March 2006 Archives

New York Times dot com designer Khoi Vinh discusses the 37 Signals manifesto, Get Real (Subtraction: C’mon Feel the Signalz) and the ensuing discussion in his blog’s comments illuminate the controversy Fried and company’s increasingly strident calls-to-arms have stirred up. Vinh tends to admire where the 37s gang is coming from:

[I]t’s hard to deny “Getting Real” as, at least, important documentation of this particular point in the evolution of design and development for the Web. You could say that historically, it’s not to be missed, and that would be true; if you want to have a first hand look at how this industry’s working methods are changing, this is the book to read. But if you’re resigned to being passively buoyed by shifting trends, then you can skip it: before too long, anything of consequence to be found between its digital covers will be fully dispersed in standard practices. It’s Jason Fried’s world, after all. We just develop in it.

---

Shimone just sent this guide to printing sections of a web page around to our developers’ list with the comment, “You know this is going to come up.”

According to Boing Boing, the recent LA student immigration protests have been organized on MySpace. The revolution will be smartmobbed?

Update: Here’s danah boyd on the same topic. Check her next post too, in which MySpace inadvertantly takes down the NPR when Tom sends the community there.

Having met Rashmi Sinha at SXSW and again at the IA Summit I’ve been interested in understanding what she’s working on. She’s brilliant so her work product must be equally compelling. Sure enough, her company Uzanto makes a product called MindCanvas that’s used to conduct user research in a game-like way (check out the testimonials on the linked page) and then present them in various compelling interactive formats.

Something to keep in mind when you want to understand what your users expect or care about.

uploaded by erin_designr.

Erin Malone took this nice pic of me at the IA Summit.

The summit was great. Learned a lot. Met very cool people. I’ll probably write up some key takeaways as I digest my thoughts over the next week or so.

tags: iasummit2006, iasummit

I’ve just ducked down to my room on the 8th floor of the Hyatt Regency Vancouver to get some money to buy drink tickets at the welcoming cocktail party at the IA Summit.

Ran into David Weinberger, who’s been refining the plenary keynote he’ll be giving to kick off the official proceedings tomorrow. We talked about some of the emerging themes in his current book project (called Everything is Miscellaneous and eagerly awaited in this corner) and he mentioned that he’s noticed recently that marketing and particularly PR folks seems (finally) ready to board the Cluetrain.

“If blogging were to change PR,” he said (quotation approximate), “that would be big.”

“Let’s hope that PR doesn’t change blogging, though,” I said.

“It already has, to some extent” he kinda replied.

“We wouldn’t want blogs to become the silencer on the gun of PR,” I said, gesturing with my hands as if screwing a silencer onto a gun, something I would have no idea how to do in real life, but I’ve seen a lot of movies with Nazis and gangsters in them.

“That’s a great image,” he said. “You should blog it.”

tags: iasummit2006, iasummit

I just spent all day in a seminar led by Kevin Cheng and Jane Jao, both currently at Yahoo! Local, on the subject of Creating Conceptual Comics: Storytelling and Techniques and I came away from it with some great ideas about how to communicate web interface and functionality ideas at the early, prototype stage of a project using comics.

The presenters articulated the problem this way:

At Yahoo!, we’ve used a combination of tools such as requirements documents, personas, user scenarios and storyboards with varying degrees of success. For example, requirements and personas were rarely consumed or were interpreted differently between individuals. Traditional storyboards detailing screen by screen progressions created a focus on the interface, rather than the concept.

The solution offered was to use comics as a relatively cheap and easy method intermediate between video and static sketches, and avoiding the problems of traditional storyboards which, by “detailing screen by screen progressions created a focus on the interface, rather than the concept.”

They taught us some principals of communicating with comics, and some key elements of a visual vocabulary and then assigned us in groups to brainstorm, script, and illustrate a scenario using storytelling and the comic-art techniques we’d just learned.

After lunch we paired up with other groups and acted like user focus-groups, giving feedback on the scenarios and suggesting what we found useful, confusing, etc.

The workshop taught me a lot and I can think of a few ways we could employ these techniques at Extractable to get buy-in for some hypothetical user-interfaces, both within our multidisciplinary teams and with our clients.

tags: iasummit2006, iasummit

Tanya Raybourn (Pixelcharmer) points to Waterfall2006 in her Field Notes blog:

This one, Waterfall 2006, sounds unmissable.

After years of being disparaged by some in the software development community, the waterfall process is back with a vengeance. YouÕve always known a good waterfall-based process is the right way to develop software projects. Come to the Waterfall 2006 conference and see how a sequential development process can benefit your next project. Learn how slow, deliberate handoffs (with signatures!) between groups can slow the rate of change on any project so that development teams have more time to spend on anticipating user needs through big, upfront design.

Seems like there are some great sessions planned:

• Very Large Projects: How to Go So Slow No One Knows YouÕll Never Deliver
• User Interaction: It Was Hard to Build, It Should Be Hard to Use
• User Stories and Other Lies Users Tell Us

As you would expect, thereÕs no concurrent sessions.

Be sure to check out the description of the keynote: Put Testing Where it Belongs - At the End.

Register now, while seats are still available!

I’m headed up to Vancouver tomorrow for my first IA Summit. I’ll be presenting two posters there this time (one was submitted on our behalf by a former colleague). For posterity (and in case I lose the poster tube on the plane) here are links to the Acrobat files containing the two posters.

• Social Software in the Enterprise (description)
• A Case Study for Architecting to Users’ Concerns (description)

tags: iasummit2006, iasummit, presentation

Finally signed up for an account at Boxes and Arrows (the premier journal of information architecture on the web), so this makes yet another place where a rapidly ossifying bio of mine is bound to fall off my radar.

If I ever get my comprehensive personal site organized, I may need a big list of “identity” pages out there, just to remind me to update them from time to time.

I know it’s probably just because I’m racing around to get a bunch of things done between trips (to Austin, Vancouver, and Utah), but this article (Be smarter at work, slack off) sounds like the perfect advice to me right about now.

Oh, man. I can't wait to see Snakes on a Plan, starring Samuel L. Jackson. When Mike Stillman posted a link about this movie to the merry punster list, I couldn't tell if it was for real or just a high-concept joke.

Then MichaelZ posted a follow up link from a screenwriter who's turning "snakes on a plane" into a mantra, and it looks like it is for real.

Here's another guy's idea of how the script might look:

SAMUEL L JACKSON: You've got to listen to me. There are SNAKES... on the PLANE!

CUT TO: Samuel L Jackson punching a snake. The snake is wearing a pair of jeans.

Jackson finally knocks the snake out. He rummages through the snake's pockets and is shocked by what he finds.

SAMUEL L JACKSON: Oh my God. This snake has a PILOT'S LICENCE!

CUT TO: Samuel L. Jackson is talking on one of those phones they have in the seatbacks of planes. Tears are streaming down his face.

SAMUEL L JACKSON: Listen, sweetie, I know I haven't been the best father. I'm so sorry. I don't think I'm going to get through this, and I wanted you to know something: I love you very, very much. Oh, and by the way, there are motherfucking SNAKES! On the goddamn PLANE!

VOICEOVER: Coming soon: SNAKES ON A PLANE. Because on a plane... nobody can hear the snakes.

If we accept that it’s true that these are the “four modes of seeking information”:

1. Known-item
2. Exploratory
3. DonÕt know what you need to know
4. Re-finding

Then Donna Maurer’s recent article in Boxes and Arrows offers some excellent advice on how to accommodate each of those four modes.

(I say if only because I am inherently suspicious of all such ordinal systems - there are 12, no seven personality types, no nine, no two - but having said that, I still love any such organizing scheme, if only for the sake of argument.)

Here’s a snapshot of my panel at South by Southwest Interactive (D.I.Y. Media: Consumer is the Producer). Now I’ve got a few days to be productive before I’m off to Vancouver for the IA Summit.

I majored in philosophy in college. At Princeton nearly all liberal arts majors (and many of the engineering students too) have to write a senior thesis to graduate.

I was interested in philosophy of language and wrote a thesis called “Is Metaphor Necessary for Communication?” In it I argued that metaphor was much more than a rhetorical frill but in fact constituted a primary building-block of communication.

Briefly put, I suggested that it’s only through comparisons with existing shared ideas that new ideas (ideas from one person that are new to another) are introduced into a dialogue between two people

In Analogy as the Core of Cognition, a Stanford presidential lecture, Douglas Hofstadter makes a rather similar point:

To me, however, analogy is anything but a bitty blip — rather, it’s the very blue that fills the whole sky of cognition — analogy is everything, or very nearly so, in my view.

I find it particularly interesting that he illustrates some of his points by discussing the process of translation, which was also a topic in my thesis.

Seems like a lot of the Web 2.0 skeptics come out of Australia. Not sure why that is. Personally, I hate the whole "2.0" concept. It's already played out as a meme and it means nothing (or everything, which has the same effect).

Now a blog called Squash claims to have detected a sign of Web 2.0 fizzling.

Things definitely felt hype-y at SXSW this year. While some of that optimism and energy is based on real advances and growth, in some ways it reminded me a lot of the 1999 energy when everyone with a web idea seemed to think they could launch it, get millions of users and flip it within a year or so, except now the popular exit strategy seems to be to sell out to Google or Yahoo! instead of having an IPO.

Christian and Jesse Garrett
Originally uploaded by jonl.

The party itself was kind of like a bad college mixer, with kegs of Miller Lite and a silly cover band in a large cement warehouse loading dock.

I did have the chance to chat (or shout) with some interesting people there. This picture was taken by Jon Lebkowsky and shows me talking to Jesse James Garrett, one of the fathers of Information Architecture.

tags: sxsw2006, sxsw

The redesigned Safe Credit Union web site is live and looking great. Awesome job Extractable!

I was catching up with ALLABOUTGEORGE and I was intrigued by his Johari window. (I’m not sure I’m brave enough to try the negative-orientd Nohari window.)

It seems like a cool way to find out how you are perceived. If you’re interested in helping me with this, please stop by and pick a few adjectives to describe me (xian was already taken, so I used the domain of my personal blog as a handle).

I’ve been jotting down a partial list of the people I’ve been meeting (some old friends, some for the first time) in the halls and at the parties here in Austin. I’m sure I’m forgetting various cool somebodies and I’ll update the list when my memory coughs up new names (and when I go through the stack of business cards piling up in my hotel room).

day one

• Liz Lawley
• Mary Hodder
• Nancy White
• George Kelly
• JW Richard
• j.brotherlove
• Jon Lebkowsky
• Marc Canter
• Jesse James Garrett
• Peter Merholz
• Tiffany B. Brown
• David Pescovitz
• Tikva Morowati

day two

• Don Turnbull
• Thomas Vander Wal
• Prentiss Riddle
• Joshua Schachter
• Adina Levin
• John Tolva
• Halley Suitt
• Scot Hacker
• Liza Sabater
• David Isenberg
• Jerome Armstrong
• Markos Moulitsas Zúniga
• Nancy Scola
• Ruby Sinreich
• Glenn Smith
• Henry Copeland
• Cameron Shaw

day three

• Molly Holzschlag
• Dave Seah
• Chris Pirillo
• Robert Scoble
• Mark Glazer
• Renée Blodgett
• Ed Ward
• Laura Fulford
• Eric Meyer
• Nick Lewis
• Mike Krempasky
• Chuck DeFeo
• Chris Nolan
• Liz Lawley
• Andy Baio
• danah boyd
• Derek Powazek
• Rob Pongsajapan
• George Oates
• Mena Trott
• Tom Coates
• Heath Row
• Susan Kaup
• Halcyon Styn
• Dori Smith
• Steve Champeon

day four

• Rex Hammock
• Limor Fried
• Natalie Zee
• Phil Torrone
• Liz E. Burr
• Susie Wyshak
• David Todd
• Tish Grier
• Scott Allen
• Cam Barrett
• Scott Johnson
• Tantek Çelik
• Chris Messina
• Heather Hesketh
• Kevin Smith

Did I meet you and forget to list you? Let me know and I’ll gladly add you, and buy you a beer (or the frosty beverage of your choice) next year.

tags: sxsw2006, sxsw

I have to admit I’m almost relieved to learn that everything Jason Fried et al. touch does not automatically turn to gold. People love, love, love 37 Signals’ hosted Basecamp project management service (we’ve considered adopting it here at Extractable), but IA guru Christina Wodtke recentply posted her Top Six Pet Peeves with Basecamp.

I was joking with a coworker about how the new hotness is Trashing Web 2.0. But seriously, there’s some interesting stuff out on the web when you go looking for it. Mobile Web 2.0 is all about AJAX for Mobile Devices although TS in engineering points out that the phone we both own (Audiovox SMT5600) already supports AJAX with Mobile Internet Explorer.

Some interesting stuff on the Analytics front as well - Mapsurface is “a web page activity widget that helps you quickly see how people find, navigate and value the pages of your web site.” While CrazyEgg allows you to “easily see where visitors are clicking on a page and where they’re not”.

TechCrunch is the ultimate destination for all things Web 2.0 and in fact, positions itself as “Tracking Web 2.0”. Noteworthy posts include Zooomr which they claim is better than Flickr in several key areas and Skobeee which looks like a healthy alternative to Evite.

Ikarma wins for most interesting innovation of the day - and most transparency. I only wish they had space for more industries.

Lastly, 143 Resources on Online Tools, Generators, and Checkers may indeed prove useful. Wish it was more than just a massive list of links though.. something like the Web Developer’s Handbook perhaps.

Panelists

• Aaron Gustafson: Sr Web Designer/Dev, Easy! Designs LLC
• Ed Shull: CEO, USWeb (Web marketing)
• Eric Meyer: Complex Spiral Consulting, Standards Nazi
• Andy Hagans: works in SEO, blogs at Performancing.com

white hat vs. black hat SEO

Shull:

• cloaking (visible only to search engine)
• linkspamming
• comment spamming
• hiding tables in javascript to make the content show up higher in results (“cheating?”)

Meyer:

• blackhat is anyone who’s cheating
• sneaky techniques… at least grayhatting
• I’m asked too speak at search engine conferences for reasons I don’t understand. At one
• I was spammed in person on the conference floor

Hagans: As an SEO I make it my business to know all the weapons in the arsenal. Search engines are getting smarter, so the business case for blackhat getting weaker. I don’t like to get into the moral argument… its gets kind of old.

Professional SEO involves regular testing and writing software. In the long run blackhat doesn’t make sense: you’ll get caught and penalized. Accessibility and web standards = whitehat SEO already.

Copywriting and SEO

Gustafson: Good content for the page, semantic markup all help.

Shull: We work with a lot of publishers (example: Forbes). Copy is the thing. Every title on their page said “Forbes.com.” They were excited to learn they could change it, but they just wanted “Forbes.com: The capitalist tool.” We got them to put the article names up there.

When the Hummer H3 coming out, we let our clients know about search terms coming up in their space. The Forbes article title was “Baby Hummer” which didn’t help them with “Hummer H3.” Instead of “Martha Stewart Goes to Prison,” “Stewart Goes to Prison” [so we had to get them to use better descriptive titles on the web pages].

Meyer: The role of copywriting is to get people to like the site and link to it.

Hagans: I agree: being linkable more important than the code. Re copywriting, you need to understand usability, accessibility, and SEO as well as marketing. Use alt text. Don’t use “click here.”

Meyer: The alt attribute is important. Title is most often used for snarky comments.

Hagans: Linking algorithms have killed most of the old tricks. Using common structural elements: h1, good link anchors are the most important things.

Question: Better to use h1 for name of site or page/article title? Answer: The title.

Descriptive page titles, good navigation, good anchor text

Someone (I forget who): Personally, I love site maps. another way to make sure every page on your site has a link into it

Google allows you to upload an xml version of your sitemap.

Microformats

Meyer: Microformats have a whole lot of potential, not yet a lot of payoff. One example, link rel=”license”, Yahoo has a Creative Commons search that looks for that rel attribute/value.

In the works: hresume. Would enable, for example, a search among resumes of people Jeffrey Zeldman regards as friends

Shull: You can use SEO as a way to sell web standards.

Hagans: Getting to 508 helps, but after that you don’t get much. Still, it’s important to get the low-hanging fruit.

Question: Clients view SEO as a different project. How do you explain to them that it’s inherent in good web design? Answer: Educate them.

Mention of Matt Cutts, Google search engineer who outs black hats on his blog.

tags: sxsw2006, sxsw

I’ve nearly recovered or recreated all the pages and templates that were damaged by the nasty little scriptkiddy who hacked our server. I’d rather not go into detail about how it happened, at least until I’m sure we’ve locked the barn door.

For today’s daily Ajax news I recommend Scot Hacker’s notes from a panel I wasn’t able to attend yesterday.

tags: sxsw2006, sxsw

I thought it might be interesting to listen to the panel on how large enterprises ought to choose their design partners. The lineup had changed a bit from what was listed in the SXSW directory.

The moderator was now Maddie Coover of Alamo Design and formely of Omnicom (the owner of Agency.com). The panelists were Jeff Williams of Frog Design in Austin; Christian Barnard, AT&T’s executive director for online experience and user strategy (he oversees the relationship with their design partner, Razorfish, and used to be a director and client partner at Sapient, and before that worked at Scient); and Mike Appel, VP and general manager for the south-central region of of AvenueA/Razorfish, which he says is the “largest independent interactive agency in the world today” and formerly Anderson Consulting in Dallas.

Williams went first and he was excellent. Here are my raw notes from his talk (accompanied by a slide deck):

Frog started as a product company, is strategic/creative. Model is “identify, transform, implement.” Some of their partners (clients):

• Tmobile - strategic partnership, worked on extranets and flash apps and not just a tactical website redesign
• Sun.com… home page used to be 150 times as long, 1000s of links (when?), also extending web design to brandingpackaging and software
• Disney: digital, product, embedded ui, packaging, etc.
• HP is our largest partnership now. We are their master vendor. HP knows the value of design, doesn’t second-guess a lot of decisions.

Clients sometimes ask you to copy something else out there. Copying the competition gives parity but not innovation. To clients: don’t ask for work on spec, if necessary for a design competition.

Christian Barnard explained how SBC (not AT&T) ultimately chose AARF to redeisgn their website:

Identified need in June 2004, not until April 1, 2005 for first delivery (from Razorfish). Sent an RFP to 16 agencies, received responses from 9 agencies, narrowed the field to 5 finalists, brought them in for oral presentations, chose top two finalists, got internal approvals, started vendor negotiations, started with an initial trial quick-hit project with chosen vendor, then jointly developed the plan to redesign SBC.com. Our decision criteria:

• experience (UE, web tech): 25%
• partnership (plans for organizing the partnership): 15%
• reliability (proven ability to execute against commitments): 15%
• cost: 13%
• capacity for handling overflow UI/IA work: 11%
• financial stability: 10%
• communication / decision making (ability to comm., methods to ensure decisions made in a timely manner): 6%
• logistics (extent to which vendor locations / resources align with SBC): 5%

We developed their online visions and a strategy roadmap with the vendor and internal stakeholders. Goals were to increase sales by 10%, reduce costs, get calls out of call center, and enable self-help online. The roadmap plotted out a five-year strategy, and broke up the redeisgn into meaningful phases (home page/public site, account management, product ordering). AT&T does their own backend work but the vendor has to know the constraints. Baptism by fire: the home page redesign was phase one. The old SBC page had 100+ calls to action, lots of content, not very useful. The business objectives: purchasing and account management. We used an “advanced optimization” tool The home page had to be done over because of the merger with AT&T, the new brand (worked with InterBrand) Phase two was MySBC, account mgmt. For this they did rigorous user research, ethnographic research, contextual inquiry to inform the design process. Our partner had to understand the business aspects and how to develop user insight. We went into customer’s homes, to see beyond how they interacted with the existing site: how they work with paper bills, feel about them, interact with them, file them afterward, to meet their needs online. The current initative: redesigning the shopping & ordering process. Held an offsite lessons-learned retreat: Works Well: Program Communications (master list of milestones, deliverables; overall creative brief stating the goals, objectives, and overall direction of the resdesign), Collaboration (strat and tactical, building consensus with stakeholders) Needs Improvement: Focus on vendor morale (recognition, celebration, empathy, career growth) Project Guiding Principles: face-to-face meetings, work-life balance (treat vendor like employees.

I found Appel’s presentation disappointing. To be fair, he was probably a late addition to the panel, but instead of general principles or advice or case studies we got a capabilities presentation.

Also, he repeated the AARF is the largest independent agency in the world, but I’m not sure what he means by independent. Independent of what?

Criteria companies should consider: Customer lifecycle (attract, convert, service, extend). Why choose AARF? Thought leaders in digital channel, proven track record helping major brands improve performance (increased Adidas online sales 500%), deep technology experience, data-driven business optimization (tools to measure performance).

My only other note was “this feels like an ad for the ‘fish.”

tags: sxsw2006, sxsw

I’ve been posting raw notes from panels all morning. I blogged about Beyond Folksonomies over at the blog for my book, The Power of Many and I blogged a presentation by a Harvard psychology professor about why people make poor decisions, How to Do Precisely the Right Thing… on my personal blog.

I’ve just been taking notes at the keynote conversation and it’s the first topic of the day that I thought was appropriate for Extra! Extra!

Both Coudal and Fried were witty speakers. Coudal led off and made excellent points about the importance of curiosity and a willingness to learn with each new project and then Jason took over with his familiar rants about not overengineering things and how functional specs are the devil.

Here are my raw notes from the discussion, printed as is in the spirit of launching a 1.0 version with limited time and effort and then revisting later (maybe) to improve it:

Jim Coudal

Imagine “Chris” - your friend who’s hipper to you than everything, used to have a band, then was making indie films, now building a tagging web 2.0 social web app

Noticed a trend in SXSW panels: used to be about making tools, now about making real businesses with those tools

37 signals (Jason’s company) used to do client work, now they do: ruby on rails, econferences, books, backpack / basecamp / campfire / ta-da lists

Coudal partners still does some partner work, mostly naming and identity work but also has some business: jewelboxing, the show (on tour with bands , record / mix / master / design / manufacture / fulfill limited edition concert dvds), the deck - targeted ad network (includes only signal vs. noise, the mighty, a list apart, waxy.org, and coudal.com).

When someone says they work in-house as a creative at product company, Jim smiles nad nods, thinking: awful newsletters, Comic Sans, sales videos based on the reality show of the moment, cubicles full of toys.

Running the whole show is better than being an employee. It’s better to be the boSs than to work for the boss. But there are always problems. Example, with products: fulfillment, for example, a minefield, though: international shipping / customers regulations, etc. Part of craft is to be able to learn quickly

Questions Coudal asks before taking work:

1. Will we be able to do good work?
2. Will we be able to make money?
3. Will we be able to learn a little something new along the way?

These criteria are not equal. Sometimes we take a project to do good work but get mediocre pay. Sometime the reverse (not proud of this). We won’t do mediocre work for mediocre pay. We won’t do a project where we can’t learn something new along the way

In work-for-hire world you must be flexible, curious, learn quickly. It’s always a new industry with a new problem. You need to be able jump right into the deep end of the school and start swimming, and we’ve got to like doing it.

The meek won’t inherit the earth; the curious will.

Jason Fried

on “the how”

How to take skills and turn them into a business. Now we all know css, blogs, semantic web, web standards. Starting something new is intimidating.

One way to start is to quit your day job, business plan, predict the future, get vc, hire, get office, aluminum sign with neon backing on your web page. That way is expensive and stressful, doesn’t put the product and customer first, puts the investor first.

Fried’s advice:

• don’t quit your day job
• don’t get money, hire
• start something on the side

Examples: delicious, basecamp (launched on 10 hrs. a week - “we were a consulting company”), jewelboxing, blinksale (josh williams)

advantages:

1. obscurity
2. less

Obscurity: You learn more by failing in obscurity without the ego-hits, public criticism - removes fear of failure.

Less: Less comes for free, is a plus not a minus, underdo: simplicity, clarity, work well, not too clever (one-down, not one-up) - less time is good, avoid overwork (functional specs, abstract things, wasted time, procrastinate… then rush), don’t try to be big, less red tape; less money is also good… you don’t need a lot of the stuff you think you need — 6 yrs. ago companies were spend millions on oracle, windows servers they didn’t need, insane scaleability (“ridiculous bullshit”).

Now, infrastructure software is fee, hardware is cheap (basecamp had one app server for one year, $150/month - don’t need all this redundancy, terabytes of tape backup), you need money for salaries, but if it’s on the side it’s just you or your partners also donating time

Seeing the 90s mentality again: Get $2 million bucks…. let’s get some nice desks, aluminum sign, etc.

Polish 10 features instead of 50 mediocre features. Get a few things right. There’s an endless amount of time to add stuff later. You can’t take things away.

If you make a big huge thing, tech support will kick your ass.

Build simple software that does a few things very well, not clever (like software we all hate: the kind that capitalizes for you). Software is not the solution to everything. Don’t build software that gets in people’s way. Build less software. That clever stuff takes a lot of time.

One “more” thing: more constraints

Bootstrapping model. Jason is anti functional spec. Just use it as you build it and you’ll learn what it needs to do.

Question and Answers

Coudal on web design: Use a subtractive process, take away what you don’t need (like Hemingway’s comment about writing).

Fried on venture capital: With vc money, you keep needing more of it, series a, b, c; those who don’t take it always seem to have enough.

Fried on hiring: Don’t hire with a long bullet list of expertise requirements. you want passionate, curious people who can learn what you need to do. are you good at what you do, motivated, passionate, curious

Fried on making money: How do make money? charge for your work. Charge a monthly fee. Everything doesn’t have to be free. It’s hard to make money from advertising. Also, lower-paying customers complain more. When you make a change for the better, people still bitch. Resist the urge to change it back just to please them. Wait them out.

Fried on functional specs: Why do I hate functional specs? They are political documents. They are about covering your ass. “We all signed off on it and we all agreed on it.” Mostly they’re illusions of agreement. (It’s usualy a matter of interpretation.) We build the interface first… we build it in HTML… you can all touch it, agree on real stuff.

Very little cost is involved in adding in a new feature to a functional spec…. In the real world there are real costs involved

Coudal on RFPs: “The RFP” rule. If the RFP is more than two pages, we won’t do it. If they spent all that time, imagine what a pain they’re going to be on the project.

Coudal on a possible motto: we’re making it up as we go along

Question: I work for Yahoo and we write functional specs. Eliminate them and a few people will lose their jobs. How to migrate to a better way? Isn’t it utopian to eliminate specs?

Fried’s reply: What’s utopian is thinking you know everything about how the app should work. We don’t know anything. What we do is write stories… we keep them to one paragraph. The story is a scenario, not technical or confusing. If necessary, we’ll mock it up to show how it works

Fried on specialization: When you’re small, you want to be generalists… don’t be just an information architect.

Fried on scope creep: We fix budget and time frame… whatever fits is version 1… adding more time and money will add scope.

Update: Scot Hacker took notes on this panel too.

tags: sxsw2006, sxsw

I’m here at SXSW Interactive and I’m scattering my blog notes to various blogs, depending on the topic and relevancy. This one is kind of general and about psychology so I’m stowing it here

Raw notes from the Daniel Gilbert Presentation: How to Do Precisely the Right Thing at All Possible Times:

standing in a slow line is memorable

the “light is always red” problem

people vastly underestimate the numbers of deaths by asthma and drowning (much less spectacular than asthma and drowning)

one of these things is not like the other:

• terrorist attack
• plane crash
• earthquake
• swimming pool

the swimming pool is actually dangerous
you’re 10x more likely to die in a pool than all the other put together

lotteries are a stupidity tax

the planning fallacy, example: student doing thesis

• worst case prediction, if everything goes wrong: 48 weeks
• best case: 27 weeks
• most likely: 33 weeks
• actual: 55 weeks

people make mistakes when they compare the cost of things with the past instead of the possible

people also make mistakes comparing things with the possible

conclusion: we’re not stupid, we’re ancient

how did we get to the moon?

we can make good decisions with the help of science

tags: sxsw2006, sxsw

Here are my raw notes for beyond folksonomies: knitting tag clouds for grandma:

from pidgen to creole

tags popularized by (delicious, flickr, technorati)

hodder on usability problems

a lot of web 2.0 sites, hoping people will fill in all the info, but interfaces poorly done … half-done systems because others got critical mass (which makes them interesting)

• flickr = great interface
• delicious = new features just today?

swedlow mentions goals: wants people to become comfortable discovering, sharing, making meaning

think about tools/features/usaiblity

• problem: synonyms, term drift
• ironic solution: rigid taxonomies (hah)

what are people really trying to do?

question (bill anderson): i’m just having fun - it doesn’t bother me. i don’t care about most of that stuff (paraphrase)

(emergent issue)

question: analogy to designing object oriented systems (classification), we need better tools to let us refactor

swedlow: problem: that’s a lot of work and we’re all lazy
comment: i guess i’m just obsessive compulsive
swedlow: that’s great, but the other 99.5% is lazy

question: tags are made by individuals, we’re not building community up

(but [me] doesn’t delicious tell you what tags other people have used? … this is a great conversation BUT it feels kind of obvious, protests too much)

Hodder discusses Dabble, video tagging. there are 98 commercial video hosting sites, 15 noncommercial. about half have tagging…. about 53% of videos have tags

distinction between implicit and automated tagging: implicit meaning aided, automatic tending to reinforce groupthink

Liz (finally - that ghod) jumps in (and says the new headset mics are incredibly uncomfortable), asks how many of you use tagging tools?

80% of hands go up

you are not like most people

too many places

i’m not going to use shadows - my links are on delicious

interop problem

(mention tagsonomy… dria’s article)

comment from audience: real existing folksonomies example: each person’s folder structure

(my thought: yes, but folder vs. tag, folders are hierarchical… gmail breakthrough… search don’t sort = i do that in outlook now)

new word: “emergently”

comment: iTunes folksonomy/tags are “political” (example: they put downtempo under ambient but “ambient doesn’t have a beat and downtempo does”)

question: best practices for tags UI?

hodder mentions i-tags.

tags: sxsw2006, sxsw

Mark sent around a link to a collection of articles of web design and development, saying, “Scan down the page past the HTML tools and there are some great articles on this page.”

I use Mindjet’s MindManager program for brainstorming and notetaking, and for building sitemaps. Up to now it’s been a Windows-only application. Now, it appears that Mindjet is about to start beta testing a version for the Mac.

At O’Reilly’s ETech conference, groupware guru Ray Ozzie (of Lotus and Groove and now Microsoft) demonstrated a proof of concept of a “smart” cut-and-paste feature for the web (using RSS as the transport mechanism).

According to Scott Rosenberg, he demonstrated the clipboard using Firefox.

He also posted links to live screencasts and a web-based demo.

The Rockley Report features “content management case studies, best practices, and lessons-learned” and it’s now available for free.

A discussion on a BayCHI mailing list led an Oracle UI engineer to post a link to these user interface guidelines. They present a fascinating look at a meticulously documented set of user-interface standards. The documentation specifies overarching standards, page elements, page-type templates, and numerous process flows. The description of partial page rendering provides a great deal of detail and guidance without ever once mention the A**x word.

On the downside, the actual web page titles are fairly cryptic. Isn’t there a standard for that?

I just got off the phone with Jeannie Yandel, the producer of a show called The Conversation on an NPR station in Seattle, KUOW 94.9 FM. She asked me about how online communities cross over into the real world, what did I think about the rash of bad-news stories about teens on MySpace lately, and whether online communities are here to stay.

It looks like I’ll be on the air live around 1:25 to 1:35 pm, speaking with the show’s host and possibly with callers as well.

The promo for the show looks intriguing:

MySpace is a web site where you can post a personal profile with your picture and your interests. It’s become hugely popular among teenagers. MySpace gets more than twice the web traffic of Google. It’s just the latest example of social networking on the web, following Friendster and Meetup.com. Is this a revolution in the way we relate to one another? Or is it just a fad? Do you use a social networking web site like MySpace, or do your kids? Is it worth your time? Has anything good come from it? Has anything bad every happened? Do you have a history of on-line social networking? How has it changed? Have you dropped out of on-line social networking? Why? Do on-line social networks really connect people or are they just simulations of real human interaction?

They’ve posted some related links as well:

• ‘Show and tell online’, The Guardian
• ‘Scenes From the MySpace Backlash’, Wired
• ‘MySpace: The Story of the Month’, Poynter Foundation
• ‘20 Calif. students suspended for looking at MySpace site’, USA Today
• ‘My daughter is on Myspace.com and I’m concerned…’, The Seattle Times
• ‘The cases your judges are hiding from you’, The Seattle Times

Max Design recommends using the max-length attribute (no relation) to achieve the ideal line length for content. Svend Tofte shows how to accomplish the same result (max-width) in Internet Explorer.

It was great to see the main rap from Hustle and Flow win the Oscar for best song, but did they really have to alter the chorus to sing about "a whole lot of [w]itches jumping ship"? I'm as sensitive as the next guy, but witch just doesn't make any sense in that context. They might as well have sung "It's hard out here for a wimp."

Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville are working on a third edition of the “Polar Bear” book, aka Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (O’Reilly), and in preparation for this they have posted a brief survey.

I filled it out:

Question 1: What’s obviously new in IA? Over the past five years, what major trend(s) have emerged in the field of information architecture?

My answer:

• tagging (duh, except we used to call it metadata or keywords, so I guess I really mean user-created tags)
• a greater emphasis on microcontent (as opposed to pages)

Question 2: What’s new in IA that’s not so obvious? Over the past five years, what’s changed in information architecture that hasn’t received the attention it should?

My answer:

• a more clear division of labor (i.e., a truce) between IAs and graphic designers in the UX realm
• a subtle shift toward empirical validating and analysis of information architectures (such as via user-acceptance and A/B testing) supplanting the guru-centric intuition-driven approach.

Comments: Anything else you’d like to add or suggest?

My answer: IAs should be careful not to define the life out of their discipline and not to take themselves so seriously that they forget that the Web is still an incredibly new medium and that we have a great deal more to learn from it.

It looks like the user interface people on the Firefox team have some interesting ideas about prospective changes to the browser chrome. (The newsgroup post linked here is more or less illegible in a proportional font. I copied it to a text file and viewed it with a monospace font and then all was hunky-dory. Still, it is an odd way to document and communicate about a graphical user interface!)

Here are today’s Ajax links:

• advAJAX / AdvancedAJAX 1.0
• My-Bic = Easy Ajax

This concludes the daily Ajax.

Sketch Swap gives you space to draw a picture. When you’re done, you submit it and get someone else’s picture in return.

No? Me neither.

But if yes, check out Javascript in Ten Minutes at the new infogami website.

Dispatches from Blogistan says that Amazon is experimenting with product wikis. I hope they have better luck with that than the LA Times did with their “wikitorials” experiment. At least Amazon already hosts a culture used to giving feedback (with their reviews feature).

I’m still hoping for a way to aggregate product feedback and reviews from across the blogosphere instead of expecting to find it all hosted on one commercial site.

Well, I should have posted this when Todd first sent it around because now it’s all over the net, so let me be the one millionth person to add this link to a blog: YouTube - microsoft ipod packaging parody

Aaron Swartz is building infogami in public. So far, it lets you set up a site more or less instantly(junkyard) and edit it like a wiki. The site comes with a blog. Not sure what else it’s going to do. Looks like there are Google text ads down the side. Guess that’s the business model.

Oh, and you can let everyone edit the site or just yourself. I set up junkyard for everyone.