June 2006 Archives

So maybe this will become a tradition:

• Thomas Vander Wal discusses the concept of being a Technosocial Architect (“To many people technology gets in the way of their desired ease of use of information. Those of us who design and build in the digital space spend much of our time looking at how to make our sites and applications easier for people to use. Do you see the gap? The gap is huge!”)
• History of the Button (“Up until the 1980s, all buttons were physical…”)
• Definition of User Experience Revisited (“Make it easy to be happy”)
• The Power of the Marginal (“If I had to condense the power of the marginal into one sentence it would be: just try hacking something together.”)
• Ross Mayfield posts a link to an update of a case study on enterprise wiki and blog use (“Specific use cases such as managing meetings, brainstorming and publishing and creating presentations collaboratively…”)

Happy Fourth of July weekend!

Seen in PCWorld.com:

The Web has long needed a universal checkout process. eBay’s PayPal and other online payment services rely on the various “shopping cart” applications of the Web sites they serve. While browser add-ons such as Siber Systems’ RoboForm can complete much of the order-processing information that different sites require, they exhibit little consistency in the type and quantity of data they collect. Also, as you place your personal information on more Web servers, your security risk grows. Last but not least, the Web forms themselves are often poorly designed: How many times have you had to reenter all the information in an order form because a single field was skipped or included invalid data? … Google Checkout stores your credit card number, mailing address, and other ordering information. You can view all of the orders you place through the service on a single page, and Google limits how much of your information it shares with its vendor partners.

The article does note a potential security risk:

While having a single repository for all your orders makes makes online purchases much faster and simpler (and potentially more secure), Gmail users and other people already registered with a free Google service may have to beef up their security—one log-in name and password opens them all. Until I signed up for Google Checkout, I didn’t worry much about someone gaining access to my Gmail inbox, because it contains no sensitive data. The first thing I did after adding the Google Checkout information was to change my Google password, and I’ll continue to do so regularly as long as I’m using the service.

I’ve been meaning to mention the IA Institute’s upcoming IDEA 2006 conference. (It stands for Information: Design, Experience, Access.) It’s being held at the Seattle Public Library, Central Library on October 23-24. I have a feeling I’ll be too busy to make it, but it looks intriguing and I’ll at least try to follow it via the blogosphere.

In other realms, they say when it makes Newsweek or Time (especially the cover), a phenomenon is over. Let’s hope that’s not the case for the hipster design-y sites picked in this Newsweek Design Dozen article (forward by Chris).

I seem to recall playing with a prototype of PeepAgg back in the heady social-web miniboom of 2003 but it seems that the real thing is now in alpha.

I was invited, I joined it, and I’m poking around. In many ways it looks like other social network systems, especially Yahoo! 360 and Tribe, in that, like both of them, it allows you to integrate content hosted elsewhere (such as Flickr photos, Delicious bookmarks, and presumably blog posts and other RSSable streams, most likely including events and reviews and such).

There’s a fairly subtle friendship model, though subjective of course, with five distinct levels, from haven’t met, to acquaintance, through friend, good friend, to best friend.

(PA founder Marc Canter considers me, and no doubt countless others, as a good friend.)

There are both Groups and Networks and I haven’t figured out what distinguishes them. I also haven’t figured out how to plug in my content from elsewhere, and I’m reluctant to hand-populate yet another profile.

More as I have time to explore.

I don’t know why they say Seattle is rainy because, like, I was there today and it was sunny and hot - over 90 degrees, so I hear.

Also, the space needle? Totally pointy.

Dan noticed this article in which CNET says big business is embracing Web 2.0, which in this context seems to refer to the two-way web (or, as one author put it, the Living Web):

Though it lacks a precise definition, Web 2.0 generally refers to Web services that let people collaborate and share information online. In contrast to the first generation of Web offerings, Web 2.0 applications are more interactive, giving people an experience more akin to a native desktop application as opposed to a static Web page.

• Dan Brown’s “quick and dirty Visio callout”, an elegant solution to a common document-design problem
• Digital Web Magazine reviews Caphyon Advanced Web Ranking (“does a great job of tracking and reporting search engine rankings across websites”)
• Digital Web tutorial on ‘The Pinball Effect’ (example)
• UX Matters on ‘Deconstructing the Mobile Web (“The mobile Web is largely overplayed hypeÑthe clumsy extrapolation of the behavior and use of a basic set of interfaces from one environment to another incompatible one.”)
• Luke Wrobleski on ‘Developing the Invisible’ (“the need to consider what’s not there”)
• Zooming User Interface (wikipedia link via peterme)

a new tradition? we’ll see…

I just don’t post to RFB much these days. Nor do my other contributors. Does that blog need to continue? Should I put it to rest? I like the “this day in” stuff from the past, but of course a lot of it is dated. Is there any value to a legacy blog-on-blogging that doesn’t even have a post about, say the recent beta release of Vox from Six Apart?

Plus what do I do with the moderate traffic pointing there from Google? Redirect it to x-pollen?

Likewise, do I need to keep supporting The Power of Many till the end of time? I swear, next book I write I’ll blog about it in an existing blog instead of spawning a new one. If the book needs its own website, it can get its blog content by republishing a feed from my main blog on the topic, along with a set of delicious bookmarks tagged with ‘presence’.

I would like to recommit to blogging here daily. I’ve been neglecting the personal side of my life blogwise, at the expense of professional concerns and the occasional political or other current-affairs type posting.

I miss the daily journaling aspect of blogging and I think it’s helpful - for me, at least - to reflect on a daily basis on what’s going on around me.

Lifehacker links to a video demonstrating a proof of concept caleld BumpTop desktop. I’m not sure I’d actually want to manage my work this way but some aspects of the demo are fairly compelling. (via antiweb)

It’s amazing that Opera’s still around. Some say it’s the most standards-compliant browser, and Opera Mini is supposedly a great browser for handheld devices. On the IAI list they’re talking about how they’re using personas for marketing (though it’s just an assumption that these same personas were part of their process for tweaking the browser’s user experience). One of the personas looks a bit like the Columbine killers and another seems like the TV version of danah boyd.

dKo draws my attention to A Shift Among the Evangelicals by E. J. Dionne Jr. in the Washington Post (Friday, June 16, 2006; Page A25):

Sometimes very important elections receive very little attention. When the Southern Baptist Convention elected the Rev. Frank Page as the group’s president… One other force was at work in this year’s Baptist voting: the rise of the blogosphere. Over the past several years, an active network of Baptist bloggers has opened up discussion in the convention and given reformers and moderates avenues around what Parham called “the Baptist establishment papers” and other means of communication controlled by the convention’s leadership. Thus may some of our oldest and most traditional institutions be transformed by new technologies.

A week or so back I was reading another one of those “Top 10 mistakes of website design” articles. All the usual stuff was in there like skip intro, splash pages, popup windows, and intrusive animation but what really got me was the mention of “right-side blindness”.

Most of these top 10 lists just regurgitate the same obvious design mistakes that really don’t bear mentioning further. If it’s not obvious that you shouldn’t have a flashing animation or intrusive popup windows then you’re in the wrong business.

But let’s get back to this issue of right-side blindness. Right-side blindness is the notion that people have become so accustomed to seeing advertisement on the right side of their screen they tend to ignore everything else in that region as well. Since reading this article I’ve really thought hard about the issue and started to monitor my eye movements as I navigate through the various websites I peruse.

Where do I expect common elements to be - search, login, home, logout?

How quickly do I hit a website and then leave - what was I looking for, how long did it take me to find it, what frustrated me in the process?

I’ve found the most usable websites either make things very obvious through a “web 2.0” style layout - SIMPLE HUGE BRIGHT BOLD everything, tons of spacing and a general adherence to treating users like silly putty - making things very simple and very obvious.

This style of design is hardly applicable to the corporate B2B world however. For designers in that realm I recommend perusing the business sites you use most. Give usability a thought and ask yourself the following question:

Which came first - the form or the function?

Update: 2:24pm - I tracked down the original article that prompted this post and found that while I may have stretched the point a bit, the right-side blindness issue is still valid. Either way, the article made for my first Ironic Site of the Day Award.

Cecil filled me in on something cool and old friend of ours, Brendan Fletcher, is doing. I remember him hiking the Sierra Nevada (or some similar west-coast trail) years ago. Apparently now he and his partner Emma Nicholas are “attempting to walk the length of the Great Wall of China.” They are blogging the experience at a site hosted by the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney (as part of their Great Wall exhibition) called Walking the Wall.

Tom Coates of Plastic Bag (and now Yahoo!) has long been reliable for his occasional thoughtful long-form essays about the nature of the web as a medium. Back in February he posted one called Native to a web of data. Then a few weeks ago Christina Wodtke posted about it to the IAI list, summing up the points thusly:

1. Look to add value to the Aggregate Web of data
2. Build for normal users, developers and machines
3. Start designing with data, not with pages
4. Identify your first order objects and make them addressable
5. Use readable, reliable and hackable URLs
6. Correlate with external identifier schemes
7. Build list views and batch manipulation interfaces
8. Create parallel data services using standards
9. Make your data as discoverable as possible

Tom and I worked together at the BBC on the project that brought our thoughts together on this. We created PIPs (Programme Information Pages) that has now been rolled out to create pages on Radio 3 and Radio 4. As a quite technical information architect form a data perspective, I enjoyed myself immensely, looking at the XML, identifying how to break source data to make it human readable/ sensible and the “highlight” getting 5 new fields into a BBC-wide database. But I also did user testing and research and worked with a fabulous designer on creating the pages. What struck me, since I moved into a more traditional UX/IA role in an agency, is that there are very few of us who enjoy the level and granularity of data into interface or applications. My team look aghast at the thought that they would look at XML and identify how to create applications out of it. I think this is the growth area of IA especially in the world of mash ups, but it does require a love of detail and the vision to see how it can be grown, merged and manipulated. It is the ultimate in collision between Big and Little IA.

Michal Migurski is annoyed with javascript delays and other “Ajax abuse” slowing down sites and points to a Safari plug-in that enables him to selectively turn of javascript at specific sites.

Still working my way through interesting links I saved from the IA Institute members mailing list. Livia Labate posted this link to the “Value of Design” factfinder, a site that communicates the value of design to business.

The site includes an interesting “Your Report” tool that enables you to cut and paste interesting tidbits and research findings into a custom report you can then use in your own materials (as long as you credit the Design Council).

The “headline facts” section of the site, for example, presents research findings (“Rapidly growing business are three times more likely than the rest to consider design crucial to success”) in a visually compelling fashion.

Joel sent around an interesting little white paper by Rebecca Churilla called Single Interactive Agency Looking for Clients to Build Lasting Relationships With, about how responding to an RFP can feel as nerve-wracking as a blind date, and how to make the “dance” of the requester and proposer work better for both parties.

A while back I posted an entry here about Uzanto’s MindCanvas, an application for doing user research. A week or so ago, Cody Burleson of IBM Global Business Services posted a link to the IA Institute members mailing list about a web-based card sorting product called Websort. I haven’t tried it out, but it looks like it could be useful when you can’t do card sorting in person.

Following up, Lou Rosenfeld points out that Donna Maurer, who is writing a book on card sorting for Rosenfeld Media, is maintaining a comprehensive list of card sorting tools.

Raleigh, one of our web-production developers pointed me to this interesting tool that shows you what search engine spiders see:

It gives one insight into how the heading tags work to ones advantage. Interestingly enough, as I was testing it, I noticed cnn.com doesnÕt use heading tags except for one h2 for the latest headline…. I wonder if this is part of an seo strategy to only provide one header or just sloppiness. On the contrary, msn has multiple heading 2 and heading 3 tags with no headline within either.

I haven’t lifted a finger to post here in so long, and so much been’s going on lately. (And just now I tried to post and somehow lost my window.)

Like, for instance, we just got back from a week in New York. (I posted some pictures from the trip at Flickr.) And before that I was at my 20th reunion at Princeton. And before that I was in Memphis on business.

Also, Bill Ectric just posted an interview with myself and my erstwhile partner-in-crime Levi Asher on his site as well as at at a site called SearchWarp. Bill has got hisself a new blog too, and I’ve been posting a few chapters from his novel Tamper over at Telegraph.

Just wanted to get that off my chest.

Livia Labate, from Comcast, posted recordings of a number of sessions from this year’s Information Architecture summit in her blog I think, therefore IA.

Lou Rosenfeld, one of the coauthors of the seminal “Polar Bear” book from O’Reilly, launched a press last year dedicated to developing and producing books on user experience strategy and design by means of user-centered design principles. One of the books coming out from Rosenfeld Media, Search Analytics for Your Site is coauthored by Rosenfeld himself (with Richard Wiggins).

The book’s description makes the case for analysing search logs when trying to improve a website:

Any organization that has a searchable web site or intranet is sitting on top of hugely valuable and usually under-exploited data: logs that capture what users are searching for, how often each query was searched, and how many results each query retrieved. Search queries are gold: they are real data that show us exactly what users are searching for in their own words. This book shows you how to use search analytics to carry on a conversation with your customers: listen to and understand their needs, and improve your content, navigation and search performance to meet those needs.

For more insight into this book-in-progress, read a sample chapter for a preview, check out the delicious-driven bibliography to keep up with the research, or take a survey to contribute to the book’s development.

Chris Pirillo just IM’d me to point out the Windows Vista Torrent site:

Per the official report, Microsoft is currently recommending waiting for a DVD version of Windows Vista Beta 2 due to extremely long wait times for the download directly from Microsoft. To help them with their dilemma, Windows enthusiasts Chris and Jake have downloaded the official beta release and created a torrent. They did an interview with Jim Allchin a few weeks ago. … This is not a crack, this is not a hack, this is not software piracy - it’s unofficial mirroring with official validation. You can get a Windows Vista Beta 2 product key for free through Microsoft, as the OS won’t install without one.

Brian Dear from EVDB wrote me recently to bring to my attention the Eventful Demand service on Eventful.com (the event-planning website powered by his EVDB service). He is justifiably proud of this new feature:

We premiered it at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference in San Diego in March. Eventful Demand is a set of tools to enable fans to form grass-roots campaigns to “demand” an event to happen, by inviting their favorite performers to come to their town. Performers might be lecturers, book authors and journalists, musicians, bands, filmmakers, politicians, entrepreneurs, astronauts, scientists, who knows… it could be anyone. The idea is, put the power of creating events in the hands of the people who want most to go to the event - the people! What’s great is that we’re seeing performers start to embrace the technology, and participate with the fans in making events come about.

I have to admit, that last bit does sound cool. If you’re interested in watching this in action, you can view the “hottest” current demands

The first two sheduled events to emerge from this service were a book signing / film screening by blogger, author, and actor Wil Wheaton in Boston, and a music concert in the DC area by Jonathan Coulton (of the Thing a Week blog project and the classic multimedia song Flickr).

To grease the skids, Eventful Demand also provides tools for performers to encourage fans to start “demanding” them. I wonder if this could be adapted for the next Ross Perot or Wesley Clark to encourage supporters to draft them to run for office?

David Gammel, knowledge management guru, writes in his High Context Consulting blog (The One and Only Purpose for an Intranet):

The sole purpose for an intranet is to facilitate the work of staff in pursuit of the organizationÕs objectives. Nothing more, nothing less. A good metric for this is that one of the first things that staff do when starting a project is to voluntarily create a space for it on your intranet. If the intranet is considered a prerequisite for success by staff, then you have succeeded! I was prompted to post this after reading Nick Besseling’s rant on how stickiness is not a good goal for an intranet (I agree).

To quote a famous ubiquitous Usenet and BBS luser, “Me too!”

When arriving at work today I saw a large crane removing the Siebel sign from atop our neighbor’s building. Unfortunately I remembered to take a picture just after the sign was hidden from view behind the truck.

Siebel was officially integrated into Oracle on June 1, 2006

In case you missed it, the Blogosphere was abuzz last week about the apparent trademarking of “Web 2.0” and subsequent cease-and-desist sent to IT@Cork (a non-profit networking organisation) who’d organized a recent conference.

As a recap (clipped from)

[The] upcoming Web 2.0 half-day conference is the target of a cease and desist letter from the legal team of O’Reilly publishers. Basically O’Reilly are claiming to have applied for a trademark for the term “Web 2.0” and therefore IT@Cork can’t use the term for its conference. Apparantly use of the term “Web 2.0” is a “flagrant violation” of their trademark rights!

284 comments later and the controversy exploded onto the scene. Meanwhile, mister O’Reilly himself was away on vacation. He returned Monday and responded with a lengthy post later this week.

I don’t want to spoil the ending by giving too much away, but Tim’s detailed response to the issue puts it all to rest. Firstly, it was CMP Media who sent the cease-and-desist not O’Reilly himself, second, the trademark was specific to conferences that reference “Web 2.0” in their name, third, cease-and-desist is not equivalent to “suing” someone and fourth, many bloggers who posted didn’t even bother to do enough homework to qualify their own opinions.

A fascinating read if you’ve got the time and definitely one of those things that will end up going down in “Best of” 2006 history.

Related reading:

O’Reilly trademarks Web 2.0 and sets lawyers on IT@Cork!

Controversy about our “Web 2.0” service mark

Web 2.0 Service Mark Controversy (Tim responding this time)