June 2000
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san francisco days |
a new face
FEED: Tomorrow's Desktop is a cool article on the future of interfaces from Stephen Johnson, including quotes from various folks on the front, such as Harlan Hugh, developer of The Brain, and Dan Ancona, evangelist for the vizbang project. Good meat here.6/29/2000 11:12:54 PM
Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com) the sequel
So faithful readers know I spent my flooz foolishly at B&N. Two days later, I decided I wanted another book and I ordered it from Amazon, my old standby. Guess what. I got my book from Amazon. No sign of my book from B&N. So I called them. I went through the maze of voicemail, only to arrive at my natural final destination: a dial tone
"if you'd like to make a call, please hang up and try again"
So I call again and pretend that I have a rotary, as I so often do to avoid voice mail. I get a voice, "barnesandnoblemayihelpyou".
"Oh, hi, I just got hung up on by the voice mail, and thought I'd try a person instead of a machine"
"tracking number please"
"guess I should of stuck with the machine"
yes I actually said that. no, she did not respond.
So I stare at the confirmation mail, trying to find the tracking number. Wait... there it is... in the subject line! Yes, the order number is NOWHERE in the actual body of the mail. I give her the number.
"That shipment has not left the warehouse"
"Okay, do you know when it will?"
"No, that shipment has not left the warehouse. "
goddmamn, I did get a machine!
"So, since it hasn't left the warehouse, can I change the shipping address? I've started a new job and I'd like it to come to my work"
"what is the address mam?"
I give it, she repeats I , I say okay, she hangs up on me. cool.
Today I received this mail
"We're sorry. We find that we're unable to ship the following in the time
frame we expected. Below are revised details on your order. We will email you as soon as the title ships and apologize for any inconvenience this causes. In the meantime, you can contact us at service@bn.com. Or, if you prefer, you may call our Customer Service Center at ..." they'll be shipping it tomorrow. Maybe. I don't believe anything they say anymore. I guess I already proved I wouldn't shop there again by shopping at Amazon the day after my B&N purchase, but I think now I'll also concentrate on talking others into avoiding my experience.
bye bye, B&N, hope you learn customer service before you go under. Now I'm off to fuckedcompany.com to put their URL in my pick list.
6/22/2000 9:39:19 PM
found sumptin cool
IBM/Ease of Use/Design...6/20/2000 9:12:20 PM
not yet
Recent Industry Standard article states over half the web
audience is at 600x800 or less, connecting at 33.6 or less, 54% at 16 bit ... be
kind, y'all
get the story here: TheStandard.com: The Right Tools For The Job
News on browsers and plug-ins as well... but don't get too excited about
flash's 97%. It's all the flashes combined, and I saw a flash 4 site crash a
flash 3 enabled browser just today....
6/19/2000 8:39:23 PM
web conventions 2
JJG sends an article on web conventions here on peterme's
site. He also questions the location of the search box (but agrees it lives as a box and reminds me of tabs and shopping carts... Taylor points out "skip intro" before flash openings. Keep 'em coming! Maybe I'll write an article...
6/19/2000 6:59:24 PM
web conventions
no I'm not talking thurderlizards. The opening paragraph of this issue of A List Apart made me wonder...other than the left hand nav, how many established web interface conventions are there?
- the yahoo hierarchy
- more like this
- next
- back
- the yahoo breadcrumb
- back to top
- submit (to many people's chagrin)
- top nav is global
- logo links to homepage
- logo is in top left
- search box is in top left and is a text box with "search" written under it
- jobs can be found at the bottom of every page, or at least the homepage
got any more? Send them to me
6/19/2000 8:07:30 AM
pot and kettle
reading Future Focus:
Viva Aus Vegas on project cool today, I was amazed at how Project Cool was
making exactly the same mistake they were complaining about in the article...
ruining the point of their article on inappropriate advertising with bad banner
use. Banners are a necessary evil, especially for content sites, but there is a
smart and a foolish way to handle them. Anyhow, dashing off to work so follow this link to read it and also my annoyed (and badly
spelled) comment at the bottom of the article. More on this subject later.
6/17/2000 9:17:16 AM
burning a hole in my inbox
Well back in January, I was given a wedding shower present of Flooz. What is Flooz you ask? Well, it's essentially an online gift certificate or fake currency that can be spent at any of their partners. Why is is called flooz? Don't ask...I've got my account number, which I wrote on a post-it and stuck on my monitor with a big "Spend This" written above it. I've tried twice before to spend it,and once I thought I'd succeeded, only to find my CD's hadn't arrived and I still had this Flooz in my account. Sigh. But I'm ready to try again.
On the homepage I try to figure out where to go... I finally find under the heading "stores" on one of the global nav's it says "spend flooz." On the next page I'm supposed to click "got flooz" rather than the "send flooz" but spend and send and my poor brain that though I was about to shop... Well, there is always the back button.
This takes me to a classic yahoo-style hierarchy displaying the stores I can visit. I select barnes and noble. So I get a page telling me about the store, other than going to the store. Okay, I scan over the page. I get to the button that says, visit the store. I get a warning splash page that tells me I'm leaving Flooz, and asks me to click again. Gee do I really really really want to leave flooz?
Finally I'm at B&N, with a flooz frame along the bottom (in case I want to go back to that heavenly site!). Okay, to give them some credit, it also has my account info there.
So, 8 clicks to get to barnes and noble.
Who then promptly almost lost the "sale"!
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| click to see large image |
I wanted to pay with the flooz, but on the payment option page, they had a radio button for type of credit card, and no way to select the flooz option that is to the right of the credit card list. So I kept getting this great error
I couldn't pay for my stuff, even though I had 40 bucks of flooz, and only a 38 dollar order! (the screenshot was made after, when I realized I had to write about this...
can you guess how I made it work kids?
yep, I clicked pay by phone. yum, intuitive. Sigh.
6/14/2000 9:20:59 AM
beep beep
yet another fine collection of stuff on usability. Especially excited about his paper on trust
Peter "Beep" Boersma - Homepage
6/13/2000 7:42:16 AM
those wacky librarians
Wow! What a fine collection of information architecture resources, white papers, and the no longer hard-to-find IA glossary.Argus Center for Information
Architecture
6/12/2000 2:51:59 PM
Palm of Hand
UI guidelines for the palm pilot. thanks Kayla Black for pointing these out.offtopic...anyone else love Kawabata's palm of hand stories? Are they available for the palm?
6/11/2000 11:36:00 PM
eh
I've decided the Alertbox is just a blog out of control. His latest is particularly rambling.6/10/2000 12:43:35 PM
less is more
Okay, this has nothing to do with IA, I just want to be able to find this site when I feel like it, and I'm betting you will too (see the honkworm entry) 5k was a content to build engaging websites that would be 5k or under... and engaging they were. Sometimes designers need constraints... (take that sapient, you slow loading dhtml monster)6/10/2000 11:00:01 AM
quit yr excuses
Stumbled over this fine article that gives you rebuttals to all the arguments against user testing including some of my favorites, such as "Users don't know what they want... we'll tell them" and "We don't have time/money for user testing." Check it out and be armed for your next battle with management:
Interaction Architect: Knowledge Base
So, I know I harp on user research and usability, like, all the time. And
some might be wondering, "She's an IA. Why does she carry on about all this
human factors stuff?"
Glad you asked. I think of usability folks as
researchers of human behavior, and IAs as designers of human interfaces. We are
joined at the hip, really. By gathering a rich understanding of how users behave
we can create humanized information spaces. Sure, the dewy decimal system is
usable, but is it user-friendly? And if you had a choice between going to a card
catalog and looking up a book, or going to a search engine and searching on a
word, which would you choose? Or better yet, would you prefer to ask a friendly
looking librarian for help?
At the ASIS
summit on IA,
Jennifer Flemming told an interesting story from the days when she was a
librarian. She was working in the children's section, and a little girl came up
and asked her for "the big purple book I was reading last week" Jennifer was
able to find it, but could a search engine? It is only by understanding how each
unique group of users conducts their searches (or attempts to complete their
tasks) that we can begin to build successful interfaces.
IA can never been a
pure intellectual exercise. It will always have to be tied to our understanding
of how users behave in a given situation... which is why IA can't exist without
usability testing and user research. But feel to disagree with me.
6/9/2000 9:28:24 PM
you think you know someone...
Because I'm interested in collaborative filtering and progressive profiling and suchnot, I was drawn to this sitem o v i e l e n s
however, 155 ratings later, it still can't predict what movies I like. I suspect part of the problem is they ask you to say whether or not you think it was a good movie, rather than "did you like it"... two different things. I'm sure we can all think of movies we saw, had to admit that it was a good movie but a tortuous 2 hours. I've been avoiding "Boys Don't Cry" for just that reason. I also suspect they are missing the important option"would not see it if you paid me" as opposed to merely "not seen".
I also managed to thwart emode.com... The What Breed of Dog Are You? test said I was a happy go lucky pug (?!?!) Maybe I'm just difficult, or maybe the fine art of predicting what people like has a long way to go. (Or maybe I'm a pug? Argh!)
6/8/2000 9:28:30 AM
everyone's a critic
This is got to be one of the best opening lines of an article ever "While I like to kick websites and dogs, I am generally nice to children. " Lou Rosenfeld goes to town with Toys "R" Us's new website...A Closer Look: Critical Reviews of Corporate Websites - - WebBusiness Magazine May 23, 2000
Go Lou!
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