1995 Electronic Catalog

AOL keeps track of the items that are downloaded from within its content sections by its members. It does this as a way of tracking what's popular for sorting purposes. Beginning in 1995, I started using their download numbers to track how many people were downloading my shareware packages and I would occasionally modify the text that described my downloads to see if I could affect the total downloads of my products.

Every change that I made had some kind of reaction in the numbers of downloaded products, The more interesting descriptions might get 500 downloads over the course of a couple days, unexciting descriptions might only get a couple hundred downloads ever. I started to develop a following that I could count on for future sales. With every release of a new issue of my magazine or a new type design, I would expect a slew of letters (back when people still wrote letters...) to arrive with checks and ten-dollar shareware payments shortly thereafter.

A story is worth a thousand clicks

In early 1995 my work at the college started to utilize a product called Macromind Director, eventually called Macromedia Director. Director allowed me to be much more creative with the typeface presentation and to create more than just a catalog. Director allowed me to create an environment that the user could explore, Admittedly, this doesn't sound like much today, but back then, the options were really limited. Web sites were all still very static and boring things and "multimedia" could still mean that you were an artist working with colored pencils, watercolor and photographs in the same piece of artwork.

With an investment of around 30 hours, I built a disk-based catalog that would go on to win a silver award in the nationally held Optima Design Awards contest and was eventually included in the 1996 book "In Your Face, the best of interactive interface design", among other accolades. All told, I probably got a good three years of returns from this catalogue, with the very last printed order form coming in during the later months of the year 2000.

Users would open the program and be given a background story about a vanished civilization that related to the design of the interface and a description of how the interface worked. The idea was to create a background story that was intriguing enough and a visual style that was rich enough to keep people clicking through the 16 buttons that each represented a different typeface so that they might see them all. I guess secretly I really wanted to get into game design and I think that really drove the design into the game-like interface that it turned out to be.

Designers are used to working in two and three dimensions, as we've been doing that for thousands of years in as almost as many thousands of variations in media. The fourth dimension, Time, has directly been with us in the form of films and television since the first moving images and arguably as long as there has been any kind of performance art. All of these aspects play into the work that an average designer at any studio might touch on during their career, producing two and three-dimensional images in QuarkXPress, Photoshop and Maya and other programs like them and then animating those images in packages like After Effects and Macromedia Flash to produce work with the fourth dimension of time. But here is where I add another dimension to the mix. Choice. Not your choices, but the choices that the user will make.

Interactive design is all about choice. It's not static like a brochure or even linear like a video, it's more like a nebulous grouping of possibilities. Good interactive designers are able to design the experience that guides the user through those possibilities in the way that best supports the intended experience.

The flow of the program was very similar to the way that a standard Flash-based web site of today might work, with an intro, a homepage, and content pages that all live within the same window.

Many Flash-based web sites today attempt to create the kind of experience that this catalog did and fall far short. Not because they don't have the capability to do so, not at all. They fall short because a Web user is not a captive audience as my user clearly was. Since this catalog was an executable, the users were locked into it and had nowhere else to go. Web users have more power than that. Because web content is delivered in a browser window that has a static set of controls, users in a web environment generally have the power to leave a site if they don't like it. In modern web design you can take this "exit door" away from the user by launching a site in a separate window that has no browser controls available, but it's generally accepted that this kind of user "hijacking" will only generate unrest and mistrust amongst your users.

Despite being a pretty good success, I made some mistakes in the design and usability of this program, which taught me a lot in terms of what not to do with user interface design. From a user standpoint the only way that you would want to spend any time at all with this program is if you have a lot of time on your hands. Nothing is easy to read and there is no way to tell what you have looked at or what you haven't. It's great design for a puzzle game, but not so great for a commercial catalog.

Today, this kind of careless indifference to the user is passé and should be discarded in favor of something much more usable.

Preliminary designs, 1994
Usability: the Site Speaks For Itself
1995 Web Site