From: Gleanings
To: fellow travellers
Subject: Gleanings: On the Road to Morocco

OPENING THANG

Well, folks I'm off to Morocco this afternoon for a two week vacation with my handsome husband. Normally this would mean you'd go gleanless, but NO! I won't let you suffer!

My fabulous partner Noel will be stepping in to keep you happy and gleaned during my absence. Noel is an email junkie like myself, and won't have any trouble keeping you regaled with the same sort of tasty tidbits that have kept http://www.gap-toothed.com, http://www.kickballusa.com, http://www.1minute.org and the ever fabulous http://www.carboniq.com alive and kicking up their collective heels.

gleanings-comments@eleganthack.com will be pointing at him, so be sure to send your intriguing links and insightful feedback there.

Any questions? Great, I'm off! (did I remember to turn off the coffeepot?)

IA MATTERS

Luminant white paper on IA by J. Vodvarka
Designing the User Experience
http://www.luminant.com/whitepapers.htm

Cool paper on why people buy, and what causes those irrational moments we all know and love.
I was very impressed with this, and suspect there may be some important repurcussions for IA.
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20010211mag-econ.html

Macromedia has released the Wireframing Extension for
Dreamweaver, that allows you to build site prototypes for usability testing
in a few hours.
It can be downloaded at http://www.macromedia.com/exchange/dreamweaver/
Search for 'wireframing'.

Information Anxiety 2
By Richard Saul Wurman
The wild man of TED is back, with a sequel to his 1990 bestseller.
http://www.thestandard.com/subject/book/display/0,4294,204,00.html
I'm reading it, and it's a mess. But an entertaining mess.

Presentations from the Summit are up.
http://www.asis.org/Conferences/SUMMITFINAL/

USABILITY MATTERS

Color Deficient Vision
http://www.visibone.com/colorblind/
Safe web colours for colour-deficient vision
http://innovate.bt.com/people/rigdence/colours/

• Donald Norman on learner-centered design
“The traditional course is run by a professor, an instructor, who organizes the course material in some logical method and gives lecture materials and assigns readings. This is an approach that we can call either 'teacher-centric,' or maybe, 'content-centric.' And it fails to take into account the way people learn. The first step in learner-centric is to understand how learning takes place. Much modern research in cognitive science shows that people learn by doing. So it is very important that people learn not by reading a book, and not by listening to a lecture, but by doing tasks that can engage the mind.”
http://www.elearningpost.com/elthemes/norman.asp

NEWS & COMMENTARY

Congress and Cookies
A new bill working its way through Congress could change the way you track
your customers as they surf the Web. The legislation would, among other
things, mandate that Web sites obtain consumer consent before using
third-party services to track visitors' online journeys with cookies.
http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID=2494

Nasdaq Plunges at Open
Greater-than-expected inflation and worse-than-expected earnings for Nortel are combining to send tech stocks much lower.
http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,21392,00.html

Don't Return to Sender, Please
Most people leave forwarding addresses when they move in the "real" world.
But when it comes to cyber moves, less than one-third of Internet users
notify Web sites and e-mail newsletters of new e-mail addresses. This
means that millions of e-mails are missing their mark--and their audience.
http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID=2488

EVENTS- BAY AREA

"Legal Ins & Outs for Startups and Entrepreneurs"
Networking Event/ Educational Seminar/ Audience Round-table

You would normally pay $375 an hour to get advice from a lawyer.
Attend this event for $25 and network with fellow entrepreneurs,
enjoy food/beverages, listen to an educational seminar covering
legal issues for entrepreneurs and then participate in a round
table discussion about company formation, intellectual property
protection, non-disclosure agreements, raising venture capital...
what ever YOU want to talk about!
http://www.StartupUniversity.com/sfbay

Jacqueline Kessel, Founder of HiTech Law
Food/Beverages/Networking 7pm
Top 10 Legal Questions Presentation: 8pm
Audience Roundtable 830 - 930pm
Wednesday, February 21st
Fee: $25 Includes Food & Beverages!
http://www.StartupUniversity.com/sfbay

APROPOS OF NOTHING

because people hav a need to glue things together
http://www.thistothat.com/

I used to do a thing on the graphixgrrls list called site du jour. here a bunch of them....

pretty
http://www.webproductions.com/photo/

to me this is exquisite and amazing and exactly what the web is all about..
bizarre little human pages... the question is does it have *no* design at
all, or is it beautifully designed.
http://www.rhythm.com/~julius/

this is a extraordinary and beautiful use of the web to showcase an artist's
fine art work
http://www.photomontage.com/

beautiful tecnolicious
http://www.nike.com/idstart/
100 % dhtml. they boot anything that's not 4.x+.

Today's site du jour deserves a little time... it a collection of W.W.II letters
written to and from the designer's father while he was at war. The design in
ever way supports the story, and the little icons accompanying each letter
gives you a feeling for the writers.
http://www.private-art.com/

posted by Christina Wodtke 2/16/2001 08:36:11 AM

From: Gleanings
To: vday sufferers
Subject: Gleanings: IA and me

OPENING THANG

It's a light day in glean land, as we had a party last night and I'm feeling "delicate"

but my article got published!

feel free to write me and tell me how I got it wrong.

IA MATTERS

Peterme points at

"Designing for Information Foragers: A Behavioral Model for Information Seeking on the World Wide Web".

This paper explains and elaborates a behavioral model for understanding how people look for information on the Web. The first half briefly reviews a wide range key research to provide a broader context for understanding human information seeking behavior and a starting point for further exploration. The second part proposes a model for organizing design ideas based on this research.

NEWS AND COMMENTARY

Editor & Publisher: Yes, Interactivity Really Is Good for Your Site.
Steve Outing. New research offers some rationale for making your site more
interactive. Studies of the psychological aspects of new media suggest that
empowering online users can make them trust and feel better about content as
presented in online media.

Useit.Com: From January 24, 1999; Differences Between Print Design and Web
Design

NY Times: Fighting Free Music, Europeans Take Aim at Personal Computers.
While American music producers pursue their marathon court battle against
Napster, European composers and record companies are opening an entirely
different front in the war against unauthorized copying: the personal
computers that do the actual work.

APRPOS OF NOTHING

posted by Christina Wodtke 2/15/2001 08:31:10 AM

From: Gleanings
To: Small Twisted Things
Subject: Gleanings: rants, icons and fuzzy squished kittens

OPENING THANG

Rant #215. Do usability testing at the beginning of a project, not just at the end. Too many redesigns break what was already working. People would rather keep using something broken they've already learned how to cope with than have to learn something completely new. In a Jupiter Consumer Survey, 44 percent of respondents indicated that they react negatively to changes in site layout, functionality, and look-and-feel, with 24 percent of total respondents exploring alternative sites as a direct result of the relaunch. Do you really want to lose 24% of your customer base? Do you?

The Right Time for Research: The Beginning
http://www.clickz.com/article/cz.3290.html
"Now that the rush to be on the Web is ceding to a more reasoned,
disciplined approach, 'speed to market' is being replaced by 'Is there a market?' And smart companies are finding that there is no better way to find out what their customers and prospects might need than by asking
them."

BTW, my loooong blog on Peter's ASIS&T report has generated some interesting feedback, and I've been slapping it up on the blog when people say I may. check it out.
http://www.eleganthack.com/blog/index.html

USABILITY MATTERS

Justifying user centred design: Calculating cost benefits
http://www.usability.serco.com/trump/methods/integration/costbenefits.htm

Email is very important to a lot of people and companies. However, very little usability research has been done on email, specifically email subject lines. This article is a summary of a research report written by WebWord on the topic and contains several results. The basic finding from the research is that effective email subject lines are very short, very meaningful, and personal.
http://www.webword.com/moving/subjectlines.html

You resource for desiging usable useful and acessible web sites.
http://usability.gov/index.html

DESIGN MATTERS

The new face of European signage
http://www.aaae.com/depts/publications/airmags/am5693/signage.htm
"Schiphol uses about 100 pictogram symbols to back up its written messages -- for the benefit of travelers who know neither Dutch nor English. But the symbols themselves have their limitations. 'The problem with pictograms,' the Schiphol spokesman said, 'is that they are not always standardized internationally. You have to learn them, as you have to learn any other language. ...In comparison with the U.S., Europeans have always relied heavily on symbols to get messages across. One theory is that, while the Europeans have had to meet the different linguistic needs of a variety of nations living on a relatively small continent, the U.S. has sought to use the English language as a means of assimilating immigrants."

http://swissposters.library.cmu.edu/Swiss/
Ahhh... posters! "The Swiss Poster Collection at Carnegie Mellon University is a critical selection of more than 300 works representing the Swiss Posters of the Year competition and other Swiss posters from 1971 to the present. The collection is for students, teachers, scholars, and thegeneral viewer to explore the art of the poster and its leading expression in Swiss graphic design." from xplane.com/xblog

COG-SCI MATTERS

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
http://www.connect.net/georgen/20maslow.htm
"In the late 1960s Abraham Maslow developed a hierarchical theory of human
needs. Maslow is a humanistic psychologist believing that people are not
controlled by mechanical forces (the stimuli and reinforcement forces of
behaviorism) or unconscious instinctual impulses of psychoanalysis. Maslow
focused on human potential, believing the humans strive to reach the
highest levels of their capabilities. People seek the frontiers of
creativity, and strive to reach the highest levels of consciousness and
wisdom."

NEWS & COMMENTARY

Salon: Napster: Hanging by a thread.
Napster is still alive -- but just barely. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
ruled for the recording industry on virtually every point of law at issue:
Napster users are infringing on recording industry copyrights, and a
preliminary injunction shutting down Napster is not just "warranted, but
required."
http://www.salon.com/tech/log/2001/02/12/napster/index.html

Mappa.Mundi Magazine: World Wide Wunderkammer.
In their new project, WonderWalker: A Global Online Wunderkammer, Walczak and
Wattenberg apply this old metaphor to the Internet. The results are
fascinating. WonderWalker is a visual map of icons. People create icons and
lay those icons in a place that is appropriate on the map.
http://mappa.mundi.net/reviews/wonderwalker/

Industry Standard: Just the Text, Ma'am.
So an impatient Wolff took it upon himself to do what Salon's staff couldn't
seem to: make the site quick and easy to use. In less than an hour, the
35-year-old New York Web developer wrote a program that strips out Salon's
tables, ads and graphics and leaves just the raw text.
http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,22016,00.html
from tomalak.org

Newsbytes: Is B2C doomed to fail in Australia?
Retail ecommerce may never succeed in Australia because of its
geographical isolation and the limited size of the local market.
http://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?f=VS&art_id=905356433&rel=true

APROPOS OF NOTHING

This works. it blows my mind, and makes me vaguely anxious, but it works.
http://mail2web.com/

Who has not been stricken with the expressive grace of Japanese Bonsai? Though once the sole province of Bonsai masters within Japan, Bonsai plants have been available to fortunate consumers throughout the world for some time. With this in mind, we are proud to now offer to you the animal complement of this art form; the Bonsai Kitten.
http://www.bonsaikitten.com/

SpamMotel
"Now you can stop junk e-mail, a.k.a. spam, from cluttering up your inbox. SpamMotel's unique patent-pending technology lets you know exactly where the sender got your e-mail address, and lets you block all e-mail from that sender with just a click of your mouse. It also blocks e-mail from anyone the sender gave, or more likely sold, your e-mail address to." http://www.spammotel.com/
from xplane.com/xblog
posted by Christina Wodtke 2/13/2001 08:11:42 AM

From: Gleanings
To: Big Brains
Subject: Gleanings: merely academic

OPENING THANG

***Peter wrote up some of his thoughts set off by the ASIS&T conference.
http://peterme.com/asis/2001summit_intro.html
which, when I read them, got my poor little brain a popping
(see "reflection and responses")
http://www.eleganthack.com/blog/2001_02_01_pastblog.html#2319523
which set off victor
http://www.noisebetweenstations.com/personal/weblogs/
and then Andrés wrote and I posted that....
http://www.eleganthack.com/blog/2001_02_01_pastblog.html#2319523
and peter linked back to me.

busy little weekend. you can tell when it's rainy, can't you....

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE MATTERS

***User Modeling & Cognitive Analysis
Why do user/operator modeling or cognitive task analysis?
Terminology: Cognitive task analysis refers both to the process of analyzing
human performance from a cognitive point of view and the resulting product
of the analysis (e.g., a GOMS model).
http://tortie.me.uiuc.edu/IE342/2.modeling.html

***On applying Don Norman's The Seven Stages of Action
http://www.it.bton.ac.uk/staff/lp22/CS133/models.html

***Good overview of GOMS
GOMS is a family of techniques proposed by Card, Moran, and Newell (1983),
for modeling and describing human task performance. GOMS is an acronym that
stands for Goals, Operators, Methods, and Selection Rules, the components of
which are used as the building blocks for a GOMS model.
http://www.usabilityfirst.com/goms/

NEWS & COMMENTARY

***Web Informant: How to make money with an online news web site.
Robin Miller, editor-in-chief of OSDN.com. The best way to make money with an
online news site is to use a revenue model closer to those used by free
alternative newspapers than to those used by large-circulation dailies. This
is not a bad thing, since many small weekly papers produce excellent
journalism.
http://strom.com/awards/237.html

***AtNewYork: The Myths and Realities of Peer-to-Peer Networking.
Although helped by the wild popularity of consumer file-sharing programs such
as Napster and Instant Messenger, P2P has different uses in the corporate
world but is similarly ushering in social transformations of how people
communicate and build networks.
http://www.atnewyork.com/news/article/0,1471,8471_580941,00.html

IDEA CORNER

***goofy idea
http://www.realuser.com/cgi-bin/ru.exe/_/homepages/users/passface.htm
and why it may not work
http://www.choisser.com/faceblind/
variation
http://www.passlogix.com/

***and not so goofy. napster gets a little brother.
www.flycode.com

***and this guy has a ton of amazing ideas
Michael Dertouzos, director, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. If you think the astonishing wave of change you've been living through has run its course, think again, says this digital guru.
http://www.accenture.com/xd/xd.asp?it=enWeb&xd=ideas/outlook/6.2000/dert.xml

APROPOS OF NOTHING

***Tracy sent me this link some time ago. it's pretty amazing.
http://www.360degrees.org/

***from the people who brought you CPU's with a cigarette lighter built in
http://europe.cnn.com/2001/TRAVEL/NEWS/02/06/airlines.russia.reut/index.html

Today's Media Nugget featured this:

Repo Man 1984
"Bullshit! You're a white suburban punk. Just like me."
Repo Man entered the pop-culture consciousness as a defining artifact of the Reagan '80s: a punk anthem showcasing societal alienation in America. The bastard child of Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider, this apocalyptic treat revolves around the disaffected Otto (perhaps Emilio Estevez' finest performance), who joins a team of repo men tracking down a Chevy Malibu with mysteriously glowing cargo in its trunk. With rapier dialog, surprisingly beautiful cinematography, and a perfect-pitch soundtrack, Repo Man rewards repeated viewing.
"The more you drive, the less intelligent you are."
-- Peter Merholz

If you haven't seen it, see it. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/6305971048/medianuggeofthedA/107-1728894-9266936
You also *need* the soundtrack. A prefect punk primer.

posted by Christina Wodtke 2/12/2001 07:52:28 AM

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