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busteda mail from John Driscoll"This means doing more than simply alt tagging your images (though I notice fixed. thanks for keeping me honest. Alt tags are important! They help you with search engine placement, they improve acessibility, and they provide oppurtunities for humor. 12/30/2000 08:02:47 AM | link
i like him butthis game is pretty fun.Driving Over Jakob Nielsenis a Grand Prix style flash based driving game from urbanev.com. It's even pretty usable, though I wish it had instructions on the first screen and a start button rather than auto-starting. But if wishes were horses, beggars would ride-- probably over Jakob Neilsen. 12/29/2000 05:30:55 PM | link holiday readingFinally finished How Buildings Learn. It's a remarkable book, one that makes you look at and reevaluate your surroundings, and question things you took for granted-- from the shape of your living room to the house across the street's glassed-in front porch. All Web designers should read this book. Websites, like buildings, exist in time. But web construction materials cost so little and adjustments are so seemly easy that websites are often built to solve an immediate need with no concern for future ones.However, human resources are what websites are made of (rather than timber or concrete) and these days good human resources are extremely precious (<2% unemployment, folks). They should be used carefully. Better to invest in a good requirements gathering process and a use-driven architecture plan. The chapter entitled "The Scenario-Buffered Building" gives a good and quick process for brainstorming possible uses for a building that is entirely applicable to website design. 12/29/2000 08:33:22 AM | link
tuftian thinkingI keep returning to this quote:"The average download of a website is longer than the average visit to most corporate websites" If he's right, that means that what you see during a download is as important as what you see when it's fully loaded. No, it's more important... that's your chance to keep your users from bailing. When I was at egreetings, I suggested we use a different standard for our SLA. Rather than demanding that the site load in 6 or 8 seconds, I suggested we try to measure how fast it was usable. Therefore we set limits such as: you had to get the main navigation to the card categories within 3 seconds of request, and the key cards in 5 seconds, and the global navigation in 8, and so on. By carefully calculating what should load in in what order, we could hopefully engage users with slower modems early, while still offering a rich range of offerings on any given page for those with faster modems. This means doing more than simply alt tagging your images (though I notice more and more websites are forgetting the importance of even that simple task). It means designing pages with consideration to load order, creating series of grids rather than a design that requires one gigantic table. It means putting as much text as possible into html rather than a graphic so people have something to read while the page loads. It means learning more about css and how that can control load order. And then maybe you can get your average visit to be longer than your average page load time. 12/16/2000 09:48:09 AM | link a year ago i thought i'd be rich"Hello Christina,This must be important because you asked us to remind you of the Occasion: IPO 12/16/99 Visit http://www.egreetings.com/rsother if it's appropriate to How about a gift? Our new Gift Center makes it easy for you to Have a great day, Steve 12/16/2000 08:42:24 AM | link
Tufte TidbitsLast week I went to see Tufte with some friends. Afterwards, one friend made a candle with his image on it to light in times of information murkiness. Another friend invited the web community to rate Tufte and Jakob Nielsen's comparative hotness.I merely assembled these quotes: "Only two industries refer to their customers are 'users'" "The average download of a website is longer than the average visit to most corporate websites" "The point of information design is to assist thinking." Good information design is "clear thinking made visible" "Bad design is stupidity made visible. Chart junk is very often a sign of statistical stupidity" "This is where God wants footnotes, on the side" (referring to sidenotes in his books.) 12/15/2000 09:30:52 AM | link
happywhy can't this be a goal for the work we do? it's such a simple word.happybut i think it is a fine goal: do work that makes us happy, make products that make users happy, happy users buy and make happy businesses. too simple I suppose. 12/12/2000 10:35:16 PM | link
are you in error?Error messages are typically one of the least designed, messiest and unhelpful part of an interface. A Review of Error Messages breaks down the wrongs and rights of erorr messages, and provides some excellent examples of each.12/8/2000 10:51:29 AM | link that sweater you wore every day in eleventh gradewrongwaygoback.com has created a short index of the major 'blog players and organized it within the metaphor of a junior high school. Like many metaphors it gets stretched out as things that don't quite fit into their category get shoved in-- but like that polyeser blend sweater you wore every day in eleventh grade, it seems to snap back into shape by the next wearing-- or the next section anyhow.12/8/2000 08:02:49 AM | link
huh?one of the oddest websites from one of the most influencial minds.Welcome to PatternLanguage.com 12/1/2000 06:04:30 PM | link curled up with a good book
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