TC 510 Course Website David Farkas has an amazing collection of web-based articles supplementing his course that would make fine reading over the holidays-- the breadth and diversity of the reading would help round out any IA or ID thinking.
I was so stunned by this monument of unusability, I had to share. Of course, any software that comes with a scanner or a digital camera is usually a pretty good candidate for an interface hall of shame, but I felt this one was kinda special. It's from ACDC's plug-in, photostitch, which allows you to stick together images into a panorama, such as below.
So, since it's the end of the year, I'll let you-all find the usability problems. How fun!
We can start with: Guess what you do to launch the stitching functionality?
Guess how many times I hit "cancel" accidentally?!
Guess what words I used to describe my experience?!?!
(Answer to first question: you hit one of those big purple things above to launch the stitching functionality. Now as a bonus guess how many times I started the stitch before I had preferences set?!? How fun!
Answer to second question: 3 times!
Answer to third question #$%@$*&$*&%
Answer to bonus question: just once but see third answer for that also)
From Yahoo! News - The Eight Biggest Tech Flops Ever
"What distinguishes a simply bad product from the truly awful? Sometimes it's a dreadful user interface. Other times it's a product that successfully addresses a particularly daunting problem - yet one shared by relatively few people. And often competitive or financial pressure forces new products to market before they're ready - full of bugs and horribly unusable. Still other times, the products arrive too early. Eventually they become a success, but often after the founding company has been ruined. "
for those of you who don't follow all the Mt activity that closely, do look at this extension: a nifty little script that overcomes one of Mt's flaws-- password retrieval and resetting.
Top Yahoo! Searches 2003 teaches us the most popular jennifer, how to misspell the governator's name, and reminds us about our lack of schooling (the #1 iraq related search is "map of iraq")
Why is random data so interesting? Who cares, give me some more!
from The Talent Myth
"What if smart people are overrated?"
From Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003 (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
"It used to be that Web sites offered one or two things. Now it's common to find sites with thousands or millions of items. Wonderful, but that means that item listings are often very long and hard to use.
One of the main usability guidelines for category pages is to let users winnow items according to attributes of interest. To "winnow" a list basically means to filter out elements that don't meet specified criteria, leaving a shorter list that's easier to manage and understand. "
Sounds like a job for faceted classification! Dooo do do!
Looks like I complained too soon... movabletype.org: News announces that 3.0 will feature "Comment registration. As a response to both comment spam and to the increased usage of Movable Type on large community sites, we'll be adding the option to restrict comments to registered users. "
the question of whether the underlying architecture is stable and scalable is still an open one, but at least this accursed spam might be stopped.
growing up, and even once grown up, there were no wodtkes. I remember once driving around on an island in wisconsin seeing the wodtke name on a tree, and being amazed. The only wodtkes I knew were my grandparents. When I travelled to Europe, I never met wodtkes and when I asked Germans if they knew my name, they never did... and often suggested maybe it was polish. Moving to california produced no more wodtkes, not even in the san francisco white pages.
But the web changed that-- we knew our family was German, and the appearance of wodtke.com was the first instance of wodtkes appearing that weren't definately us. Next Christina M. Wodtke emailed me, wanting to know why I was impersonating her (it is a rare name).
Now Mark Von Wodtke chimes in, commenting on "small world 2" he says "Maybe there are connections between ideas and DNA." He's not only a Wodtke, but a wodtke very much interested in the things I am passionate about. Perhaps he's right.
To test the idea, I explored Amazon and discovered Amazon makes being a Wodtke seem common as dirt. And I kinda like it. I always wanted an ordinary name.
Now I'm cruising their wishlists, capturing snapshots of who they are-- Francesca Wodtke likes gardening and cooking, Dirk Wodtke has a porche 9-11, and likes scooters too; Katie Wodtke likes scupture and is politically active, and Kirsten Wodtke is expecting....
I wanted to know if our possible DNA also connected in ideas, interests. And exploring that, the wishlists became humans, and I suddenly started considering them cousins. People I wanted to write to, buy gifts for, invite to dinner.
What an odd new use for Amazon-- inventing new family.
I worte an article last week: Boxes and Arrows: Building a Vision of Design Success.
"Redesigns are as often crucibles of group anguish as they are opportunities for invention and rebirth. In the entirety of my career, I've definitely seen both. So what is the difference that allows one redesign to work and another to turn into months of tail chasing? ... I think the key difference is vision."
I've been off the writing horse for a bit, and it's nice to get back on.
"... the cost of the five gold rings dropped by 5.6 percent, and the pear tree is down a full 28.6 percent from last year. However, these discounts were offset by the dancers, pipers and drummers who have seen significant increases in the cost of their services over 2002."
Looks like a service economy to me....
I've noticed a strange upswing in playful names in my spam from list lately---
Is it a programic accident, or are spammers tired of ordinary names, and getting playful? I can tell you it is making it easier to wipe spam unread from my mail.
Well, you guys found the little project i've started I see. Widgetopia is still too small a collection to be useful, but in time it will change. I was collecting widgets for myself, but then decided "why not do it in public and let others share in the findings?"
They seem to have a rather different idea of exclusive than I do, considering this went to four different email addresses.
Well, proof if you dream small your dreams can come true-- it's not world peace, but today I saw my book packaged with the book that changed my life... Information Architecture for Large Scale Websites. Ah Amazon, the gifts you give! I'm atingle!
from The Guts of a New Machine (NYT, free refgistration required)
''The Dells of the world don't spend money'' on design innovation, he (steve jobs) said. ''They don't think about these things.'' As he described it, the iPod did not begin with a specific technological breakthrough, but with a sense, in early 2001, that Apple could give this market something better than any rival could. So the starting point wasn't a chip or a design; the starting point was the question, What's the user experience?
Design innovation. What's the user experience?
That's where *I* want to go today.