Perception

[Note: This entry was written for the module, CS3216]

One of the most common mistakes in any endeavour is doing more than necessary. This doesn’t sound particularly bad on the surface, but at times, overdoing something can have detrimental effects that hamper the objectives of the initial endeavour.

Two subsets of the above behaviour are redundancy and a lack of focus.

Redundancy indicates the inclusion of additional elements that bear little or no meaning to the context of the task, and an example which highlights this problem is the evolution of sign-up forms on the Internet.

Anecdotal evidence would suggest that users find longer forms more annoying or troublesome, which in turn will most likely lower the sign-up rate of the site. A solution to this problem is to break down the fields into steps to simulate a wizard, or more effectively, simply remove the redundant fields.

In fact, there are an increasing number of sites nowadays that do not even require you to have a username when you register, while some eliminate the need of you having to think of a password at all by having a random alphanumeric string emailed to you upon signing up.

However, the presence of millions of sign-up forms all over the Web still denotes a sense of redundancy, but this overabundance seems somewhat curable if Facebook Connect or OpenID take off. A single, common authentication system would possibly make sign-up forms completely redundant in this case.

As with the above example, it is easy to fall victim to redundancy and over-elaboration when dealing with design. The negative consequences of such action is that excessive visual cues can create clutter and confuse the user, thereby harming the user experience instead. While Web 2.0 design trends place emphasis on gradients, rounded corners and the general idea of simplicity, my personal thoughts on adopting such styles is that it can easily cheapen the look of a site if it isn’t balanced well. So what minimal design should a site have such that it neither appears too plain nor complicate the user experience? Indeed, finding that balance is not a trivial task.

“In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.” – Antoine de Saint Exupéry in Wind, Sand & Stars

A lack of focus is also possibly a consequence of poor design, but to widen the scope of this discussion, I will illustrate this problem in the context of web application development. Evan Williams advocated in a blog post pre-Twitter that an important rule of web startups is to “be narrow”, and I believe this doesn’t just refer to one’s niche but also the features of one’s product.

It is easy to want to develop a product that is feature-rich, but the shortcoming of this ideology is that one becomes concerned with areas that might be only slightly relevant to the core aim of the product. A better way to go about this would be to stick to the main tasks, and execute them really well. Naturally, such methodolgy is not applicable to all development, but in the context of small startups, it probably serves as a good rule of thumb.

Evan Williams has certainly heeded his own advice, and this is reflected in how Twitter has more or less the same functionality as when it started. It is quite amazing that even today, Twitter still serves images and URLs through the likes of Twitpic and bit.ly respectively when it could easily replicate the functionality in-house. Whether or not it should is a discussion for another day, but I digress.

I bring up these two problems, redundancy and a lack of focus, with regards to design and development because I foresee the possibility of encountering similar pitfalls in my project work throughout the course of the module. In a recent email to me, Professor Ben Leong wrote:

I’m not very concerned about students idling in the class. I’m quite prepared to give D’s [sic] to such people. I’m more concerned about people burning themselves out.

Of course, his statement was followed by the customary three-part smiley, but I left it out as it reduces the underlying seriousness of his sentiment. The heavy workload for this module is quite legendary, but I wonder how much of it is actually entailed by the requirements of the assignment. Could it be that in a bid for perfection, students tend to do more than they should, resulting in the possibility of a burn-out or more seriously a compromised execution of the product?

I am certainly attempting a rhetoric with the above question, and the greater concern is that a burn-out will only lead to further unproductiveness. Such a predicament is exactly what I’m hoping to avoid with my group assignments and final project, although the temptations for committing redundancy and losing focus will definitely surface.