From: Gleanings
To: gleanettes
Subject: Gleanings: It's not easy being gleaned

Sorry, couldn't resist the pun.

USABILITY MATTERS
after six seconds, wave bye bye to your customers

I know it's an old study, but it's still quite valid. go to "quicktime" with a stopwatch if you are on a modem. ouch.

and if you are saying, isn't everyone 56k and faster?

IA MATTERS
Ford-Forlizzi Theories of Experience

Really interesting discussion on UML on CHI-WEB right now,

it produced this
"Still, UML as it is now, is inadequate for effectively communicating
with non-technical people. But new ideas are rapidly evolving. I've
already experimented with colour modeling, based on the work of Peter
Coad , and found it
promising (see also UIdesign.net, which I'm sure you're
familiar with). And I think it would also be a good idea to add another
dimension to the model, e.g. an isometric perspective, the way Dynamic
Diagrams uses it."

GENERAL NEWS

from tomalak

Internet Week: Don't Trust Everything You Read, Even On The Internet.
The events that led to this damage involved a string of errors that would be
comical if they weren't so serious. They all had one root cause: the fact that
many people make major decisions based on information they find on the
Internet but don't confirm.

Advertising Age: Delta flies toward $1 billion in Web sales.
The campaign from Leo Burnett USA, Chicago, launched last week and includes TV, print and radio. Print tells customers the simpler URL will save them "an extra 0.73 seconds,'' TV features the delta-air.com URL morphing into the new delta.com, while radio asks, "Why oh why wasn't delta.com our Web address all along?''

Industry Standard: Disney Looks for the Magic. Bornstein is fond of saying the new site won't try to be all things to all people and will focus instead on a few key areas. The search engine will still be in place, but in addition to Web results, consumers will also receive user- rated sites and related content from any of DIG's dozen or so other properties...

Wired News: Eudora Retards Flames.
The newest version of the Qualcomm software features MoodWatch, an automated emotion monitor that scans the text of both incoming and outgoing email for the sorts of "aggressive, demeaning, or rude language," that typically appear in flames -- or abusive electronic communications.

fig 1.1

I pulled up the quicktime site the other day, in hopes of upgrading so I could see the fake star wars trailer (yeah, it's the little things in life...).

When I arrived at Apple - QuickTime I was treated to a particularly egrerioius world wide wait situation. Even at 8 seconds I still didn't have the button I needed to click to upgrade (see img 1.1)

If they had only used alt tags on their navigation bar, not only would they have made the site accessible to the blind, they would have also let me know what to click so I didn't need to wait for those darn gifs to load. There are actually a lot of reasons to use alt tags, including getting better placement with search engines.

fig 1.2

At 22 seconds, I had the entire site (fig 1.2). The channels on the right came in last. Hope they didn't plan to make money off of those.
Honestly, is this site really so beautiful I needed to wait for these images to load? One could say that quicktime is aimed at high bandwidth surfers only. But that would mean they are ignoring 93% of the web audience. Sounds like a bad business strategy to me.