listening to Forum: Broadcasts, in particular Garrison Keillor mock Ginsberg and laud Bukowski (mixed feelings on both cases, but still, always nice to see a strong opinion based on something other than literati pronouncements) and was gratified to hear him say "MissourA", an artifact of my own midwestern accent I cannot bring myself to expulse...
ieSpell - Spell Checker add-on for Internet Explorer
"ieSpell is a free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a webpage."
wine, women and smoke is a nifty little animation, made more pleasurable as one realizes it's all back-drawn... they are all good, though pickle may be my other favoritist.
I'm having a lazy slow morning, this last day of 2002. I'm surfing. I realize I don't surf anymore. I used to. I used to get up in the morning, pick a blog-starting point, and go... noting sites as I went for the gleanings newsletter.
But writing the book slowly weaned me off random wanders, and forced me to do only directed searching-- research. Soon the only odd sites I'd find were mailed to me (thank god for friends, family and readers-- keep me sane!).
And now, I'm wandering again, following links, running searches and my curiosity is peaked... wondering what will become of gleanings. I keep thinking I should resurrect it. But do I want to? When I started it, there were only a handful of blogs pointing this way and that-- now there are thousands.
Maybe essays? Or links with mini-essays? Or maybe nothing. Maybe it's time to retire the old newsletter, and go to digests of the blog. Or maybe it's time to stop blogging? it's not like I don't have enough ways to communicate, via B&A, AIfIA, mailing lists and so on...
I wonder what 2003 will be like, I wonder what role I'll play... what will make me happy...
What Should I Do With My Life? is a wonderful little article-- occasionally overwrought, but that might be artifact of being in Fast Company... Po Bronson's look at how life and work intertwine to an inseparable degree is fascinating.
"The relevant question in looking at a job is not What will I do? but Who will I become? What belief system will you adopt, and what will take on heightened importance in your life? Because once you're rooted in a particular system -- whether it's medicine, New York City, Microsoft, or a startup -- it's often agonizingly difficult to unravel yourself from its values, practices, and rewards."
The best part of the end of december is the prognostications. madonnalisa tries to predict the future of ia-- my favorite is
"5. Search engines no longer exists as we know them today...they rebrand their identities as "Find It" or "Knowledge Repository" engines. Yes I know this sounds outrageous but I have this feeling..'k?"
Strangely I found this as I began to work on a predictions article for B&A-- what are your predictions for 2003?
InformIT - Your Online Guide to Tech Reference has a bad practice I haven't seen in a long time--- required registration to read all their content.
What makes it such a sin is the poor job of setting expectations & providing feedback they do. Take a look at the front page, pick an article that appears interesting, click and whammo-- a brick wall of a registration screen demanding your email. No explanation of why you are there and what it has to do with the link you just clicked... only a list of bullet points on the right about why you should register... the third gives you a hint of why you are there: "Quality IT Content."
I kept clicking back and reclicking article links, thinking I had made a mistake, or maybe there was some freely available content and member only content, like just about every other website...
At the minimum, they should add a line at the top of the section saying "to read this and all other articles on InformIT, please register. It only takes a second and it's free". To set expectations, they might add a line above the articles saying "all articles are available to registered members. Find out more."
Better yet would be for them to give free access to all articles, and use other ways to harvest emails such as useful newsletters, or interest alerts.
With increased suspicion of spam, to demand an email before proving your value is hubris. And bad business practice.
kevin writes "I'm surprised this is button is allowed (on Apple Print Center)"
matt jones shares knowledge again. in a world of NDAs where it's hard to learn from each other, these tiny very naughty moments are to be treasured.
ahoy, matt.
AIFIA | AIfIA Finishes its First Month with 200 Members, International Flavor
"Recent additions to AIfIA's leadership council are similarly global, hailing from Australia, Belgium, Chile, Denmark, and the US."
I'm psyched to be part of an organization that is working on kicking its USA-centric habit-- it's a big world out there...
Ziya points out Fortune.com - Alsop on Infotech - Hollywood's Latest Flop
"It's clear that the studios' motivation in designing MovieLink is fear of piracy. But they forgot to make the service usable, appealing, or compelling. So MovieLink will fail, people will argue that you can't sell digital content on the Internet--and the studios will have proved nothing. "
from since1968 :: Steve Krug Interview, upon being asked about so many quality websites coming from amateur enthusiasts rather than professionals:
"I'm afraid I'm not very big on calculating correlations between things. But it reminds me of a line from an underground comic called The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers from back in the 1970's: "Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope." Having a small budget and someone on the project with clout who really cares about whether users have a good experience--which is often the case with an amateur site--will often get you much farther than a big budget and no one guiding the whole thing.
(On the other hand, while a big budget doesn't ensure usability, it doesn't preclude it, either. Rich people can get into heaven; it's just trickier.)"
In O'Reilly Network: Dial-Up Revelations [Dec. 20, 2002] Meg writes
"Lately I've grown lazy around the issue of page size and images. When designing something for a client or posting a picture to my own web site, I'd often think to myself, "everyone I know has a high-speed connection now-a-days" and with little more than a cursory glance at the file size, I'd post or design in happy, dial-upless oblivion.
Oh what a spoiled fool I'd become."
our world is not the world....
I'll put Coffee, Tea, or Should We Feel Your Pregnant Wife's Breasts Before Throwing You in a Cell at the Airport and Then Lying About Why We Put You There? by Nicholas Monahan in the "user centered design" category, because I don't have a "how to be a human being" category. But our first job is always to remember we are humans, interacting with other humans. Like the stanford prison experiment and the milgram expirament, this made me cry.
from Metacrap
"A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. "
The reasons why decent metadata is near-impossible to come by are funny and true--- and point toward why the semantic web is going to be a hard row to hoe.
Reading Wired 11.01: Google vs. Evil
"Newbies flocked to the site, grateful for a simple search engine that was both powerful and intuitive. More sophisticated techies came to appreciate Google's computational elegance and its willingness to shun the "portal" model that crammed ecommerce down their throats."
What's funny is everything I know (I do have access to some research data most folks don't) says the opposite. Early google users were hardcore techies who wanted nothing but undecorated data. Later on the newbies started coming, as the early-adoption "taste-makers" such as slash-dot got the word out, and the general media picked it up and spread the knowledge google existed to newbies.
I hate it when the news presents what appears like a logical conclusion as fact.
As for the rest of the article, it's really very interesting. I love and admire google-- they not only power Yahoo, but they are our competitor and thus inspire us to innovate (and interesting conudrum, the in-bed-with-the-enemy syndrome). They also make a lot of good fun stuff. But "Don't be evil" is overly simplistic attitude. some things are easy to recognize as evil, such as a KKK site. But if you censor those sites, then you keep people from being able to research them to form arguments against their ideology. Is censorship evil, making google evil when they stop evil things? Good and evil are for first graders. Grown-up life is far more complex.
from the riveting Nathan Shedroff: the v-2 interview (part one of two) and by the way, ED is short for experience design. Cozy little acronym, ain't it?
"Nathan Shedroff: Well, all of those cultural, psychological, physiological, technical, etc. theories support ED just as well - if not better, in fact - than they do IA/ID. I don't understand the need to acknowledge them for one and not for another. This is like those IAs who spend so much time splitting all of the responsibilities of information creation into two sets, the set of things they consider nicer, cooler, or more sophisticated, and those they consider basic, dull, or beneath them. Then they label the first IA and walk off laughing with their noses held high and the other set ID.
AG: Sounds to me like when you talk about "noses held high," you have one or more bad experiences in mind. And I'm not denying that can be important, but aren't you then simply doing what you accused me of earlier: damning the entire field for the blunders of one or two pompous jerks? Why would I assert that IA is somehow free of such, when anybody who's read SIGIA knows perfectly well that we have our due ration of bozos?
NS: It's just that I see it way more than "one or two jerks." It's an overall feeling I sense, more often than not, in writings, speeches, and conversations. If it were only a few people I'd just write them off (like certain usability folk). But, in my experience, it's pervasive.
Maybe I'm just being too sensitive, but things feel a lot different from ten years ago, and not in a good way. Some of the best IAs/IDs I know never participate in the IA/ID community because of the pervasive attitudes and the lack of anything new or interesting going on. I think that the IA/ID community is, mostly, spinning its wheels in terms of growth and development. It isn't innovating and it is turning more people off than on. Again, my opinion."
Wow, it's been a long time since I've seen anyone bag that hard on IA-- I wonder who has been poisoning his soup. Last I saw Mr. Shedroff, he was cheerfully breaking bread with Lou Rosenfeld... I personally have many reservations about the nascent field of ED but I have yet to take a public stick to the entire group of people who are trying to build it (though Adam's fearlessness in asking the hard questions is rather enticing... come on in... the water's bracing!)
Another oddity in the interview is Nathan's mixing of Information Design and Information Architecture. I really wish Adam had asked Nathan for his definition of IA, just to set a common vocabulary. I'm not sure if Nathan has expanded his definition beyond his former mentor Wurman's or not...
Finally I just don't get these particular arguments. Why argue over the same bit of carpet, when there is a whole world to design? IA designs information spaces, ED designing experiences, IA designs for findability, understandability and usability, ED designs for a positive user experience, thus moving beyond information spaces and interactive to include passive and visceral designed environments.
For me, Ed is too big, too undefined to be juicy enough for me-- I like to stay more in the realm of the practical than the theoretical. I still do big IA, but it tends to be limited to information spaces-- interactive, digital, structural. When I hang with former Argonauts, I'm a generalist. When I chat with the ED crowd, I'm a specialist.
But for other designers, ED is the key and I like watching them go off on their philosophical tangents as they ponder the universe of designed experience like a sophomore art student on his third beer. There is joy there, and it's all good.
from Digital Web Magazine - An interview with Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld, Information Architects
"Digital Web: Many have stated they believe IA is only for content-rich sites like magazines, news, and search portals. Do you get the same impression from people on this view? What are your thoughts? Why should IA be done on other sites?
PM: Our personal backgrounds in library science and our passion for findability have led us to focus a good deal of our energy on content-rich sites. However, many other information architects focus on the design of highly interactive Web sites and software products where navigation and task completion go hand-in-hand.
LR: And let's not forget that even in an application-rich site, you still have to find the right applications before using them."
After hunting for "check spelling" in Adobe InDesign, Macromedia Dreamweaver and MS Word, I can tell you a little IA in software design would go a long way. And I never know what I'm going to find when I look under the "file" menu, beyond "save."
Today I recieved a couple queries from a reader, one I could answer moderately easily ("IS IT ILLEGAL TO COPY SOFTWARE AND HOW I KNOW WHICH SOFTWARE WILL WORK ON MY COMPUTER?") and one that I thought I'd let you folks take a stab at as well...
"WHY GRAPHIC USER INTERFACE IS SO POPULAR?"
I'd say the answer to the GUI (graphic user interface) popularity is twofold
1. GUI's are easier to learn. It can use a combination of both images based on symbols we might already know --such as an pencil for draw-- as well as text to express meaning.
2. GUI's are easier to relearn. The human memory is finite. Command line interfaces require you memeorize hundreds of unique commands, which, unless you use them daily, you forget. But GUI combines text with images, and allows for nice touches like tooltips to supliment the fallable human memory.
What's the alternative to GUI? Command-line interfaces, where users must learn and memorize a set of commeands. Take Vi, a command line editing tool. I used to know it fairly well, and could edit html in it quickly. Now I barely remember the commands, but I do recall doign things like ctl-j to out two lines on the same line, or wq to save a file and quit editing it. It took me a long time to learn to use it in a limited fashion, I became very swift with it for a short time, and now I can barely recall it enough to use it (possibly not enough to use it).
Now that I think about it, it's also possible that typing might be a piece. To use a command-line interface well, you must be a fairly swift and accurate typist. You can get away with being a so-so typist wiht a GUI. The mouse makes up for a lot.
Also images are pleasurable to look at. a GUI gives you words *and* pictures and humans like rich sensory experiences.
This is my five minute version-- what do you all think?
Boxes and Arrows: Putting a Face on B2B Websites is a good article for a number of reasons, one of which is the way it takes on emerging technology use.
It also reminds me of how hard it is to be a consultant and design for an unknown domain. Even though "web" is your bread and butter, it's the client who has most of what you need to know to design well locked in their head. And considering they don't like to pay you money to catch up, how do you design well? An inhouse designer/IA for domain unique products is one solution (works for yahoo!), developing a relationship with a company over time is another solution for clients and for the consultant, specializing in a field is another solution (sapient built their business with health-care sites, I've heard). And there are many more I'm sure-- mixing in-house and out-of-house teams, paying for a "discovery period" or doing discovery for the proposal (someone has to pay for the catch up...)
makes me think.
Jakob's most recent In the Future, We'll All Be Harry Potter (Alertbox Dec. 2002) is a pleasent little riff on Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke's quote "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." It's a nice change of pace from the sturm and drang we've been seeing lately, and is marred only by the somewhat threatening last paragraph.
"NOTE: bio-identifiers are still primitive. They don't work for everyone. And several people have managed surprisingly simple ways of spoofing them (the schemes range from photos, to recordings, to clever ways of lifting latent prints to breathing lightly across the fingerprint pad thereby re-enabling the fingerprints of the last previous user!)"
"I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. De Mille!"
shudder.
Ten taxonomy myths is such an pleasently written article, it brings taxonomies in reach.
"Myth #1: A taxonomy can only be expressed as a hierarchical list of topics.
The implication of our definition is that every company will use multiple, interacting organization schemes (taxonomies). Some will be very concrete and may even be "invisible" except to computer programs (e.g. product codes). Others will be abstract, designed primarily for use by human beings (e.g. a list of topics on a departmental Web site)."
This is an exellent observation. Often I've seen arguments over which classification scheme to use, as if there is one ideal that all users can understand and meets all needs. But often the better answer is use several schemes. A CD site can have music type, artist and chronological classification schemes all mixed and matched-- and often do. Why shouldn't other sites support different user needs and mental models with multiple interacting schemes?
I didn't have this hard a time -- Why Computer Books Suck -- but it's not far off.
NNGroup and Me : A Tale of Two Tickets illustrates that sometimes user-centered isn't as important as customer-centered.
I cannot stop listening to Le Phare and Rue Des Cascades by Yann Tiersen , who did the Amelie soundtrack. extraordinary.
Bruce sends me Typography of the Bauhaus. It's the second time in 24 hours Bauhaus has come up-- maybe ti's time to crack open From Bauhaus to Our Houseagain.
Universal Usability in Practice is a nice cheatsheet for figuring out how to design for different user types.
According to WebWord.com Weblog Posting I am a Userati with some Connections. I don't fully understand the measuring system, but I'm happy to be there. Like my dear friend Noel, I consider myself a half IA/ half usability specialist, though I concentrate on IA in my writings because it seems to have enough champions and is a much more formed mature profession.
This list does blur the IA/Usability distinction though even further-- maybe we need to add user-centered writers, designers and programmers to the list?
Mark Bernstein thinks we are saying the web sucks. Er, well..
I love the web, and think it is wonderful. I can't imagine how I lived without it-- how did I figure out how to make tomato soup? Or figure out what the name of that guy In Green Mile and Charlie's Angel's was? Or keep track of my bank account? Or find new fiction?
But there are one heck of a lot of bad websites out there. When I was writing my book, I was looking for a good example of a ecommerce store that sold only music (I was looking for taxonomies of music). I went through a directory flipping through store after store, stunned at how ugly and unusable they were. I had gotten a bit complacent-- all the sites I use on a regular basis are great (IMBD), or pretty darn good (Wells Fargo Banking). But the grand mass of *professional* sites are lousy.
I'm not even including the sites built by hobbyists, families and diarists. These are small busines sites whose equivalent is a store in the mall, or on main street in a small town-- but they don't even meet that standard. You can't find anything on these sites, they are ugly as nobody's business and check out is often impossible to accomplish-- if you dare it after taking a look around. It's more like a old barn turned junk store you find on a lonely country road... you dig through spiderweb covered junk, and if you do find something that catches your eye, you pay in cash because the cross-eyed KKK-T-shirt wearing drooling kook at the register looks like he'd eat your credit card as likely as process it.
When you are a professional site, there is a baseline of quality you need to do business. While the web is delightful, I would say many denizens are far from reaching that baseline. This is a multipart problem, in which IA is not the solution, but a piece of the solution, which includes excellent design, copywriting, technology and more....
Zen Haiku: Password Previewing Tools version 2.2 is out. He continues to refine his tool for password choices. I rather wish he'd continue-- I wonder what other issues folks face in password selection? Perhaps dealing with passwords that require a number and a capital (a common restriction)?
This is me back from Iowa. ahhhhhh
Chris Macgregor's Running from Bears Suggests that "with the release of Flash MX, Flash Remoting and the Flash Communications Server we can offer users:
an experience that is better than HTML
an experience that is faster than HTML
an experience that is cheaper than HTML "
It's an interesting article, and pretty controversial, I'd say, being from the school of context (a.k.a. "it depends") but interesting.
My own thoughts were pretty off topic... flash and html aside, what is the price at Walmart? How is Walmart "fast, good, and cheap" Perhaps by bad labor practices and shoddy goods? Walmartwatch's news clippings show the other side of Walmart, with their "Wal of shame" being particularly illuminating. There is always a price.
