Seed Conference 3: Jason Fried - The details matter in application design

Jason Fried decided to part with the “Getting Real” presentations he’s been giving for a while and focused on why the details matter and how 37signals thinks about the details of their products. His talk was sprinkled with tons of application demonstrations and interface development experience.

Fried started with a high level discussion on the building Seed 3 was being held in, S. R. Crown Hall, by Mies van der Rohe. This building is a great example of how paying attention to details yields a product beyond the base components. You can feel the details before you even see them. For instance, one of the things that Crown Hall is most well known for is its floating ceiling, something you don’t necessarily catch when you walk through the door - it’s too subtle for that. It’s only upon deeper reflection and analysis that you see the thought behind the design; you notice the gap between the edges of the ceiling and the windows running the entire perimeter of the building. Van der Rohe really wanted a feeling of floating to permeate the space and it does. Light changes moment to moment, altering the entire mood of the interior. The roof is suspended from the building frame above. None of the interior walls or posts are structural.

Also noteworthy, in Crown Hall, is the alignment of all the building materials - the roof tiles line up with the floor tiles, which line up with the building frame and windows. Everything is perfect. Even smaller things, like the sprinkler system, are made to fit within the overall design concept, they’re not afterthoughts.

These observations are what led Fried into discussing the development of software. One of the nice benefits to working in software, rather than building masterworks of architecture, is that you can build and tweak iteratively and quickly at very low cost. For Fried’s software, “building IS designing.”

37signals tends to use pretty low resolution designs. In fact, if it can’t be drawn with a sharpie, they feel there is too much detail. It’s only by building in this way that you end up focusing on actual user experiences with your applications rather than thinking in terms of artsy screens. The products 37signals builds try to think through people actually using them for repetitive workflows. For instance, task entry using Ta-Da Lists is as simple as title -> return -> task -> return -> task …

Writing copy

At 37signals, they consider copy to be part of the design and not just a means of explaining their product. When you write copy, “it has to make sense to read out loud,” says Fried. Explain your features in ways that your audience will understand, not in techno-babble.

“If you wouldn’t say something in conversation, don’t say it in your app.” - Jason Fried, 37signals

Make your app have “photographic memory”

One of the other UI concepts expressed in Fried’s talk was about remembering what your users are doing so that you can make it easier for them to repeat it. User preferences are a horrible way of doing this. It’s much better to look at what your users are doing and have the application be smart enough to guess it the next time.

An example of this in action would be adding tasks to a to-do list. If you have multiple to-do lists, it’s not a good idea to have a default list and then require customers to always move items from that list to other lists. Instead, have the application be mart enough to know which list a task was added to and remember that to suggest the next time the user adds a task. Chances are good that your users are repeating tasks if they’re using your application - they’re in a particular mode and it’s best not to break their concentration.

Time is the new vector of interface design

How you time activities that occur on your site and in your application has an enormous impact on how responsive and intuitive your application feels to users. If a user deletes an item from a list and the object just disappears or the page refreshes the page, this time without the item, it might be difficult for the user to figure out what happened. If you instead, show the deleted item fading out over the course of a quarter second and then the items below it sliding up the list to replace it, you’ve done something more visually intuitive and noteworthy while making the user more comfortable the action they just completed.

Other Jason Fried:

• BusinessPOV Video from June 2008: Jason Fried explaining how his work is like that of a museum curator or a chef with a request to add bananas to his lasagna.
• BusinessPOV Video from April 2007: Jason explains how 37signals builds software with tiny decisions.

[Disclaimer: What you have read in this post is my recollection and my notes from the event. I make no claims to 100% transcription accuracy and if I botched something, I'm happy to fix it - just drop me a comment.]