Last year I finally got around to implementing a really good working prototype of an idea I had wanted to do for quite a while: a self-service website building tool. That became Hiyakoo, and I started trying to demo it in the fall. I totally felt (and still do) that there has to be a better way of creating websites for the layperson that doesn’t require a skillset like mine, but I wanted it to be powerful enough that a pro web designer could make sites really sing. Somewhere around December I figured out a few things that I didn’t really want to hear but nonetheless were really important:

Even simple is still too hard.

I tried to make things pretty obvious in a way that once you got a few of the basic mechanics down you could pretty much edit everything with a couple of clicks. I tried to pare down complexity by forcing people to use a single column for layout (which is why I refused to call the site structure a “template”). And I was in the process of installing a help system that would be totally contextual. Yet, this was too complex. There were sliders and panels tucked behind other UI.

The exception is always the rule.

When you tell a small business that they can build their website with ease they begin to do this free association between the word “website” and all the things they can conceive: menus, iPhone app, image gallery, Yelp, shopping cart, special deals and announcements, blogs. More interestingly, even if you start out with a really clean layout it always ends up getting tweaked in a way you (the web designer) didn’t expect. I’m not saying this is bad, I’m just saying that it is very hard for me to sell someone on the idea of simplicity when in the business owner’s mind they might be wanting a special callout of their Groupon or holiday specials. The layout over time just needs to change.

A web designer is still required.

I was really hoping that if I just spent a little time with the business in the beginning that I could get them up and running and they’d be able to edit things from there. That may be true in a bootstrapping sense, but what happens is that questions pop up and it can quickly turn into something much more than just a simple support ticket. Small businesses (in my experience) have so much on their minds that their website is really not top priority. Even for tech-savvy social-media-aware businesses they’d probably end up using Twitter more often than not to post updates to the people that cared—tweaking their main website probably still needs a web designer.

So I’ve been sitting on Hiyakoo for a few months now and just thinking there still must be a way to make it work. In the meantime, a friend is apparently trying to launch a very simple website creator tool too, and about.me just had a big ad campaign. Maybe the time is ripe for a new breed of simple website builders?

Maybe a couple of weeks ago I was still pondering what to do about this code I’ve been sitting on and then I thought: what if I could change the way people thought of what a website is? What if it was just more of a web presence? What if it had a little more flexibility than about.me or flavors.me, but not nearly as much as other CMSes? What could I do to constrain the problem so I wouldn’t get requests to add shopping carts? And this all led me into a long rambling series of thoughts that finally percolated up tonight after a post-strawberry-pie nap…

The upshot is: I have a new plan (based on the old one), a new domain registered, and now I have to just make another prototype.

Ever have a really good idea that—once you build it—gives you a new perspective? That’s what’s happening with the Hiyakoo CMS right now. After FailCon I’ve had a bunch of follow-up conversations and they revealed some much-desired functionality. Incorporating those things and also trying to really make the site editor interface solid has revealed some new ideas.

As the WYSIWYG portion gets built out I’ve come to find that there are certain pieces of user interaction that just aren’t smooth enough. It requires a zig-zag pattern of the mouse to move from one area to another and back again—that won’t do. I’m a big fan of contextual editing, and that also means that if the user is looking in one area of the screen that the cause-effect of their actions should also be relatively in that viewing space. To that end, some things which I thought were going to work just really don’t.

I was asked just today even “when is it going to be ready?” The short answer is: when the core functionality and UX are solid enough. Of course, balancing out the main features from nice-to-have is always a difficult task for an unreleased product, but I think I’ve got a pretty good sense of where the baseline requirements are now. Then again, once it’s in the hands of real users new things always crop up.

I just saw a post about user preferring web pages over downloading apps. I wonder if this is really true or not?

It might be true in the sense that downloading an app can be seen as cumbersome: browse a marketplace, pick an app, agree to download, wait, wait, wait, wait, click to open, wait, learn how to use the UI. Versus: tap the web browser icon, tap the address bar to change, enter the memorable URL, wait, view a familiar interface.

I think that this is definitely something that requires statistics behind it. Fortunately, it seems Keynote Systems did in fact do just that. Though they also did another survey which said mobile versions of web sites frustrate users too.

This is one of the reasons why I’m definitely building Hiyakoo as the “simple alternative to a complex problem”. It naturally restricts what you can create so that when it comes time to render mobile versions you have a higher chance of: 1) maintaining the same functionality, 2) the formatting still looks great, 3) the load times are reasonable.

I recently saw this linked from a message board and had to share it.

In conversations with people I’ve talked to, I love how there are always two opposing goals: “fill the whole page with my marketing message” and “keep it above the fold”. I’ve been trying to encourage everyone (including myself) to keep things really simple. Sure, sometimes you do need to explain things, but can you tighten it all up so it really only takes a few words?

I definitely understand the idea that businesses need to be able to catch the customer otherwise they’ve lost the customer. And I understand that designers look at the problem holistically. Who is right? Obviously the business owner should know their business the best—we as designers are the hired hands who are just trying to guide them into making better decisions. But perhaps if we ran their type of business we’d also come to similar conclusions that they do?

I think instead that we can settle some of these debates through statistics. I know people don’t like other people monitoring and watching them. It feels uncomfortable. I think of it as the so-called double-edged sword: it can be used to manipulate, but it can also be used to help and optimize.

As a person trying to create and grow a business I want to know what “resonates” with the people that come by my web site. I want to see what are the entry points, what they are reading, what they actually understand within the first few seconds. There’s no point in me making videos or writing explanatory text if no one is going to watch/read it. I think I have a good solution for a problem yet unsolved, and I want to reach a set of target customers that have this problem. If I know how people perceive my service then I can more intelligently communicate my value proposition. And if I have statistics to help me then that’s one more tool I have in my marketing kit.

Yay! What an amazing day! Thank you to Cass Phillips and Diane Loviglio for an awesome FailCon 2010.

Many months ago they asked if I wanted to participate when I was just starting on the Hiyakoo CMS idea and I just “sure, sign me up”. I didn’t know exactly what I’d be presenting or even if I’d have anything to present. Actually, up until last Friday I was pretty skeptical that I’d have working code at all. But things came together and I was actually able to demo a lot of the core tech to all the people that came by the Hiyakoo table. And by the end of the day I was sooooo tired. I talked with dozens of attendees directly for like 11 hours. What a rush, though.

Now a lot of people have seen a very early version of Hiyakoo CMS in an actual demo-able state. It is a versioned content management system with a focus on mobile and SEO. It is intuitive by its direct click-and-edit or click-and-drag manipulation of things on the page, but it’s also technical in that you can get in and tweak properties in a properties panel. It allows for an immediate WYSIWYG preview in multiple formats: computer, tablet, mobile. It lets you compare multiple versions. It offers infinite site style customization, but uses physical restrictions to guide users into lessons that us web designers have learned over the years. It lets both designers and small business owners work collaboratively together.

Hiyakoo CMS isn’t for everyone: it’s just the super fast and easy CMS for busy people who care about good web design that has a little future-proofing built in. I’m trying to finally integrate the best practices of the web into one handy app that is both easily to grok but has super-powerful tech behind it all.

So I’ve been semi hush-hush about the project except to a few people because honestly I’m still trying to prove out theories. Anyone that knows me directly knows that I love doing visual stuff and anything to do with the web. Even with the advent of mobile apps, the web still remains a place for people to congregate en masse—not everybody is stuck inside their Facebook or Twitter microchannels. The web allows us to discover one another because it’s the common platform for the world. But there’s some big big problems a-brewin’ and I’m trying to solve them.

Theory #1: Small business don’t want the hassle of maintaining a web site; designers aren’t necessarily helping. Biz people really just don’t. They don’t want to build it, they don’t want to maintain it. Many have tried it themselves and created sites which are now completely outdated. And it’s too much of a hassle to get it back up to current technology. That’s where web designers come in. Even a quick pass by a designer is better than none. Still, biz owners need to make small changes but sometimes the designers’ modifications to the base site templates are so extensive that it’s not obvious (to the small biz owner) what needs to be changed.

Theory #2: The mobile web is a mystery. It’s a completely foreign language to most small businesses. They can’t grasp the differences required to view a site on mobile—”but it looks great on my laptop computer?!” It is true that iPads and tablets are mobile devices with higher screen resolution but there are still tech considerations that need to be made.

Theory #3: Eyes bigger than stomach. It’s like having an SUV or a sports car. They really like the idea that you can do anything because the system is so powerful and flexible it can. But the reality is that once you get things set up it’s a pain to change it and you don’t end up using all the extra features anyways. Just because you can configure your template any way you want turns out to be too much freedom. Small businesses end up spending days or weeks editing and tweaking before giving up and then just going with a designer. Then we’re right back to Theory #1 where the site can become too hard to maintain.

So. Enter Hiyakoo CMS.

I’m getting back to basics. I think that simpler is really better for a few reasons:

Restrictions on input don’t mean restrictions on creativity. I think of it more as guiding the user to focus their creativity in certain ways. Hiyakoo limits the number of colors, number of fonts, size of the site, width of the navigation bar, and so on. There are physical restrictions everywhere. That does two things:

1) Users don’t spend forever configuring things. They have enough flexibility to get a lot of personalization done, but it limits the time they’ll waste. I come from a rapid-prototyping background where it’s more important to get something up than nothing. It doesn’t have to be perfect! But it has to be good enough.

2) Physically restricting the things you can do means you actually become more inventive. You realize that in order to achieve a better balance of the thing you have they have to work better together. That means you are forced to think about the layouts, the imagery, and the text. You go more towards creating short, quality-packed text than sprawling diatribes that NO ONE EVER READS. Get to your core message and just say it with brevity.

Mobile is the future. Millions of mobile devices have been sold this year that have the capability to access the web. Plus, netbooks are underpowered and have low screen resolutions. What that means to small business owners is that they need to truly consider how their mobile customers get access to their site. Which means that a system (like Hiyakoo CMS) that tries to nudge small businesses into making mobile-compatible sites really is important.

It’s not just enough to have “responsive web design” that uses CSS to change the presentation based on number of pixels available—consider the iPhone Retina Display which has the same resolution as many small laptops yet is physically smaller by magnitudes than a laptop! You really have to be device-aware and have an application making decisions over what is the best presentation for your content. Remember: small business owners DON’T CARE about the mobile versions, so thusly the mobile version should be automatic. Yep, Hiyakoo CMS does that.

Low cost is important, but free sucks. Free sounds nice at first, but a small business owner wants a stable service that will be around for a long time. I just don’t get how a free business model can actually truly work. Good quality engineering and support requires good people, and good people aren’t free. Hiyakoo CMS isn’t free, but it won’t break the bank. Actually, it will be quite modestly priced considering what you’re getting. However, small businesses do want to at least test-drive the solution. So, creating an account and playing around will be free. Even viewing a public version of their site (for a short while) will be free.

There’s so much more to do and say, but for now it seems like Hiyakoo CMS is definitely on the right track.

I just came across this: http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew

Very cool!

Want the awesome Design Classics and want to carry it around on your handy iPad? Check out the Phaidon Design Classics app. It has a curated catalog of 1000 awesome items from the key-opening sardine can to the 1958 Cone Chair to the 1997 iPhone. Amazing stuff with intriguing backstories—what’s so special about the Heinz ketchup bottle or the Triumph TR3A? Now I totally want a few Omstack Chairs and some TAC Tableware…

Just a quick link on Gestalt psychology and user interaction: http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/gestalt_principles_of_form_perception.html

I had a thought this morning: “easy” things are easy because they’re familiar.

Do you remember the first time you tried to drive a car? It was a nightmare! The coordination between your hands and feet, reading traffic, getting used to looking in the mirrors. And now you do it effortlessly: you jump in, tune the radio, adjust the climate controls … all while being distracted by talking on your cell phone! The task of driving from home to work involves hundreds of individual steps and requires constant vigilance, but I can’t think of anyone I know that says “driving to work is too hard, so I’m not going in today.”

I went on the Net this morning to look around for an article to quote:

On the surface, easy is what we already know how to do or that which takes little mental or physical effort.

“The Difference Between Easy And Difficult“, Alex Licherman, M.D.

I’ve been building a new piece of software which is aimed at making a very complex task really easy: building a website. I did a Google search for “website builder easy” and got back 4.1 million hits. You would think if websites were so easy to build that one of these millions of links would actually do the trick. But I don’t think any have hit the mark quite yet.

Source: http://www.mom4life.com

What makes building a website “easy”?

I’ve been keeping a running list of hosted services and what easy really seems to have boiled down to is one trick: what you see is what you get. Sorry, WYSIWYG isn’t anything new. Yes, you can “drag and drop” all of these “modules” or “widgets” onto your site, but does that really make it “easy”? I argue it does not. What it does is leverage your innate ability to grab a colorful block and position it on the floor in front of you. Even after you put this module/widget on your site canvas you still have to decide how to style it, what to write in it, and how to arrange it so it complements the other modules/widgets on the page. Next you need to repeat this process for the umpteen pages on your site. Sure, templates bootstrap you by giving you graphics and layouts, but you still need to customize them all to your liking. Oh, and let’s not forget what I consider to be the real evil of having a website: maintenance.

That’s right. You spend days/weeks tweaking your website so that it’s beautiful, shiny, modern, flashy, ________ (insert other cool adjective) and then you release it to the world. … time passes … Then something needs to be updated. Then all those glassy reflections on your images start to look dated so you want to go with the new design style hotness but there’s oh-so-many pages and icons and Adobe Flash files you need to update… The cost of owning and maintaining your site just went from trivial to white-hot painful. So “easy” really wasn’t, eh?

I think the easiest hosted website to maintain in my opinion isn’t even really a web site: it’s your Twitter account. You pick some colors, you change your background image, and that’s it. This means you focus on your content. And you change your mind about the style later then it’s so simple. Plus, since you have that muscle memory of having gone to the Settings page -> Design tab, it’s easy for you!

What I’m building is something along these lines. For site owners it will make choosing your style so trivial that changing your mind about something will be effortless. The site editor will require you to learn only a couple of interface navigation concepts and only a handful of terms. Instead of giving you free reign over any number of layouts and templates, there is only really one. Instead of creating deeply-nested site hierarchies, it’s completely shallow. Instead of allowing you to do everything you could ever want to do (which in turn necessitates a complex editor), you get to only do a few things but you’ll do them so well.

More importantly, let’s consider the end-user experience: what will your customers see?

Good user interfaces on the web (or any device) have consistent, predictable interfaces. (I’m not the only one with this view.) Users will only need to get used to one visual layout, which means the organization of the rest of your site is also predictable. This in no way means that your site will be boring! It simply means that your design will have a higher degree of synergy. And synergy leads to familiarity. And familiarity leads right back to Easy St.

You win. Your viewers win. Even your graphic designer that helps you with your site wins.

This is my hope. Let’s see if my bet is right?

I was listening to The Big Web Show podcast just today, the interview with Ethan Marcotte about an article he wrote about responsive web design. And I think he’s absolutely right.

It’s not just enough to have a main stylesheet and a mobile stylesheet, designers ought to consider the whole layout of the page and how it affects the readability and usability of their design. Ethan has a really interesting example which takes advantage of CSS media queries to figure out what to do with the layout of elements in the page. As the user’s browser goes from a full-screen high resolution-capable display mode to a more narrow screen, at 1300px wide the design begins to change. Then again at 600px. Then again at 400px. At each stage certain items are moved around via CSS so that the main article is readable, that the navigation areas don’t crowd the main article text, and that the pictures neatly fill the screen without being too big. The result: a web page that looks beautiful at all times for a wide variety of resolutions.

I’ve been thinking about the same thing for quite a while now as well. And not just about device resolution.

When users land on your site they ought to be able to get at the main information they came to read, but should also have access to navigation that makes sense, and all of this should be wrapped in shiny, tidy packaging. CSS media queries are a great start. I believe there’s even more that we can do though.

Considerations that have been fluttering through my mind include:

• What if users want to use a different language?
  I18N involves more than just having a translation of the page available. Depending on how the text is read (left-to-right, right-to-left, top-to-bottom-then-right-to-left?) you might have to change the page structure entirely.
• What if the users are on mobile devices and have constrained data plans?
  iPhone users used to have an all-you-can-eat data plan right up until, oh, a month ago. So now it’s not just the case of reformatting the page so that it looks good on small screens but pushing a second set of images or CSS (or even device-specific JavaScript) means that you’re eating up those precious bits allocated to their data plans.
• What if the users can’t see your page?
  Yep. What if they’re blind or prefer to visit your web page using screen reader software?

I’ve been doing a lot of pondering, researching, and even interviewing—just last week I went down to the center for the blind in Santa Clara. One of my primary goals that has steered my career ever since college is making information on the web more organized and accessible for all. This means ensuring the best experience for users with different devices, different abilities, and different cultural backgrounds. I strongly believe that there is no one-size-fits-all approach that can be applied using just HTML + CSS. You really need to have an engine behind the content that tries its best to detect the user’s needs and tailor the experience to them.

To that end I’ve been working on something that I hope will get website owners and designers closer to that. (And by stating it publicly I’m trying to force myself to at least get the beta version of it out soon. )