From: Gleanings
To: consumers
Subject: Gleanings: only two industries refer to their customers as users...

OPENING THANG

great thread on which countries are getting online and which are not, and some interesting insights on why:

http://www.acm.org/archives/wa.cgi?A1=ind0012c&L=chi-web#8
and
http://www.acm.org/archives/wa.cgi?A1=ind0012c&L=chi-web#9

I know in France the number of folks who use the internet (as opposed to minitel) went up dramatically once the ISP's went to flat rate unlimited access. the charge for local calls still hampers them, though....

Oh, and I put up some Tufte quotes from Monday's seminar
http://www.eleganthack.com/blog/

CUSTOMERS MATTER

very important ideas in this article.
Information Week: The Customer As Co-Developer.
http://www.informationweek.com/816/16uwcl.htm

this is one of the key premises of carboniq.com-- the customer should be embraced as a codeveloper. they know their own needs better than anyone....

ZDNet E-Business: Hilton.com: Help when and where you need it.
Hilton.com creates an especially good customer experience. The hotel site
delivers help that specifically relates to the page customers are on, making
it easier for them to complete the reservation process without having to
contact a customer service representative.
http://www.zdnet.com/ecommerce/stories/evaluations/0,10524,2662374,00.html

EVENT

PRACTICING INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport
February 2-4, 2001
http://www.asis.org/Conferences/Summit2001/

"Practicing Information Architecture" is the second in the ASIS&T-sponsored
series of conferences, the largest gatherings of information architecture
professionals. This edition balances practical applications of information
architecture with the big-picture thinking and sparring that electrified the
April 2000 meeting.

"Practicing Information Architecture" features:
* a keynote by Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering
* case studies of IBM.com, United.com and other sites
* presentations addressing such key issues as IA tools, IA metrics, and
content management
* opportunities for break-out sessions and discussions with other
information architects
* an ACIA pre-conference seminar on thesaurus design (separate registration
required)

Early registration closes on December 29, 2000. To register or learn more
about the program, visit the conference web site:
http://www.asis.org/Conferences/Summit2001/

For more information about ASIS&T, the American Society for Information
Science and Technology, visit:
http://www.asis.org

APROPOS OF NOTHING

www.biggerhand.com today asks who is hotter, jakob neilson or tufte

FEEDBACK

Dave Rossi (http://www.jivefly.com) gives permission to print this, his note to Mark Hurst after reading the latest Good Experience

"hiya mark,

i'm compelled to write if only to beg you to lighten up!

while self-anointed gurus like jakob nielsen can get away with it, i find it hard to believe that any internet strategy firm that cares about its clients could espouse the virtues of yahoo's and amazon's design strategies as a panacea for all. it has been and continues to be proven that different site strategies, including varying degrees of rich media and visual design, work for different firms in varying degrees. a once size fits all model for user experience does not equal good strategy. jakob may not believe it, but the people who pay the bills have the stories to prove it.

don't agree? go to a major motion picture website and look at a promo for an upcoming movie. think a bunch of blue links would work here? would you
consider that *not* a good experience?

i'm with you 100% on ease of use and good navigation that enables quick completion of tasks. but when it comes to many successful sites on the web, the technophobic, they're-coming-to-get-us, almost luddite mentality you seem to have taken does not fit.

dave rossi"
posted by Christina Wodtke 12/15/2000 09:51:17 AM

From: Gleanings
To: gui ues
Subject: Gleanings: short clean glean

IA MATTERS

Appeared in my inbox

"In an effort to help build a robust, standardized notation scheme for
information architecture, silverboots has recently published a new white
paper on information architecture notation for managing multiple browser
windows, frames and embedded objects."

The white paper is called Geography Maps and Notation and can be found at
http://www.silverboots.com/whitepapers.html

USABILITY MATTERS

http://www.nada.kth.se/cid/usor/
"This web site contains descriptions of different user oriented methods.
These descriptions are not meant to be exhaustive descriptions that you
could use right after you have visited this web site. They are rather
short summaries with references to more thorough descriptions of these
methods. The purpose of this web-site is to encourage the usage of user
oriented methods in both industry and research projects."

http://monstro.com/presents/versus/
Warning: Online PowerPoint presentation (short). "What we do is all about
communication, right?"

both from xblog.com

NEWS

Inside: The Revolution Is Glorious, and the Sky Is Falling. Get Used To It.
The de facto mission of both journalists and Wall Street analysts and traders
is to oversimplify very complicated subjects, and technology is one
complicated subject that most members of both groups understand dimly. For
both, exaggeration is tempting, an occupational hazard.
http://www.inside.com/jcs/Story?article_id=16873&pod_id=13

Walmart stifles critism
This is what is called autocracy - look it up.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/15419.html

Goodbye Problems, Hello Benefits.
Donald Norman.
http://www.informationweek.com/767/67uwdn.htm
We seldom brag that our home has electricity, indoor toilets, or a paved road to the door. Similarly, we'll someday take computing and communication for granted. All our devices will be interconnected. We will no longer speak of the PC or of the Internet. Hurrah and good riddance.

posted by Christina Wodtke 12/14/2000 09:32:35 AM

From: Gleanings
To: italians
Subject: Gleanings: more words than you can shake a stick at

OPENING THANG

My big news du jour is that I got an article published on sitepoint.com
My article is here
http://www.webmasterbase.com/article.php?aid=302
Please feel free to write me and tell me what you like/don'tlike/would prefer me to write about in the future article@eleganthack.com

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MATTERS

Good article at goodexperience.com this morning on the complexities of computers and technologies.
http://www.goodexperience.com/columns/121300simplifypcs.html

In it, mark hurt points to this quote from a salon article, which I dig a lot:

"A culture of carelessness seems to have taken over in high-tech
America. The personal computer is a shining model of
unreliability because the high-tech industry today actually
exalts sloppiness as a modus operandi."
http://salon.com/tech/feature/2000/12/06/bad_computers/index.html

from xblog--
The Seven Qualities of Highly Successful Web Writing
--> http://clickz.com/cgi-bin/gt/article.html?article=2997
"In future articles I'll write about each one separately, but here's the
list in brief: Clarity, Relevance, Brevity, Scanability and readability,
Consistency, Freedom from errors, Good integration with the site design."

TECH MATTERS

from webmonkey, a suite of useful browser articles

"Will Browsers Ever Not Suck?
http://go.hotwired.com/webmonkey/99/52/index2a.html/eg20001211

... and ...

Why Browsers Haven't Standardized
http://go.hotwired.com/webmonkey/98/38/index1a.html/eg20001211

... and, as a warning, this, which wouldn't be necessary if all those
browsers had only done it right in the first place:

The Browser Chart
http://go.hotwired.com/webmonkey/reference/browser_chart/index.html/eg20001211 "

NEWS

Business Week: Walmart.com vs. Amazon: This Race Isn't Even Close.
Trouble is, the case for Amazon getting crushed by Wal-Mart doesn't stand up
when you do some side-by-side comparing of their Web sites. What's wrong with
Walmart.com? Put simply, it settles for taking orders for the products people
come looking for rather than enticing them to buy things...
http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_51/b3712204.htm

Some former Microsoft "permatemps" will have a little extra dough to
pay off their holiday Visa bills. Microsoft will pay about $97 million
to compensate 8,000 to 12,000 long-term temporary employees for the
stock-purchase plan they never had.
http://tm0.com/thestandard/sbct.cgi?s=64374789&i=284790&d=734101

Adweek: Estee Lauder, Excite Settle Lawsuit.
The dispute stemmed from a lawsuit that Estee Lauder filed in January 1999
accusing Excite, a popular Internet search engine, of selling advertising
rights to "keywords" such as "Estee Lauder" and "Origins," both Estee Lauder
brand names, to other fragrance and cosmetics retailers.
http://www.adweek.com/daily/December/bw/bw122000-3.asp

APROPOS OF NOTHING

I love this play (it came as today's media nugget). Anyone who cares about the power of language should read Stoppard. well, I think so.
http://www.medianugget.com/archive/20001212.html

FEEDBACK

Andi writes--

"I just wrote to one of the two Principles of bytelevel to inform
them that a link was broken. Surely they have better things to do
and most certainly there is someone better to contact, but I have
no idea who they are and how to contact them.
The link is http://www.bytelevel.com if you follow the article it
takes you to
http://www.bytelevel.com/reports/weighing/ which has a broken
image link on it.
My observation is this...
recently there seems to be a new trend in which websites are
omitting the (call it whatever you like) webmaster link to inform
the company that a link is no longer functioning correctly."

I quite agree. more and more websites are making it harder for users to talk to them, when they should be doing the opposite.

mike writes--

">mike "the finger" monterio

monteiro. monterio would be Italian."

Sorry for making you Italian, Miguel. Repatriatism happens.
posted by Christina Wodtke 12/13/2000 09:21:49 AM

From: Gleanings
To: readers
Subject: Gleanings: loquacious and elated

OPENING THANG

I promised to reveal what was keeping me busy-- now the story can be told. I've left Hot Studio to join a small user-experience group called Carbon IQ (http://www.carboniq.com). I'm extraordinarily excited. Carbon IQ is a group of extremely smart people who care deeply about crafting positive human experiences (sometimes hard to find in this technology-centric industry). Anyhow, you can now hire me and my fabulous partners for information architecture and user experience research by contacting the company! Woo Hoo!!!!

now back to the show:

a NUA has graced my door stop, starting with an interesting editorial--
Oh, that internet thing... what a goofy fad!
http://www.nua.ie/surveys/analysis/weekly_editorial/archives/issue1no156.html

My #1 least favorite sentence (okay, after "we're out of coffee") is "the web is all about 'blank'" (such as, "the web is all about community" or "the web is all about eccomerce").
That's like saying "art is all about blank" or "books are all about blank." It's just a medium, and it holds stuff. Lots of different kinds of stuff. I'm gonna start hitting people over the head with a stick.

NY Times: Coming to Grips With the World Wide Web.
Several executives made bold predictions for the Web. "It's like C-Span for
everyone," one said. Seven years and many business propositions later, the
Web's uses and limits are still being tested. But it is now possible to make a
number of observations informed by experience.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/11/technology/11INTR.html

USABILITY MATTERS
a new paper that you can use to club the heads of marketing or nifty-flavored designers
http://www.bytelevel.com
It's not very rigorous, but it does at least point out the price of scripting in pageload time.

(I tend to think of designers in two camps-- the niftys and the communicators. the niftys make huge flash intros with no content, the communicators make beautiful interfaces that make information make sense. of course if you disagree, you can always flame me and tell me why I'm on drugs -- yrondrugs@eleganthack.com)

personalizationdotcom put up the presentations from the Sf conference.
http://www.personalization.com/

EVENTS

great resource from tomalak

A regularly updated listing of different events around the world that relate
to the stories posted on his newsletter.
http://www.tomalak.org/conference.html

NEWS

ZDNet: IT staff work longer, produce less
IT professionals are working longer hours but producing less,
according to a new report on global IT trends.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2661710,00.html?chkpt=zdhpnews01

Internet Week: Return of the middleman
Despite the promotion of the Internet as a direct-selling tool, many
companies are actively encouraging middlemen to join their supply
chains.
http://www.internetwk.com/story/INW20001201S0002

Verizon: Small firms use Web for promotion, not ecommerce
Small businesses are setting up websites primarily to advertise and
promote their business, according to a new study.
http://newscenter.verizon.com/proactive/newsroom/release.vtml?id=4646

PC Data: US consumers to buy more gifts online
Online consumers in the US plan to buy more gifts over the Web this
holiday season than the last, according to research by PC Data.
http://www.pcdataonline.com/press/pcdo113000.asp

NY Times: They Built Online Meeting Places But the Venture Capital Didn't
Stay.
But four years and dozens of disappointments later, community portals, as they
came to be known, have fallen, and hard. The Globe, iVillage and others in the
doldrums have learned that while community is an attractive notion, it does
not transfer easily to the commercially minded Web.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/11/technology/11FOLK.html

NY Times: New Economy: How Reality Fits With Fantasy in Cyberspace.
In the biggest collaborative act of creation since M. C. Escher drew a pair of
hands drawing each other, the World Wide Web and the so-called new economy
have looked to the literature of science fiction for a sense of direction and
of style. The cross-fertilization worked both ways.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/11/technology/11NECO.html

IF YOU MADE IT THIS FAR

mike "the finger" monterio pointed out I misspelled my subject line. i want to remind folks that this is a one woman show... i'm dyslexic and sporadic and have no editor... and no ads to pay one with. until that changes (if it ever does-- could you trust me if I took ads?) I'm probably going to reveal my foolish spelling and my quirky grammar on a semi-weekly basis. I'm hoping that adds to my charm.

posted by Christina Wodtke 12/12/2000 08:41:57 AM

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