March 2002 Archive

Promoting Visual Thinking

Wendy Richmond discusses how visual thinking gets left behind in America as we focus on structured verbal communication.

As a society, we don’t spend much time nurturing our visual thinking. Watching TV doesn’t count. It’s impossible to be fluent in a language or a way of thinking if you don’t practice it. You can’t understand something unless you are involved with it, rather than just being a silent audience.

Reminds me that I still haven’t visited Mood River, the new contemporary art and design exhibition at the Wexner Center. Have you nurtured your visual thinking recently? (via xBlog)

The Art, Science, and Magic of User-Centered Design

Art, Science, and Magic: What really happens during User-Centered Design? by Carol Righi, Ph.D. investigates what happens between user requirements and the actual design solution. She uses the concept of subsumption to explain this gathering of individual data points into a greater structure. Oh and she also recently published a book on user-centered design. (via InfoDesign)

Building Accessible Websites

I just learned about Building Accessible Websites, a new book by Joe Clark to be published by New Riders in May 2002. There are apparently two other books on accessibility currently in production, and Joe is delighted to hear that.

As I have consistently maintained, the greater the number of books on the market on Web accessibility, the more apparent it will be that mine’s the best.

I don’t know much about Joe Clark but I already like him.

Voice Recognition Appliances

How many of us really want to talk to our appliances? “TV power.” “Lights dim.” “Teleport beam?”

37BetterFedEx

The folks at 37Signals have done it again with 37BetterFedEx, a redesign of FedEx’s Shipment Manager with emphasis on the user. These guys are my heros. One more down, several million to go. (Also check out 37BetterBank, 37’s ultimate online banking experience.)

Greg Knauss on Kids

Greg Knauss hijacked kottke.org today and convinced me to buy a copy of his new book Rainy Day Fun And Games For Toddler And Total Bastard. Watch out. He just might convince you too.

Virtual Keyboard

The virtual interface from Developer VKB Inc. from Jerusalem in Israel can be integrated in mobile phones, laptops, tablet PCs, or clean, sterile and medical environments and could be a revolution for the data entry of any mini computer.

Pretty neat, but I don’t think taking something old and simply making it virtual is revolutionary. Now a new, evolved input device? That would be truly revolutionary.

Megnut on Conference Usability

…and then there’s Megnut.

In order to get usability out to the masses, Meg Hourihan (codename: Megnut) explains it in terms of something much more familiar than personas, scenarios, and task analysis. In her first Megnut column at O’Reilly Network, she discusses Attendee-Centered Conference Design, i.e. conference usability.

In the past year I’ve been to six conferences and my experiences as a speaker and an attendee have ranged from wonderful to down-right awful. And in nearly every case, simple decisions influenced the outcome of the panel. The person who makes the decision — and more importantly, why they make the choice they do — determines the outcome not only of one session, but potentially the entire conference.

(via Scott Andrew)

Movable Type 2.0

Movable Type 2.0 is in the Heeeeouse! Cheers to Ben and Mena Trott for all of their hard work on a great product. The interface is much improved, thumbnails can now be automatically created (although I haven’t tried that yet) and most importantly, multiple categories can be assigned to entries.

You might have heard many others around the Web raving about Movable Type too. Believe the hype, because it’s true. If you’re thinking of starting a weblog, or if you already have a weblog and are switching from another publishing tool, I highly recommend Movable Type. You won’t be disappointed. Learn more about Movable Type and download it today!

Organize My Music

Today Jason Kottke pointed out SingleFile, a great resource for organizing your book collection. This made me think not of my book collection, but of my music collection. Unlike a lot of people, I don’t have my entire CD collection on my computer as mp3’s. Someday I will, but I’ve yet to find a software tool that organizes them the way I want. Until then, I’m looking for a tool that works like SingleFile, but will organize my music collection (the actual CD’s, not whatever mp3’s I have on my my computer) instead. Add your suggestion in the comments.

ThinkCycle

ThinkCycle is an academic, non-profit initiative engaged in supporting distributed collaboration towards design challenges among underserved communities and the environment. ThinkCycle seeks to create a culture of open-source design innovation, with ongoing collaboration among individuals, communities and organizations around the world.

A wonderful idea. How can you contribute? (via xBlog)

Google Gallery

Who is Joshua Kaufman?

Back From IA Summit

I’m back from the IA Summit in Baltimore! It was a spectacular weekend. I was able to meet a lot of great people, have many interesting discussions and listen to some very thoughtful presentations.

I’m going to be organizing and typing my notes and thoughts over the next few days. So you can expect to see something here at least by this weekend.

Google News Search

Google’s News Search (BETA) service presents information culled from many of the world’s news sources collected over the previous week. With continuous updates throughout the day, you’ll keep up to date with what’s happening now and learn about the stories that led to the most recent developments.

The new Google service has a few neat features, including how long ago the story was indexed (in minutes!) and grouping related stories together. Another great service from Google.

Off to IA Summit

I’m off to the IA Summit in Baltimore, MD. Looking forward to meeting everyone and hearing lots of great speakers. Until next week, check out Boxes and Arrows to quench your IA thirst. Have a great weekend everyone.

18 Months 1398 Killed

Need I say more?

Dear friend of peace in the Middle East

The time has come.

Vander Wal at SXSW

There’s something special about relaxing in the late eveing with a cold Yuengling, listening to Aphex Twin and reading about the wonderful things that are happening at SXSW.

SXSW provides a wonderful feeling of belonging to a tribe of people that are passionate about this digital connectivity tool of the Web and Internet. Passion is the key and the jam packed rooms yesterday were a testament that the passion is very much alive.

Text Size and Other Requests

Firstly (which is just fun to say instead of just “first,” because you know, everyone else says “first.” And who wants to be like everyone else when “firstly” is just as fine a word as “first”?), for your convenience and accessibility, all text in this weblog is now scaleable. This means that if the text is too small, you can resize it by simply using text size feature of your browser. On both IE and Netscape you can change the change the text size by selecting View - Text Size. Neato!

Secondly, and also the reason for the title, I’m asking for your help. When I designed this weblog, I thought long and hard about every aspect of it. My greatest concern is always ease of use. Design comes second; thus, the almost entire absence of graphics. After keeping this log for almost two months now, I’ve thought more about the design and possible ways to improve the interface. But before I touch it, I thought why not just ask my readers, who really are the reason I have this log in the first place. The three main things on my mind are the date, the title and the category and where the emphasis should be. Frankly, I don’t know. What do you care more about? How often I update, what I talk about or what type of stuff I talk about? To me, they’re all relatively important but that doesn’t mean that they need to be on the index. Please post your thoughts in the comments below. Of course, any other comments or suggestions are also welcome. Thanks for your help.

IA Job Tips

Are you like me? Do dream of someday becoming a real IA instead of a regular web-worker bee? You’d do yourself good to start at IAwiki. (via SIGIA-L)

Boxes and Arrows!

Boxes and Arrows launches! Cheers to Christina Wodtke and the rest of the staff for pulling it all together. They’re starting with a bang by including a slew of great IA articles. Enough talking, time to dig in!

The Mirror That Changes

The Mirror That Changes by Annette Weintraub:

The Mirror That Changes is a meditation on the use of water and its limits, bridging personal use and environmental impact. The visual and aural qualities of moving water create a languid atmosphere in which overtly romantic representations of water intersect with narratives introducing issues of scarcity, purity and equity. Commonplace uses of water (washing clothes, bathing, cooking) find their parallel in the wider forces of nature (rain, ice and flood), linking individual action and global consequence.

(via Rhizome Digest)

Jef Raskin Talks Skins

A lot of links are in the pipe! Some links old, some links new. Let’s start with our favorite UI evangelist, Jef Raskin, who talked with OS Opinion recently. Isn’t it great to know that of all the operating system UIs that are out today, none of them are even close to being well designed? Why not? Raskin responds that you have to start with the UI and then build a system that supports it, not the other way around.

Measuring Frustration

Carson Reynolds of MIT wrote his Master’s thesis on The Sensing and Measurement of Frustration with Computers (PDF). This is a really interesting report on the many different devices and techniques that can be used to measure frusteration. My personal favorite is the interface using an Archie McPhee computer voodoo doll. This guy leaves no rock unturned. (via EH)

Dogma 2000

Remember Dogma 2000:

type as you think
don’t care about your spellings, typos and cut-and-paste related mistakes
try to write correctly
do not make mistakes on purpose
no intellectual capitals or other strange letter substitutions (LiKe Th15 0r ThAt)

Relevant links:

Information Age

New Yorker cartoon: so true. (via NBS)

Simplicity in Web Design at SXSW

Jason Fried, Stewart Butterfield, and Jason Kottke will be leading a discussion on Simplicity in Web Design at SXSW. Sadly, I won’t be able to attend but look for some great links on simplicity in design to appear here over the next few days.

Google Bombs and Other PageRank Tricks

I find all of this talk about Google Bombs very interesting, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to look at this bomb phenomenon a little closer and see how it applies to my own site.

According to John Hiler, Adam Mathes discovered these bombs last year. Adam Mathes of Uber:

Google is unique among search engines in that while it almost always shows you pages that have the exact keywords you are looking for, occasionally it will show you pages that don’t have those keywords, but other pages linked to that page with those words.
I first discovered this when searching for internet rockstar, which turned up Ben’s page. [editor: Adam is referring to internet rockstar Ben Brown] At the time though, he did not actually have that phrase on his page however the legions of teeny-bopper blogger morons who linked to him always used that phrase in their links.

As Hiler describes, what this basically means is that linker can impact the Google rank of the linkee. More precisely, when a lot of linkers use the same search term to link to the same site, they can really impact the Google rank of the linkee.

So that made me wonder a why I’m the #11 Joshua at Google right now when I started this weblog only a month a half ago. A Google backlink search finds that Google has only indexed backlinks from a handful of sites. How could only a handful of sites influence Google’s PageRank that much? I went to the source to find the answer:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

In essence, if a site is linked only once from another very popular site, this could affect the site’s Google PageRank just as easily as hundreds of links from very unpopular sites. As far as I know, there’s one popular site that links me from their list of blogs - bradlauster.com. Hiler notes that these lists of blogs are increasing becoming known as the “Blogrolling” section of the blog, which leads into a more important point.

Most importantly, a blogrolling link never scrolls off a weblog’s frontpage. This greatly magnifies the impact of a blogrolling link, making them a much more potent Google Bomb.

That makes sense. But can a blogrolling link on only one site affect Google’s PageRank that much? What about a blogrolling link that appears on on every page of one site, like it does on bradlauster.com? These are two questions that I’m still trying to figure out.

Regardless of how Google indexes these blogrolling links, there’s another way to affect PageRank. I had previously thought that if I visited other sites and commented now and again, making sure to always link my name to my site, it would be a great way to build traffic to my site. However, in light of John Hiler’s article, I’ve realized that those simple comments could help me a little more than I originally thought. Why start a Google bomb squad when you can quietly use your own comments as artillery?

So I’d like to take this opportunity to thank bradlauster.com, Elegant Hack, and blackbeltjones.com, for allowing me to comment on their very popular weblogs. Cheers to Christina, Brad, Matt, and especially Google for allowing me to show you that truly anyone can be a Web superstar.

ROCK!

Oh, what people do with their toys! (via kottke).

Flash MX (6) Focus on Usability

News.com reports Macromedia’s new focus on usability with Flash MX:

Much of Macromedia’s case for the new Flash centers on usability—that Web pages and applications designed entirely in Flash will load faster, work more reliably and make it easier for customers to transact business.
For example, it’s intended to eliminate page refreshes. Users will be able to continue to browse a site even while the Web page processes credit card information and other data.

Sounds like a dream, but I don’t see many companies switching over to an all Flash site anytime soon. Too many execs remember the all-Flash sites that bombed hard over the past two years. (via ia/)

New 37signals

37signals recently gave their site a very welcome makeover. Now when they say “simple for sale,” people will understand what they mean. While you’re visiting, be sure to check out their new white paper on contingency design. It summarizes their findings from the first several months of Design Not Found, their gallery of contingency design, and presents simple rules and guidelines that can be applied to improve its usability of almost any site.

Sounding Ad

If I had a category called Annoying, this would be its first entry. While reading a recent interview with Jakob Nielsen I came across the first ad banner that I’ve ever seen and heard. I find it incredibly ironic that a sounding ad would be found on the same page as an interview with king of usability. The very uncompelling ad not only makes a short clicky sound, but it repeatedly makes a short clicky sound. It’s as if the designers were thinking, “They might ignore it, but they’ll sure hear it!” When are you people going to get it? Not only do your ads not work, but they’re annoying and intrusive, especially when they contain sound! I urge anyone who opposes these types of ads to contact the site editors and let them know you will not support their publication if it contains such intrusive advertisements.

Power to the users.

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