Persuasive design: Suggesting over forcing
— October 28 2009
This past week we stopped using lighthouse and w’ere just using Teambox 2, to manage Teambox 2. We’re eating our own dog food!
In Teambox 2 we’ve reworked tasks so that they are more like conversations. This is great because it allows you to post links that will be useful for tasks you have to do weeks later, or report what you’ve done by attaching files, or start conversations about important issues.
An issue we initially had with this is, since every task is displayed in the sidebar, that we need to keep the sidebar uncluttured. One way of doing this is avoiding lines wrapping, so you need to have titles as concise as possible.
While forcing the user to do this by limiting the number of characters they can type, it’s not a good idea because sometimes it has to be so. We preferred to suggest the right length by making the font size bigger. If you’re trying to make a field too long, you’ll notice the text gets clipped and that’s a bad thing.
Suggesting is better than forcing. Visual design is better than words. Users can be guided not only by words, but also by design clues. Width and font size help in this case. Colors and placing can be important, too. For everything else, remember to use proper wording for every section and action.
Same goes on for the tweet-like field in the project field, where you can post comments or share interesting links and insight:
