aside from designers still figuring out the Web and how to make it beautiful, they were technical limitations, and ten years from now, people will look back and think the same about the current state of the web. However, that doesn’t have to hold you back. Like Apple, if you focus on a design philosophy, and not design trends, you sites will transcend time. And don’t focus on the present too much—always keep your eyes on the future.

Note: If you’re interested in looking at a site in the past, just visit the Internet Archive and enter a URL in the “Wayback Machine.”

I once knew someone who washed windows for a living, and was passionate about it. He told me that if you can find something you’d do for free, you should do it for a living. For him, it was washing windows. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Now here I am a year later about to make another move to the San Francisco Bay Area for a position at Electronic Arts (EA). EA, for those who don’t know, is essentially the biggest company in the game industry…

He didn’t receive bundles of money every pay check, but he was happy being able to make a living out of something he’d gladly do for free.

His advice has always stuck with me, as I’d always believed in this, but never heard it spoken by anyone else. Most of the people I know are all about money. I had friends in college, for example, whose major wasn’t a subject they were necessarily interested in, but one they knew typically led to large paychecks.

Like I said, my passions lie in designing, writing, and playing games, and I decided several years ago that my goal would be to combine the three into a career in the video game industry. I decided that I would move to California after college because most game companies are located on the West, and one week after I graduated, that’s just what I did. I packed up and moved from Baltimore, MD to Los Angeles, CA.

After a few months of getting by with freelance work, I found my way over to Sony Pictures Television. Now here I am a year later about to make another move to the San Francisco Bay Area for a position at Electronic Arts (EA). EA, for those who don’t know, is essentially the biggest company in the game industry, being behind such products as The Sims, Rock Band, and Madden.

What I’ll be doing there is managing the content on EA.com, as well as designing and writing here and there. While my dream is to be involved with the actual development of video games, designing and writing, just working at a game company utilizing my talents is an achievement—it’s something that I would gladly do for free.

EA.com is a great web site, but I hope to take it several miles further when I start August 24th. I look forward to interacting with my new co-workers and wish the best to my previous co-workers at Sony.

Follow your passions…

The mind is an important tool—I know it’s so obvious it sounds weird to say, but really, it’s important to note. Designers need to read, travel, sketch in their spare time, and things of that nature, if they want to stay sharp.

One tool I use to keep sharp is reading and analyzing quotes, and I’ve decided that I will make a habit out of sharing these quotes with you, thus the title “Twittered Quotes: 2nd Edition.”

Below you’ll find a handful of quotes, with the most recently tweeted ones at the top. Read them. Think about them. Enjoy.

And keep in mind that I don’t necessarily agree with all of these quotes, but I do find them all interesting.

“Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture… is always a portrait of himself.”
-Samuel Butler

“I think it’s a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one’s self.”
-From Author Miller’s ‘After the Fall’

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
-W. B. Yeats

“Cash rules everything around me / C.R.E.A.M. get the money / Dollar dollar bill y’all.”
-Method Man

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
-Galileo Galilei

“You do ill if you praise, and still worse if you reprove in a matter you do not understand.”
-Leonardo da Vinci

“It’s hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
-Steve Jobs

“Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.”
-Design House Stockholm

A minute later, he sat up and continued walking until plopping back to the grown again, several feet from his last slab of concrete canvas. At this point, I had caught up with them and smiled back at the artsy looking mom as I flew past.

It wasn’t until the following morning, when I was going back to work, that I took the time to admire the child’s artwork.
His art had balance, and repetition, and although the pieces were not all together, they interacted with each other and felt uniform. For example, one drawing appeared to be a balloon sun—a circle with triangle rays surrounding, and a line representing a string. A few feet later, he did the exact same drawing, only in reverse. So the string from the two balloon suns were between the circular shapes.

It may not seem like much, but for his young mind to consider how two objects interacted with each other takes a certain something, and it shows promise for a creative future.

Me as a child

Seeing this kid reminded me of myself when I was younger, and how a lot of what I do now for a living was oozing out of me when I was a kid. One example of this was how I use to take apart everything.

This is called a Power Wheels Fisher-Price Arctic Cat Prowler. Now, I didn’t have this particular model as a kid, but I had something pretty similar to it. These things start at about $200 now-a-days, and I’m sure it wasn’t that cheap when I was young either.

What I did to my expensive Christmas gift, my dad discovered when he pulled up to the house from work one day, was took the vehicle apart to the point of no return. Piece by piece, I had removed plastic coverings, wires, the battery, and everything that looked interesting, until there was nothing of interest to look at anymore.

I sat on the ground smiling—Philips screwdriver in hand—as my dad approached me and asked, “Why did you do this?”

My response: “I wanted to see how it worked.”

Years later, while I was in high school, I created a fan site for the anime Dragonball Z. Not understanding how to code a web site, I simply stole the code from another fan site and restyled it. However, after I had stole the code, I went through it line by line, removing things and adding things to figure out what did what.

See the similarities? And to this day, I still want to know the what, why, and the how of things that interest me.

Peek back into your past and I’m sure you’ll find a seed that has now fully bloomed into a career or a passion.

See, as described in one of the images in this post, traffic is so bad in London that the average speed is 10mph, “which is nearly the same speed as when we used to travel with horse and carriage.” So more and more, bikes are becoming the preferred mean of travel.

Envisioned by Sweden student Mårten Wållgren and three others, London Garden won a Seymour Powell award for best concept in the “Future City Mobility” design competition.Wållgren describes the project as follows:

“The brief was basically to look at the traffic situation in London for the year 2030. Our concept was to create a car-free-zone in the central of London, called London Garden. Inside this zone we developed a system created around bicycles. Allowing a special designed bicycle/scooter to be well integrated with the infrastructure as well as becoming a part of the interior of the buses and taxis. Inside London Garden, the users have more awareness of the individual energy consumption. In fact, the energy that you create while biking is used as a currency while docking the bicycle into the bus or taxi.”

What I find most genius about London Garden is how everything seems perfectly integrated. Ride your bike to a bus stop and use the energy you generated while riding your bike to pay for your ride. How? The bike folds and becomes a bus seat, contributing energy to the vehicle in the process.

If you’re in the mood for a little work out when you get off the bus, just switch the mode on the bike to make it more challenging to pedal. Doing so not only helps you break a sweat, but also pumps more energy into the bikes battery. And once you get tired, switch the mode again it you can just ride off of the power of the battery without having to pedal at all.

I’m noticing that a lot of new designs in fields like architecture and packaging have features with multiple purposes that can switch from being one thing to another with ease, and I can see this spreading to the web industry at some point in the near future.

If you would like to see more concept art of the London Garden, visit Wållgren’s blog. All of the photos used in this were taken from there so all credit goes to him.

I think a better term is design “philosophy.” What I’ve always been interested in is why someone designs the way they do, not how. A person can potentially design different ways visually, but there will seem to be a connection between their designs if they have a certain philosophy.

In the Boagworld forum, I asked some of my peers if they had a design philosophy, and if they had one to share it.

I found the responses to be very interesting. Everyone who responded had a different philosophy, yet none seemed necessarily better than the other. They were just different ways of looking at the same problem. And even more interesting, I could imagine what kind of designs a person would make from their philosophy.

Here are some of the responses I got.

“Mine is that everything is for the benefit of the user. When I design something I always try to think “will this benefit my users?” If the answer is no I usually remove it.” -Doug Stewart

“Mine is that you should always have a defined goal for any website (any and design project) and you should be ruthless in pursuit of that goal… An attractive site, well coded and accessible is great. Good usability’s also brilliant. But it’s important to remember they’re a means to an end .. not the end in itself.” -Rich Quick

“Get to know your client, but most importantly, get to know their story. Where did they come from? Why are they doing what they’re doing? Who are they trying to help? Then, endeavor to tell that story through design” -Ezekielbruni (not his real name, I think…)

“My philosophy has always been to try to capture true “conversation of the client” and try to guide a user through that conversation by applying User Experience principals – each in equal parts.” -Peter Allen

“I like design by concept, but starting off with finding out what infomation we are dealing with which actions a user will need to take.” -Jamie Knight

Ask yourself if you have a design philosophy. I believe everyone does, though they may not know it. If you don’t know your philosophy, figure out what it is or adapt one you believe in. Once you discover one, you’ll find designing easier, even if just a little.