Category Archives: Digital Media

Abstraction and Wireframing

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Before my current incarnation as a UX Architect I was a Flash developer. I spent five years coding all kind of games, sites, and apps, and gradually progressed from simple bits of script to full-on applications and fully abstracted object-oriented code.

My day job now is focused on less technical work like research and wireframes, but I think during those years of coding I learnt some interesting concepts that I’ve carried through to this new role.

I recently wireframed a few simple online art activities for children which involve adding shapes to a canvas, animating a simple figure, making a postcard and so on. None of the activities are very complicated, but as we discussed time estimates and functionality my old developer habits started kicking in.

I found I’ve been thinking about how I’d go about building these apps, which led on to thinking about how that affects the how I wireframe things. As I did so, I found some interesting parallels and insights – so I thought I’d share them here.

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Copy-and-pasting the competition

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If you’ve ever copy-and-pasted text from a website like the Huffington Post, among others, then you might have spotted the sneaky way it appends some extra text to your selection. For example, you might copy:

This way you’ll never have to choose between your armour and your spoon collection again.

But when you paste, it becomes:

This way you’ll never have to choose between your armour and your spoon collection again.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

(NB Either it’s not working or they’ve turned it off, so I’ve actually just made that one up as an example…)

Sneaky, eh? I’m sure most normal people just delete any annoying extra text straight away, but hey. It’s done by a little javascript include, which is is a nice idea, but nothing special in itself. But some clever/evil person beavering away in a dark room has thought of a different way to use the script.

Recently lipsum.com, a site generally used by designers to grab a slice of lorem ipsum from has started appending a job advert for designers to any copied text.

Do your layouts deserve better than Lorem Ipsum? Apply as an art director and team up with the best copywriters at Jung von Matt:www.jvm.com/jobs/lipsum 

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Curabitur leo turpis, rutrum ac tempus in, pellentesque at lacus. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. In hac habitasse platea dictumst.

It’s a clever idea in some ways, because these ads are going directly to the people they’re aimed at, skipping jobs sites, recruitment agencies, message boards and everything else. As targeted marketing goes, it’s pretty bang-on.

But, crucially: it’s actually pretty annoying. I don’t know a single designer who would welcome having to remove that extra text every time they copy-and-pasted some dummy text. So while they’re reaching their audience, they’re probably also pissing them off in the process. lipsum.com is hardly the only place on the web to get lorem ipsum from, and if I were a designer I’d be looking for a new source as soon as I saw that first ad.

Targeted advertising can be clever, but there’s a time and a place for ads – and bang in the middle of someone’s workflow is not it.