Tyler Tate

is a user experience designer focused on making the complex feel simple.

The Scent of Search

The implications of Information Foraging Theory on designing user-centred websites have not gone unnoticed. Jakob Nielsen and Jared Spool, among others, have put forth considered recommendations on how to enhance information scent on the web. Most of their guidelines, however, tend to assume that the designer has direct control over the explicit words used in the interface. While this is certainly the case for browse-based websites dependent on site-wide navigation and hyperlinks, it breaks down for search interfaces where both content and navigation are completely dynamic.

Concerning Fidelity in Design

People swear by their design process. Rachel Glaves insists on sketching by hand, Dan Brown urges extensive wireframing, and Ryan Singer goes straight to HTML. Conferences are filled with heated debates as advocates of each staunchly defend their favoured technique. With all of these different methods to choose from, should you be sketching, wireframing, mocking-up, or prototyping? The answer is simply: Yes, you should.

The Google Redesign: A Closer Look

This morning I got out of bed, ate my cereal, took my shower. Everything was proceeding pretty predictably. But then I did a Google search — usually a pretty mundane task — but this morning, Google looked very different than it did yesterday.

A Bright New Future for CRM

We’ve been putting together a small slide deck explaining what’s wrong with customer relationship management (CRM) as we know it, and how Nutshell is getting it right. Fortunately for us, there’s a whole lot of room for improvement.

Book Review: Search Patterns by Peter Morville

“There’s no shortage of problems with search today,” says Peter Morville at the end of Search Patterns, his most recent book. Throughout the book, Morville chronicles the challenges of search and effectively communicates the best practices of building usable search experiences. While the book more than adequately accomplishes it’s stated goal — to foster greater cross-disciplinary collaboration by increasing search literacy — it would have been an even better book if the author had proposed more of his own innovative solutions to search’s problems.

ECIR Industry Day 2010

The event consisted of 12 different speakers each presenting for exactly 20 minutes, with about 10 minutes of Q&A after each. I particularly enjoyed the presentations from the major search engines: Yahoo, Google, Bing, and Wolfram Alpha. A topic that seemed to arise in each of those talks was how query reformulation data can provide a feedback loop to make search better. But without further ado, here are my summaries of each talk.

Search Suggestions, Part 1

You used to be expected to type for yourself. But today people have come to expect a reasonable amount of help at even this task. Our phones now help us form correctly-spelled words, our browsers fill in long addresses after we’ve typed only a few characters, and search engines recommend searching for “Humphrey Bogart” after we’ve typed just “boga.” But not all as-you-type search suggests are created equal. Careful observation seems to reveal three different approaches: completion, suggestion, and instant results. These approaches range in cognitive burden on the one hand, and utility on the other. We’ll look at several examples of each and consider when they should be used.

Minimising Complexity

Clean. Easy to use. User-friendly. Intuitive. This mantra is proclaimed by many but often gets lost in translation. The culprit: complexity. How one deals with complexity can make or break an application. A complex interface can disorient the user in a mild case and completely alienate them in an extreme case. But if you take measures first to reduce actual complexity and then to minimise perceived complexity, the user will be rewarded with a gratifying experience.

The 1KB CSS Grid

Other CSS frameworks try to do everything—grid system, style reset, basic typography, form styles. But complex systems are, well, complex. Looking for a simple, lightweight approach that doesn't require a PhD? Meet The 1KB CSS Grid.

Create a Resizable Image Grid with jQuery

Image grids that smoothly scale at the simple drag of a slider are no longer confined to desktop apps like iPhoto or Picasa. Thanks to some clever CSS and the jQuery UI, fluid image grids are now surprisingly simple to implement on the web.

Visualising Colour

As designers, having a proper understanding of how colours relate to one another has a tremendous impact on our work. Here is a quick history of how our predecessors thought about colour, and how we should think about it today.

Creating an HTML Signature in Apple Mail

Tired of that plain text e-mail signature that I’ve been using for years, I recently endeavoured to create something a bit more professional and refined for my e-mails. Apple Mail allows you to control the font, colour, and even insert images (which are included as attachments) into a signature. But it doesn’t give you direct control of the HTML and CSS, nor does it provide a solution for including images in your e-mail without them being attachments.

 

About Tyler

Tyler works at TwigKit and Nutshell, organises Enterprise Search London, and is the creator of The 1KB CSS Grid.

Around noon look for him munching on a chorizo sandwich near London Bridge.

Oh yes, and you should follow him on Twitter.