September 2000
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A weblog is a semi-daily record of thoughts passing through the blogger's head. In my case, I'm trying to keep it to ponderings on IA.
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not their fault
"Confusion and clutter are failures of design, not attributes of information.
And so the point is to find design strategies that reveal detail and
complexity - rather than to fault the data for an excess of complication.
Or, worse, to fault viewers for a lack of understanding."
-Edward R. Tufte 9/29/2000 7:25:47 AM
getting legalNews.Com: Lawmakers want to legalize MP3.com service.
Dubbed the "Music Owners' Listening Rights Act of 2000," the bill would give companies the right to copy CDs, store them online, and stream the songs individually to listeners who could prove they already owned a copy of the CD.
read it! 9/28/2000 8:38:48 AM
i know himVisit TheStandard.com and scroll down to "Homage" to read about my friend mike who makes usable cookies Then visit biggerhand.com to see what other mischief he gets into. 9/26/2000 6:39:55 PM
the real reason Napster is revolutionary It's the consumer experience, stupid. (with apologies to Mark Hurst).a. Go their site. It's easy to download Napster. No painful registration screens (they get that information later, after you've committed). No hiding of the links users want the most (it's right at the top: download Napster, tour Napster). Last time I was on Adobe's site I had a hard time just finding where to download products, much less finding the product I wanted most: acrobat reader.  b. Install Napster (go ahead, I dare ya!) This is the best installation of a software program I have experienced in a long time. My favorite part is during configuration. One of the choices on connection speed is "I don't know" and they let you skip the geek talk in a way that suggests not knowing how Napster works will not impede enjoyment of it. And why should you have to know about proxy-servers to listen to music?
c. As part of configuration Napster asks you if you'd like to share music with the Napster community, then searches and shares the files for you. This is what keeps Napster valuable. Each song a user shares makes it a little more likely that a song another user is searching for will be found. If you used Napster to search for Metallica songs and never found any, you'd stop using Napster. A problem with Gnutella-- the other popular P2P file swapping software-- is that Gnutella users tend to be borrowers rather than sharers (see an article on the study). I suspect this is because how Gnutella is designed: I still haven't figured out how to share a song via Gnutella. Open source software is notoriously hard to use, probably because software engineers are rarely interface designers and open source is a pure engineering play. Without people sharing songs as well as downloading them, the service isn't valuable. And if people can't figure out *how* to share songs... . Everyone is talking how Napster has revolutionized the internet via P2P, or by galvanizing the music industry to finally use the internet as a music delivery channel, but I have yet to see anyone point out the revolution wouldn't have come if Napster was as hard to use as Gnutella. Napster had to be easy to use to gain wide use to gain value.
(what use would a telephone be if you were the only one in the world who owned one?). And then the revolution could begin. 9/26/2000 1:52:10 PM
best shopping practicesFrom Dack.com: best practices for designing shopping cart and checkout interfaces a great primer on how to build a good shopping cart. 9/25/2000 5:42:27 PM
"quick" time | | 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.
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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.
9/13/2000 7:56:56 AM
unfolding practice of IAI know it may sound odd, but I believe IA's should try folding origami from diagrams. The act of using a diagram to create a 3d object is both satisfying, relaxing and makes you consider what it takes to write halfway decent instructions. I'm sure there are other hobbies that would produce the same set of feelings and skills (model airplanes? knitting) but origami is my choice.Of particular interest here is the "Phone Folding" --text only instructions.
A good site is Joseph Wu's origami page . Or you can straight to the Files and Diagrams. 9/11/2000 9:45:02 AM
death to the 216 websafe palette!Webmonkey looks at the possiblity that we might have a few more colors to play with in their latest article, Death of the Websafe Color Palette? and their discovery is.... well, let's just say "hope you like green" 9/10/2000 9:07:18 AM
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My name is Christina Wodtke. 
