February 2003 Archive
Mr. Rogers Died Today
Mr. Rogers died today at the age of 74. I didn’t watch Mr. Rogers much as a child, but he would impact my life in a big way during two summers during college.
During the summers of ‘95 and ‘96 I worked at an amusement park in Ligonier, PA called Idlewild Park. (Ligonier is relatively close to Pittsburgh, PA, where Mr. Rogers was produced.) Those two summers I was one of a handful of people who worked at one of the big attractions at Idlewild, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood of Make Believe. In the TV show, the neighborhood was where Mr. Rogers would go to visit his make believe friends. At the park, the neighborhood was a life-size neighborhood in the forest. I drove a life-size trolley full of park visitors through the neighborhood, stopping at each location so the children could say hello to the neighbors, who were actually animatronic puppets. Yes, I talked to animatronic puppets all day, for two entire summers.
So here’s to Mr. Rogers, for giving me the opportunity to make a lot of children smile, teach the value of Hug-n-Song parties and meet some interesting people along the way.
Guidelines and Design
Jakob Nielsen recently published Employee Directory Search: Resolving Conflicting Usability Guidelines, in which he explains how usability guidelines often conflict each other and how to resolve it using empirical observation, theoretical analysis and trade-offs.
Christina Wodtke says he’s talking about design then makes an important point about the usefulness of guidelines:
This is called design. Thinking about a problem, and thinking up answers by looking at the world around us: design. Blindly adhering to guidelines is not design. Looking at guidelines and comparing them to the world and deciding if they are applicable to your unique situation: design.
Don’t get me wrong, I think guidelines are valuable. Often I come up against a usability problem and say to myself, “Hey it’s a proximity problem” and can fix it easily. But those guidelines have meaning to me because they represent compressed experience.
Be sure to check out the great reader comments that follow.
Solicited Links of Interest
Over the past month or so, I’ve received a number of emails from folks who want me to link to their site (Does anyone else get many emails like that?). Here are the best of the bunch.
Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization is a new book by Andrew King of WebReference.com that looks great. Within the book, Andrew covers many aspects of optimization including markup, DHTML, graphics and multimedia, search engines and some advanced techniques. If you want a preview, you can check out chapters 9 and 10 over at WebReference. You may also want to read the WebWord interview with Andrew King.
Accessify.com is a site that I’ve been meaning to write about for a long time now. Really. What appears as a simple news site is actually much more. Inside, you’ll find great tools and wizards, including my favorite, an accessible form builder that will quickly create your form using CSS or tables. Then there’s the accessibility tutorials which should be required reading for every web designer. If you still haven’t had your fill of web accessibility, there are also excellent accessibility articles and accessibility reviews. I thank Ian Lloyd and his small team for this keen site.
SimpleComments is Plugged In
Like many others, I also think that TrackBacks are comments, so I recently installed SimpleComments, which was created by a smart guy named Adam Kalsey. Quite simply, SimpleComments merges TrackBacks with comments into a single list. So whether they’re left via the comment form or by pinging my site, they’re all comments, and they’re all listed in the same place.
ESPN Redesigns, Makes Users Feel Stupid
I applaud ESPN for moving to a standards-based design, but I don’t know what they were thinking when they wrote the copy for this upgrade page.
There’s nothing wrong with telling visitors they’re using a technically obsolete browser. However, starting off with “97.8% of our visitors are using a standards-compliant browser. It appears you are not.” is not the way to do it. The average ESPN user doesn’t have a clue what “standards compliance” means probably doesn’t give a flying rat’s ass what it means either.
It would be much more appropriate to start off with a headline like “Browser Upgrade Recommended” and then proceeding to tell users “We noticed that you’re using an older web browser. While your browser may work with the majority of websites, it will not display our redesigned website as intended due to our use of more advanced technologies. For this reason, we recommend that you upgrade to one of the following newer browsers…”
If they had tested that upgrade page with users, they would have realized the technohead buffoons they are.
I Fainted Last Night
I fainted last night.
I fainted once before back in 1999. Back then I was working as one of the Columbus science museum’s Outreach Demonstrators - more properly called a COSI on Wheels Demonstrator, conveniently called a COW within COSI, the name of the museum. I was giving a presentation at an Akron, Ohio elementary school and staying at a Red Roof Inn. When I awoke that morning I felt a little out of it, but I didn’t think much of it and jumped in the shower. While I was shampooing my hair, I blacked-out, fell through the shower curtain, and hit my chin against the bathroom sink. Besides my cut up chin which needed a few stitches, there were only minor bumps. Lucky, those stitches were on my under chin and the small amount of scarring was barely noticeable. I later decided that fainting episode was because I had the flu.
My fainting last night caused two cuts near my eye and one cut at the top of my nose, 13 stitches in all - cuts that I suspect will leave nice sized scars. I have no idea what did the slashing, but I know I did have the flu as I felt like crap the entire day before. Just before I fainted, I was feeling dizzy and decided that calling the local hospital would be a good idea. Unfortunately for my face, I didn’t think to keep off my feet. I live alone, and last night, when I was running a temperature, nauseous and dizzy, I was pretty scared. The possibility of fainting wasn’t exactly at the top of my mind.
The last thing I remember before blacking out was standing in front of the refrigerator, trying to figure out how to dial (614) 4-HEALTH and why someone would ask a sick, dizzy man who’s about to faint to dial such a cryptic number. When I came to consciousness and saw a pool of blood on the floor, I decided that simply calling 911 would be the best move at this point. Soon enough a two man crew of medics was in my kitchen taking my vitals and cleaning my wounds. A trip to the Ohio State University Emergency Room soon followed.
The lesson here is obvious: don’t stand up when you’re dizzy! Crawl, slither, roll, do whatever you have to, but don’t stand up. You never know what you’ll hit when you faint. I still don’t know what I hit.
WThRemix Deadline Extended
The WThRemix redesign contest deadline has been extended to February 28. So to all those last minute designers who didn’t get around to it, there is still plenty of time to submit your entry!
Nice Titles and Patterns
Last week, Nate Steiner from Web Graphics suggested that Safari, Apple’s new Web browser, should display tooltips the same way that it displays a dragged link. It didn’t take long before Stuart Langridge wrote Nice Titles, a JavaScript/CSS widget that basically does what Nate described. I agree that it’s a nice effect, although it doesn’t exhibit the delay typically seen in tooltips.
Before more people add this widget to their website, keep in mind that it overrides the default tooltip behavior in many browsers. While I’m generally in favor of widgets that enhance the user experience, I’m concerned about widgets that take away common interface elements, like tooltips (also known as Help Tags in the Apple realm). Whether you like them or not, tooltips are a user interface pattern, and patterns make things easier to use. Yes, I think tooltips could be improved upon, but they’re what most graphical browser users understand.
So get your JavaScript on, go crazy with CSS, innovate and enhance. Just remember that sometimes, the widget that giveth also taketh away.
A.Word.A.Day: Rubicon
The Wordsmith word for today is Rubicon:
Rubicon (ROO-bi-kon) noun: A point of no return, one where an action taken commits a person irrevocably.
Is it a mere coincidence or a subtle warning that this is the word of the day on one of the most decisive days in the pending war on Iraq?
Label Tags
Peter Van Dijck asks why hardly anyone uses label tags, and Simon Willison follows up by reminding us how to use them. Mark Pilgrim also offers a great label tutorial at Dive Into Accessibility.
Comment Author Icons
Discussion boards have had author icons for years, but Daniel Kapusta’s In My Experience is the first weblog I’ve seen that offers customizable icons for comment authors. If you don’t like any of the default icons, you even have the option of creating your own icon and pointing to it by including faceurl=image_url_here in the comment.
This is a great example of subtle personalization that’s simple and fun. I’ve also found that it makes it much easier to scan for comments by a specific people.
Dan says that Brad Choate also deserves credit for creating the Regex and Key Values Movable Type Plugins, which make the comment icons possible.
100 Stories from Mark Pilgrim
Mark Pilgrim introduced 100 Stories today. Mark says, “They are all original. They are all interrelated. Some of them are over 80 years old.” A few of the stories are familiar as it seems like he’s pulled them his weblog archive. But with some of them being 80 years old, I’m guessing that some of the stories will be new. Mark’s a great writer and over the past year, he’s been a great inspiration. So, I’m very much looking forward to the next 90 installments. Thanks, Mark.
Half-Page Ads on NYT
New York Times will soon be displaying half page ads. Yuck. Join the Signal vs. Noise discussion.
If I could take up another moment of your time, allow me to elaborate. I say yuck because ads are already big, flashy and annoying as it is. Half-page ads will be worse. I would feel better about NYT move if they provided an option for an ad-free version, like other news sites do, but they don’t. Give me the full NYT on the Web without the ads and I’ll pay for it. Otherwise, I can get my news elsewhere.
Thermostat Usability
This is what my apartment thermostats look like. Usable or not? Why or why not?
The Web Simple Project Is Over
The Web Simple project is over before it even started. I was in the middle of the first article when I realized that the project wasn’t something that I wanted to continue in the long term. The lesson is not to start talking about something until it’s ready to lauch, when you’ve had enough time to know if you actually want to continue the project. So a contact page has taken over where Web Simple used to be. I may still finish the first article and publish it here when it’s done.
Now I can think more about other things I want to publish.
Gashlycrumb
Standing before you is the tall wiry figure of Gashlycrumb. First catching your attention is his hat - tall, black and thin, almost a reflection of his torso. Wrapped around the base of the hat, just above the brim, is a silken gray scarf that is streaming in the wind, down to his waist. He has no face, only a chalky skull that very slowly turns from the left to look at you. He wears a pitch-black gown with long sleeves that cling tightly to his arms. Bright white cuffs emerge at ends of his sleeves. His long thin fingers, covered by black gloves, spread like the legs of a daddy-long-leg spider. In one hand he holds a fragile black umbrella above his head. The umbrella has obvious gaping holes; some of the cloth blows in the wind like a severed spider web. Just as his large empty eye-holes meet your eyes, he smiles smugly, and your neck muscles suddenly become tense.
(with all due respect to Edward Gorey)
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