Luke Wroblewski gave an excellent talk called “Design Patterns” at SXSW. A highlight was when Luke presented the results of user interface research into the advantages of various form label alignments.

I’ve condensed the slides from Luke’s talk down to just the ones on form labels because that information holds up particularly well on its own. The information here is based on research and is actionable. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in UI design.

Download Luke Wroblewski’s slides on Form Label Alignment

The full set of slides from Luke’s talk are available on his blog.

With that said, I’ve never been able the shake the feeling that Flash intros did in fact provide some sort of value. I could never put my finger on quite what that value was until recently it hit me: Flash intros are the “grand entrance halls” of the web.

By “grand entrance hall” I mean what you see when they open the front door on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” A huge room with a marble staircase, high ceiling and a gravity-defying chandelier.

The Value of “Grand Entrance Halls” and Flash Intros

The point of a “grand entrance hall” is to immediately communicate your wealth to your visitors. It gets this point across, not only with its extravagant decorations, but also with its utter disregard for good use of space. Having a big open room in your house is expensive, especially one that satisfies no basic human need.

Flash intros do the same thing for your website. They look expensive. For businesses, communicating to your web visitors that you have money is important. It signals to potential customers that you probably aren’t a fly-by-night company and that you’ll be around to continue supporting the products you sell.

The Limitations of Flash Intros

While “grand entrance halls” and Flash intros both provide value, they are also impractical. When you don’t have visitors over, a “grand entrance hall” becomes just a big room that you have to walk through to get somewhere where you’d actually want to spend some time. Similarly, your web visitors are going to be losing time sitting on their hands waiting for your intro to load.

Placing a Value on Web Presence

But the deeper problem with Flash intros is that you get exactly what you pay for. A $2000 Flash intro pretty much looks like a $2000 Flash intro. In my opinion, the #1 search engine in the world got that way from a design. The value of an excellent web presence can be immeasurable. Opting for a fancy hood ornament is just settling.

Are we getting stupid? François Joseph de Kermadec

Big Beautiful, Dumb Whitespace

Odeo goes simple and only insults us a little 33inc.com

[Big buttons] implicitly say, “Hey, you’re too foolish to choose what to do next, so I’ve put a really big button right here just for you.” Cameron Moll

Most of these comments are a reaction to the recent Odeo redesign which, if you agree with the general consensus, does have some problems¹. But behind these comments is a sentiment that I often hear expressed in the software design community that I do not agree with: if you design something to be simple to use, you are designing it for simple people.

While I agree that the knowledge level of your audience does affect how complex you can make your software, I do not agree that it is a factor in how simple you should make your software. The answer to how simple should you make your product is always the same: as simple as possible.

There is no inherent value to complexity. It can lead to advantages, by allowing more features and greater flexibility, but new features and greater flexibility only become advantages if your users take advantage of them. Simplicity, on the other hand, does have inherent value. It reduces how long your interface takes to learn and use. Therefore, the comparison between the benefits of simplicity and complexity is between features and flexibility that may or may not become advantages to your users and immediate guaranteed benefit to all of your users.

The following factors should be considered when deciding whether to increase the complexity of your software by adding new features:

1. A percentage of your users will use the new feature, for most of these users, the value of your software will be increased by adding the new feature.
2. A percentage of users will not use the new feature, for every single one of these users, the value of your software will be reduced by adding the new feature.

In some cases, it is a no brainer. If 98% of your users will take advantage of a new feature then it should usually be added. The amount of value gained by adding a new feature that most of your users will use almost always trumps the value of leaving that feature out to preserve simplicity. But some decisions aren’t so easy, what if only 30% of your users will use a feature? Do you increase the value of your software for 30% of your users only to reduce its value for the other 70% What about 55%?

These are hard questions to answer. Every feature adds different amounts of value and complexity. But simplicity’s inherent value means your tendency should always be to lean in that direction. Note that I never mentioned the intelligence of your users as a factor in determining how complex you should make your software. That is because a far better question than “how many users can handle the new feature?” is “how many users will use the new feature?”

Finally, a counter to the stance “if you design something simple to use, you are designing for simple people.” You don’t create simple designs because people can’t figure out your product otherwise, you create them so that people don’t have to figure your product out.

1. I took a close look at the Odeo redesign while I was writing this post, and I now believe that this “redesign” is really Odeo promoting their “create recordings from your browser- or your phone” feature. This is a very interesting feature that lowers the high barrier of entry to recording your own audio. I suspect they are making a trade-off, reducing the visibility of the audio content available to download, in order to increase the number of users producing audio content on Odeo. ↑

I have been keeping an eye on Karelia Software’s website for news about Sandvox for quite sometime now. My interest was perked when I heard it was in development for two reasons:

1. Karelia Software was behind Watson, one of the most interesting and inspired early Os X 3rd party applications. Watson was one of the first applications to explore using custom offline interfaces for web services, an idea that is very hot right now (see Dashboard, RSS Feed Readers, Google Earth, and Cocoalicious, for a few off the top of my head). Watson was a forward thinking application that unfortunately died when Apple turned Sherlock into an (oddly unusable) Watson clone and bundled it with Jaguar.

2. Dan Wood, who is one-half of Karelia, said his inspiration to create Sandvox came from his seeing the power of CSS and in particular, the beauty and flexibility of the designs found at The CSS Zen Garden. These are exactly same influences that rejuvenated my own interest in web development when I first encountered them a little over a year ago.

It isn’t often that a developer who is capable of a visionary application lets is be known that they have a new application in the works that lands squarely in your interest zone and is inspired by the same things that inspire you. So when the first public beta of Sandvox was released today, I was quick to try it out.

About Sandvox

What Sandvox is:

1. Sandvox is an offline website creation application. Websites are created locally and stored as a special file type with the extension “.svxSite.” Sandvox offers different ways to upload your website to a server, the most basic of which is to export the website as HTML and upload it manually.

2. Websites in Sandvox use templates. You can switch which template your website uses at any time without affecting the content on your pages. But you cannot directly modify the “look” of a template in any way, not even font changes. The documentation hints that this will be changing in the future. Templates are stored inside the Sandvox application package. The templates themselves at a minimum seem to consist of a “main.css” file and the required image files. In the future, designers will be welcome to create their own Sandvox designs. They are planning on releasing a “designer’s kit (coming soon) that discusses how pages and pagelets are presented” (Sandvox Faq).

3. Sandvox allows the creation of pages and “pagelets” (bits of content that can be used on many different pages at once, such as list of links). The types of pages you can create in Sandvox and the structure of it’s editing functionality are geared toward creating “blog-style” content (i.e. blogs and photo galleries).

4. Sandvox automatically generates RSS feeds for your site.

5. Sandvox is OS X only

What Sandvox is not:

1. Sandvox is not an application for creating original website designs or editing templates to create website designs. In fact, Sandvox does not contain any functionality at all that allows you to change the “look” of your website except for the ability to switch between different templates. This means that Sandvox contains no CSS editing functionality, which I found a bit surprising.

2. Sandvox is not a particularly innovative application. Both iBlog and Rapidweaver contain a lot of overlap functionality.

3. Sandvox does not create purely semantic XHTML. In other words, Sandvox creates some XHTML tags that do not have any semantic meaning and are only used as hooks for CSS. For example:

How big a deal this is differs from person to person. In comparison to an application like Dreamweaver, the improvements to the generated XHTML are immeasurable.

With all that being said, Sandvox is a flawlessly executed piece of Mac OS X software. It follows all the right conventions and it has that extra bit of design pizz-azz that people on the platform appreciate (despite it’s beta-ness.) If want an application that performs the above functions, it would be hard for another application to do better¹.

Impressions

My first impression is that Sandvox works, both as a product and as an approach to website creation. Its ease of use and feature set can benefit a lot of people. This is despite heavy competition from other methods of getting your words and photos online, mainly from server-side blogging software.

The advantage that Sandvox holds over a server-side blogging package is that it does not rely on a web interface. Web interfaces are great; they aren’t tied to any one platform or computer. But they become cumbersome quickly when things become more complicated than a text box with a publish button. In particular, web interfaces quickly start to breakdown once photos start getting involved. Anyone who has ever uploaded photo gallery one image at a time can attest to this. Even basic blog tasks like adding a list of links and badges to your sidebar are just barely adequately served by web interfaces.

On the other hand, even if you are using a server-side blogging package instead of Sandvox, your posts and photo galleries don’t need to be managed through web interfaces. If you know CSS, XHTML, MySQL, and a server-side scripting language, a server-side blogging package’s look and behavior can be customized while maintaining the ease of updating that comes from the underlying blog core. External editors and photo management applications with XML-RPC support can be used to manage content and upload content outside of a web interface.

But the problem is that the amount of technical know-how between these two options is huge and there isn’t anything in between. Everyone who doesn’t know the four web technologies you need to customize a blog are stuck with an out-of-the-box blogging package’s limited options. Divides like that are called niches, and niches are what small software development companies are around to fill.

So there is a place for products like Sandvox. I don’t know what Sandvox brings to the table that Rapidweaver and iBlog don’t (in the case of iBlog, I suspect a lot), hopefully a good comparison review will appear shortly. My interest in Sandvox has as much to do with the developers track record as it does with what the application does.

Enter iWeb

While I am on the subject of the developer’s track record… as I pointed out before, Karelia is on the slim list of developers who have had a product (arguably) copied and added to the OS for free by Apple. But Karelia, maybe about to blaze a trail of their own in this area. “iWeb,” that is the name of an application that was accidently leaked by Apple on their website that will likely be announced tomorrow at Macworld.

I hate to say it, but after experiencing the combination of ease of use and media-suave in Sandvox, this just feels like an iApp. With that and the current state of web publishing today (exploding). We may find out tomorrow that Karelia got the short-end of the stick once again (But they’re not bitter: “the truth is that Karelia’s product ideas just happen to be mainstream, like Apple’s” (The Story Behind Karelia’s New Logo).

1. Very important to note that I haven’t tried iBlog or Rapidweaver. ↑

This is my first try using Rollyo, I’ll give a report later on how well the service works. Assuming this roll is a success², I plan on maintaining it by adding or removing resources if that will improve the quality of the search.

Here is the URL for Firefox smart keywords (or visit CSS Solutions from Gurus on Rollyo):

http://www.rollyo.com/search.html?q=%s&sid=13237&x=0&y=0

PS: I am not a fan of the word “Guru,” but frankly, that’s what they are.

1. Previously, I searched these websites using Google’s “Sites:” operator. ↑

2. i.e. I use it consistantly. ↑