I look forward to hearing what you have to say!

Alphabetical order is NOT a logical order. It may be the best order for a group of choices — i.e., it may be logical to use alphabetical order — but that does not make the order itself a “logical” order. It is only a predictable way of ordering a set that has no intrinsic logical order.

Don’t get me wrong; predictable is good. And sometimes — e.g., in the situations mentioned above — alphabetical order is the most predictable order.

But sometimes it is not, and yesterday I ran across a perfect example. Consider the figure at right. This is a list of car sizes in the preferences area of a travel application. Does the list look logical to you? I can never remember whether “economy” is smaller than “compact” or vice versa; and what in the world is “special”? I submit that size is the logical order for a choice of sizes (duh!).

Similarly, sequence is the logical order for a choice of months or days of the week. (Would you suggest putting April first? I didn’t think so.)

The objective is to choose an order that helps people find the option they seek and (if they aren’t sure) to help them identify the right option. Ordering the car size list by size would do both.

Are you listening, Carlson Wagonlit?

Today I tweeted^* the above quote from my favorite playful work on the English language: “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut” , from Anguish Languish, the 1950s work by Howard L. Chace. That tweet generated brief Twitter conversations regarding the use of dummy text in draft/preliminary screen designs.

Many designers use what’s called Lorem Ipsum to populate their designs with placeholder text, to illustrate the intended appearance of text in the design without indicating what the content of that text might be. The text of Lorem Ipsum comes from a treatise on ethics, written by Cicero in 45 BC. Lorem Ipsum is, of course, in Latin, which is especially amusing because it is used as a method of doing what is commonly called “greeking” text.

So, I tweeted that sentence from Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, and @banjobunny hooted and said she “might start using this copy in my design comps in place of Lorem ipsum – see if they notice.” I loved the idea and said I just might do the same. Then @jddj said “boo-hiss” to the very idea, commenting that “its presence always tells me I didn’t think through what kind of content should be there.”

But is that true? No, I don’t think so.

Here are the issues I see:

• Stage of design. Sometimes (in my experience, often) you have to produce wireframes, or draft layouts, before you’ve nailed down the contents, and you want them to look somewhat realistic so you can look at the Gestalt to help you determine whether you’re on the right track. This requires having some amount of texty-looking stuff, and dummy text is the fastest way to include it.
• Level of review. Sometimes you have to present your drafts to your client and/or to users, just to evaluate the layout without letting the content get in the way. It’s much easier to do that with text that’s obviously fake than it is to keep telling them “Ignore what it actually says; this is just an example.”
• Generality of review. Some web sites are designed for organizations in which different groups will be responsible for creating and maintaining the contents of different parts of the site. If you use a sample of real text, you may find that one or more groups to which the content does not belong may (a) feel slighted or (b) object that the layout does not pertain to them because they have specific needs that the content area you’ve chosen does not meet. Using neutral non-content allows all groups to assess the potential of the text areas to contain their content.

Clearly, if you’re assessing a web site’s information structure or its navigation, you’ll need to use real content. How else are you going to know whether users understand it?

But under certain circumstances I see clear advantages to using dummy text. If its copyright is not an issue, next time I need to “greek” a design I may just use Anguish Language.

Twitter

@ebuie

Psychologists go even further. According to PsychCentral, catastrophizing comes in a second form as well:

The second kind of Catastrophizing … occurs when we look to the future and anticipate all the things that are going to go wrong. We then create a reality around those thoughts (e.g. “It’s bound to all go wrong for me…”). Because we believe something will go wrong, we make it go wrong. [emphasis mine]

Yikes! But does it have to be that bad?

I say no. Not if we do it on purpose.

People who do usability assessment are accustomed to catastrophizing. When we conduct a usability review, we look for possible sources of confusion and error, so that designers can devise changes to mitigate them. However, this process need not be limited to post hoc review — nor should it; I recommend that designers do it regularly during design.

Design, of course, doesn’t need to catastrophize to the extent that assessment does — that is not its main function; and overdoing it can hamper creativity the way overediting does to writing. But I argue that a little attention paid to potential problems, during design, can go a very long way. Let me give an example.

On one of my projects — creating the interaction/interface design for a client, for another organization to build — I am the HCI specialist and my teammate is the prototyper, and we collaborate on creating the design. Very energetic and creative he is, up on all the latest interaction techniques and enthusiastic about their possibilities. More conservative about whiz-bang techniques I am, more grounded in decades of HF and HCI research findings. He enriches the design immeasurably; I keep it connected to the why. One of us proposes an idea, I catastrophize it, and we jointly come up with a way to address the problems. We both find our design sessions enjoyable and sometimes frustrating, but they produce a design that’s far better than anything either of us could do independently.

The client absolutely loves our work.

Now, I do not mean to imply that designers never consider the problems their designs might cause users. Many do; and of course the best ones do it very well. Some people, including David Malouf, professor of interaction design at the Savannah College of Art and Design, would even argue that Design as a process naturally includes such examination. I think I would agree with them. However, we all know that many if not most digital products are produced without a conscious design process along the lines that Dave teaches, let alone usability assessment. Whether or not a project has time and resources for formal usability assessment, a little catastrophizing during design can make a big difference.

If we aim to design products for the best user experiences, we must imagine the possible errors and problems that our designs might induce. This does not mean that (in the words of the psychologists) “we make it go wrong” (emphasis mine). Our looking for the possibilities has an entirely different effect, because it has an entirely different purpose, and we are doing it consciously and intentionally. Only by knowing what the potential problems are, can we prevent them. We must “look to the future and anticipate all the things that [could] go wrong.”

We must catastrophize, I say. We must catastrophize.