A New Year’s Compilation Of Usability & Wireframing Poetry

We have moved well into the new year, and this is a great time to briefly pause and look back at the year 2010, which has been a remarkable year in many ways. It’s been exciting, to say the least, with Facebook becoming the most frequented website on the world wide web, Google Android mixing up the mobile market, the number of mobile internet users growing massively, Twitter becoming a viable communication channel for established businesses, and cloud services really starting to take off as companies like Microsoft, IBM, or SAP have followed Amazon into the virtual world.

What role do topics like user interface design or usability play in this setting? Well, with more and more services going “cloud” or mobile, most companies have noticed that traditional interface design concepts need to be reconsidered, not only because navigation patterns differ when you are using software in a web browser or on the small screen of a mobile touch device, but also because the competition is becoming ever more intense online and in the mobile market.

To pay tribute to the rising significance of great user interface design, we have started creating poetry that plays on the variations of UI design topics. Here are a few of the diamonds in this modern category of usability and wireframing poetry. Enjoy!

 

Ode to the Usability of Interface Designs

Though still unfinished pride of expertness

Thou wireframe of an interface design

A rapid paper prototype used to express

Ideas of layouts and navigation that lurk in the mind

What icons and buttons envelope thy shape

Of links and portals that strive with growth

through the fiber optic cables of an ISP

Streaming gigabytes of info with ease for you and me both

What mad pursuit ever since the struggles of Netscape

When the ripe World Wide Web became destiny

 

Interfaces designs are sweet, but those uncluttered

Are sweeter:  which is a reason why users stay on

When a website is clear it becomes more endear’d

Leading to increased visits and subjective satisfaction

Being used with great ease and not wanting to leave

Accomplishing tasks with minimum error scares

Knowing I can recover if something goes amiss

Though winning near the goal – yet, I do not grieve

For using this graphical user interface design is bliss

With a high level of memorability, this interface design is a breath of fresh air!

 

Based on “Ode to a Grecian Urn” by John Keats

 

 

Ode to a Skinned Interface Design

I went to the link my friend sent me,

And I saw what I never had seen;

An ad banner was built in the midst,

Where I used to click on the screen.

 

With no choice but to scroll down I did frown,

My friend’s interface design was upside down,

Like a tourist with no clue I looked around lost in town,

‘Cause there were no breadcrumbs to be found.

 

A millisecond too long I located local navigation,

Thinking ‘they sure could use a wireframe tool for their creations’.

With findability resolved these usability problems would dissolve

And, in tow, his search engine ranking would evolve.

 

Based on “The Garden of Love” by William Blake

 

 

Instant Interface Design Sorrow

My mother groaned, my father wept:

Into their shopping cart unwanted things leapt,

Helpless, overcharged but arrestingly proud,

Feeling like a fiend was hid in ‘the cloud’.

 

Who to blame when the mouse was in my father’s hands,

Well poor usability & interface design will hurt a brand,

Placing the ‘Cancel’ button a nanometer from ‘Buy’ is not best,

Especially with a return policy worse than the rest.

 

Based on “Infant Sorrow” by William Blake

 

The original idea behind these poems was to adapt famous poems and use them to shed light on issues that affect usability, wireframes, wireframing tools and user interface design. If you have some suggestions of poems that you would like for us to interpolate during the coming year, please feel free to leave a comment with your request in it.

 

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