In Defense of Cheating
Don Norman points out why GPAs aren't always everything they're cracked up to be. I can say that my GPA was always pretty good, but I've also found that often the best employees are well-rounded individuals who don't have perfect grades. I've seen many 4.0 students (a perfect grade-point-average) who can't figure out how to deal with real business situations where the path to success isn't clear. The whole grading system is messed up and doesn't reward the behaviors we need in business.

As Don says in his essay:
"Consider this: in many ways, the behavior we call cheating in schools is exactly the behavior we desire in the real world. Think about it. What behavior do we call cheating in the school system? Asking others for help, copying answers, copying papers. Most of these activities are better called "networking" or "cooperative work." In the workplace these behaviors are encouraged and rewarded. Thus, many experts will tell you that their real expertise lies not in what they know but rather in who they know: that is, expertise is often knowing whom to ask and where to look. When we have problems in the real world, we want answers, no matter the source, which means searching to find someone else who has experienced the same problem, asking others for help, and cooperating."

I can't say I agree with all of Don's ideas on "fixing" the system, but recognizing the flaws is a first step.

By Design:Wisdom from the Industry (New Architect)
New Architect talks to some industry leaders and gets their thoughts on many topics. I recommend reading the whole thing, but here are a few snippets that I found memorable:

"Machine translation (MT) tools simply don't work very well. To sum up recent progress somewhat cynically, I would say that today you can get a bad machine translation in only a fraction of the time it took 15 years ago." What's the biggest obstacle to Internationalization, and how will it be overcome? "The biggest obstacle to internationalization is the sheer distance, in every sense of the word, between the content owner and the content user. The people who benefit from I18N mostly are not Americans, while those who pay for it mostly are."
- Robert Hopkins - Founder, Weblations

"There will be a consumer revolt against technologies that are too complicated, unreliable, or constraining, in favor of technologies that are simple and elegant, truly helpful, mindful of context, and flexible enough to meet a wide variety of needs."
- Henry Lieberman - Agents Research Lead, MIT Media Lab

It has been said that innovation is a process, not an accident. What does Google do to keep innovative ideas flowing?
"Everybody is encouraged to come up with new ideas, and we have a Web page where everyone can post these ideas. There's a meeting every two weeks to discuss them, and everyone is invited."
- Monika Henzinger - Director of Research, Google

"Products have multiple dimensions: fitting a real need, reliability, aesthetics, usability, price. All have to be correct for the product to succeed. No single factor dominates. Any single factor can kill the success."
- Donald Norman - Co-Founder, Nielsen Norman Group

"A lot of navigational conventions have come and gone—such as 1997's "Yellow Fever" spate of left-hand nav bars, or the avalanche of Amazon-style tabs we've seen more recently—but architectural conventions seem to take more time to develop. But I would not be surprised if, for example, five years from now you could find press releases given exactly the same architectural treatment on every Fortune 500 site."
- Jesse James Garrett - Partner, Adaptive Path

What's the most interesting debate raging in the design and development community right now?
"Usability—balancing emotion with intellect in designing effective content."
- Kevin Lynch - Chief Software Architect, Macromedia

Macromedia launches blogs to support new software releases
Wired coverage of how Macromedia provides examples of corporate blogging and using blogs to provide customer service.

Macromedia blogs:
John Dowdell (Dreamweaver MX)
Matt Brown's Dreamweaver Blog
Mesh on MX (Flash MX)
the complete list

Looks like they've made a number of UI improvements to Dreamweaver MX (DMX) as well as some usability and accessibility additions.

How to design a logo
If you've ever tried to design a logo, you know it's not a piece of cake. This collection of logo design techniques from Before & After can really help make your next logo design project go faster.

Strategic usability: Partnering business, engineering and ease of use
Scott Berkun (of Microsoft): "The most limited view of usability engineering is often unintentionally promoted by usability engineers themselves. A typical usability study or method is not where usability is created or defined: it’s only where it is measured or witnessed."

International standards for HCI and usability
Did you know that there's a whole set of ISO standards that address usability? Yep, there is...

Standards related to usability can be categorised as primarily concerned with:
- the use of the product (effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a particular context of use)
- the user interface and interaction
- the process used to develop the product
- the capability of an organisation to apply user centred design

The user-centered-design certification that's being talked about is based on these standards.

Makers of Electronics Begin to Emphasize Style
Don Norman has been talking a lot lately about aesthetics and beauty. He talked about it at CHI, on CHI-Web, and in a NewsFactor article about the design of consumer electronics.

Here are a few good snippets from that article:
"Norman lauded the Handspring Treo phone and personal organizer for sporting a form that fit its function. The device has a thumb-operated keyboard and large screen for e-mail and Web access packed in a slim, flip-phone frame.

"Stop thinking about the technology and start thinking about what people are doing," Norman said. "That's the secret to good design."

"In designing the new iMac, Apple wanted to make a computer that "physically fits people better," said Jonathan Ive, Apple's vice president of industrial design.

"If we had just set out to design a computer with a flat panel, that clearly would have an enormous influence on our approach," Ive said. "If you are not considering the problem appropriately, and you are not understanding its context, you are going to come up with a fairly predictable solution."

At Nokia, designers spend a lot of time studying consumer behavior, said Alastair Curtis, group design director.

About four years ago, the company noticed Americans' and Europeans' burgeoning interest in yoga and decided it needed a simple product where special-function keys were grouped together. The result was the wildly successful, 4-inch tall 8200 phone series."

Of course, I have no idea what yoga has to do with grouping buttons on a phone. Maybe if I join the National Yoga Association they'll let me in on that little secret...

From the archives:
- Usability is lacking in the consumer electronics world as well
- User centered design sells products

Why I’m not calling myself an Information Architect anymore
David Heller makes some good points in a Boxes and Arrows piece on IA as a title:

"Information Architecture is not the same as interaction design or user experience design. The line is very clear and the only reason we allow it be blurred is because early adopters from different disciplines within the field coopted the term and have applied it to a broad swath of responsibilities."

"I know I am not an Information Architect because I know what Information Architecture is, and I respect those that can do it. I also want to make sure that those who can do it, aren’t obscured by those that can’t."

"So respectfully, I remain a member of this community, but I revoke (retroactively) all titles I ever held that included Information Architecture in them."

I've received a number of comments on my chosen title, "User Experience Architect" -- it's a new title that few people have used before. Here's my explanation of it: “User Experience Architect” is a title that insufficiently seeks to describe a role focused primarily on user-centered design, but borrowing from many other disciplines like information architecture, systems design, project management, marketing, and cat herding. I also don't call myself an IA -- for many of the same reasons David cited in his article. "Usability engineer/specialist" is too narrow a definition, and brings too many preconceived notions since many UE's only conduct usability tests.

My CHI 2002 conference report
Find out some of the things Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman, Jared Spool, and others had to say at the CHI 2002 conference in April. I wrote an article for Boxes and Arrows on my CHI experience. CHI is the annual conference put on by the SIGCHI group within ACM (a.k.a. the usability engineering folks). Please use the comments feature on Boxes and Arrows to let me know what you think. I'll try to answer any questions that people have as well about the conference or the sessions I attended.

George Olsen also has an excellent write-up on the CHI/AIGA Experience Design Forum - an event that brought together people from both the Usability and Design fields (and somehow no one got hurt).

Bloatware: Good or Evil?
Joel wrote a nice piece on why usability and featuritis are often at odds. Here are a couple excerpts:
"Featuritis sells products, but choices reduce usability. The really great designs are the ones that appear to eliminate a choice. You know you're doing your job as a designer when you figure out a way to take a complicated feature and make it simpler."

"It usually takes a lot more code to make a simpler interface."

But then I noticed an older post from Joel about Bloatware:
"Remember, kids, the trouble with the "everyone only uses 20% of the features" myth is that everybody uses a slightly different 20%"

"No matter how much it bothers you neat freaks, the market always votes for bloatware."

I think Joel's right on both points --- and it creates a paradox. What is better: do right by your users by keeping your product simple, or do right by your company by helping them win market share, adding features? The obvious and tricky answer is that you have to find a balance. If the feature you add is actually used by 20% of your users, that might be good enough to justify putting it in your product. Sometimes it may only be used by 1% of your users, and used rarely, but it may still be worth adding. Need an example? How about Disk Defragmenter in Windows? Few people actually know what it does, but it can be very important to getting a system working better. Of course Joel's second post make me think that things like defragmentation should just be handled automatically, behind the scenes, so that's a bad example. A better example might be a system administration feature for an ecommerce system like IBM WebSphere. Something like a system rollback option that restores a system to a prior state might be used rarely, and by relatively few people, but it adds a lot of value when it is needed. And, if no other competitor has that feature, it now becomes a wedge that marketing can use to create distance between your product and the competition.

It then becomes our jobs as designers to figure out how to add new features without overloading new users with too much complexity or confusing existing users by moving legacy features around. That's why we get paid the big bucks. :-) ...and that's why we have our methods toolbox full of things we can use to deal with that challenge.

Google challenges Yahoo as the #1 search site in the world
WebSideStory reported that Google is rapidly gaining market share among search sites and could surpass long-time leader Yahoo! if the trend continues. As of April 24, 2002, Google accounted for 31.87 percent of all search referrals worldwide - an all-time high - compared to Yahoo, with 36.35 percent as of the same date.

On my site, Google and Google-powered Yahoo results account for almost 100% of search referrals. Of course that's largely because I (so far) have refused to pay for a listing in Overture-related or MSN's engines. My theory is that the majority of my audience (usability and web professionals) primarily use Google anyway -- they know a good thing when they see it. I also feel that search engines like Overture and MSN have no content without listings -- they need new listings or they get outdated and irrelevant and lose their market share. Google has the largest, freshest index of the web that's available -- why would I pay for a listing with an inferior product? It would be different if I were selling products or services, but I'm not. Overture and MSN effectively ignore a huge percentage of the web and treat non-paying sites as insignificant -- I think that's an ignorant assumption to make.

Dem bones are useless
Popular Science voted for this Flash site as the "useless site of the month", but you'll have fun playing with it anyway. You can make a skeleton walk, dance, fly and perform all kinds of unnatural movements. Lots of options (just about everything is clickable/movable).

Looking for something on Flash usability? Try this report from User Interface Engineering. I saw some of their material recently, and it was rather interesting.

K-logs? We're talking about weblogs in business use...not corn flakes!
I posted a bit about blogs as knowledge management a while back. I came across a couple of recent articles that try to label the concept and give examples of its benefits.

from What is a k-log?
"Some people are taking the concept of weblogs and applying it to the wider concept of knowledge management. The result is k-logging ("knowledge-logging")."

The article above misses the point about how blogs can help employees find internal expertise. A big part of leveraging "knowledge" within an organization is about finding the right people. There's some discussion of the k-logging concept here and more here.

from Business pros flock to Weblogs
"The experiment has been so successful that Javaid says he plans to expand it until virtually everyone at his 60-person company, Mobilocity, has a Weblog. Javaid’s brief experience has convinced him that far from an exercise in self-indulgence, Weblogs actually can be used to increase worker efficiency."

In the same article, Dan Gillmor has an interesting quote:
“My readers know more than I do, and that’s a liberating notion, not a scary one,” he says. “Every journalist ought to realize it’s true. No matter what you cover, your readers know more collectively than you do. If we can capture that, we all come out ahead.”

Now think about that from a corporate KM perspective: subject matter experts will learn from their readers/customers/co-workers -- and then pipe it right back out into their community via their weblog. As the Fabulous Thunderbirds say, that's powerful stuff.

Meeting facilitation tips from 3M
The people who brought us the Post-It Note have a nice collection of meeting facilitation articles on the 3M Meeting Network site. Here are some examples:

• Facilitation Concepts: Group Decision-Making Processes explores different ways to bring a group to a decision.
• A Magical Tool for Group Decisions also explains the ORID process for team decision making.
• Using Where's Waldo and chocolate to keep people's attention during a presentation.

My favorite 3M product: Post-It flip chart pads (easel pads)

Lap dancers on post-it notes
Malevole is a weblog with a rather interesting DHTML-heavy design. The interface might be suited to first-time readers, but repeat readers would likely have a hard time distinguishing "new" content from things previously viewed. Clearly an experiment pushing the envelope with less-than-serious content -- fun to play with a bit. (Looking for the lap dancers? Scroll to the bottom of the Malevole page -- they're wearing blue outfits and are rather, shall we say, "active".)

What a sucker...
I wish people would stop acting as though Vincent Flanders has any qualifications to talk about web usability. This guy has turned one great, irreverent web site title from 1996 into a career and now two books. He's a technocrat who clearly doesn't know much if anything about usability, but continues to act as though he does. He makes egotistical claims like the following, and no one asks him to prove them:

"I'm most proud of the fact that I was the first to say Web design was not about art but about money. I took a lot of flak for that back in 1998, but time proved I was right."
- Vincent Flanders, Sitepoint (April 2002)

"The goal of having a website should not be to brag to your friends that you are on the Web but to provide service to your customers (and thus make money). ... I predict that 1997 will finally be the year when customers (and their money) will talk loudly enough to get rid of superficial coolness and make websites into serious business tools"
- Jakob Nielsen, Trends for the Web in 1997 (January 1997)

Flanders actually states that he thinks SOAP is the next major development in "web design and usability over the coming years". SOAP is just another web technology and has nothing to do with design OR usability, yet he says. "It's the backend that's important." Let me get this straight -- the backend, something the user NEVER sees, is the future of web design and usability???!!! The author and editors at Sitepoint should be ashamed that they gave this drivel an outlet and never bothered to verify facts or statements by Flanders.

New blog tool from Palo Alto Research (PARC)? Introducing Sparrow Web
From Palo Alto Research Center:
"Sparrow Web makes writing to the web as easy as reading from the web!!! Sparrow Web is a system that adds structured, in-place editing to community-shared web pages. It allows contributors to add and modify information on a Sparrow Web page using simple fill-in forms specified by the author/manager of the Sparrow Web page."

There's a Sparrow Web demo page with examples like a project page.

Know a generous ISP? Help keep HCIBIB alive.
The HCI Bibliography is looking for a new home to serve the HCI Community. Could be a good, targeted advertising opportunity for a willing ISP. They'd be advertising to a large group of people that help a lot of web sites get built.

Suggestion: If you have a web log or site, consider adding a link to this post or the related HCI-Bib page. The HCI Bibliography is one of the best usability resources on the web; the least we can do is help them find hosting.

Confessions of a Mozillian
David Hyatt is involved in the devlopment of the Mozilla browser. He discusses his "frustration with the development of the Mozilla user interface" and proposes some product changes to mitigate the issues. Aspects of his story sound similar to may other software projects, but what's different are the complications that open source development can bring: "there's the problem of Mozilla's perpetuated egalitarianism at the module owner level and at the contributor level. Everyone is leveled out, leaving the product with no clear direction or vision."

Related posts:
Linux needs focus not whiners where I said:
"The reason Linux is floundering, if at all, is that there is no unified Linux vision. There is no strategy, no marketing -- not even a targeted market segment. Who is leading product development for Linux? Who has identified and profiled the target users and their needs? Can anyone tell me, even in general terms, who Linux is designed for? So much Open Source development relies on the concept of evolution -- but evolution takes too long. In business, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there".

Google imitates Ask Jeeves
Google Answers was just released as a "beta". Looks a lot like the old Ask Jeeves to me. Their FAQ does provide some additional info -- like the fact that answers will cost between $4.50 and $50.50 each.

Off to CHI 2002
Well, CHI 2002 kicks off today. I'll be "drinking from a fire hose" for the next six days. Just hope my brain has enough room for all the information. The people behind CHIplace have put together a blog for CHI attendees to share their thoughts and experiences. If you're not able to attend you might want to check out CHIblog.

Related info:

• Proceedings from previous CHI conferences - ACM Digital Library
• Notes from the Practicing Information Architecture SIG at CHI 2001 with some interesting results from a survey of attending Information Architects
• SAP Design Guild - CHI 2001 - A Collection of Very Subjective Snippets is one person's account of their CHI 2001 experience. Has some good summaries of research and photos

Dead men don't read email
Recently on SIGIA-L I got involved in a little debate over the value of e-mail auto-responders. My position was that auto-responders, when used properly, can add a lot of value. From a usability principles perspective, an e-mail telling you your order has been received provides a certain amount of system feedback and status. My feeling is that auto-responders should be used to provide additional information and value to users. For example, rather than just telling a user that their order was received, an auto-response can inform the user how to check on their order's status, when to expect a shipment, etc.

After reading The Case Against Autoresponders, I think it's time to clarify a few points about auto-responders:

1. Auto-responses and the processes around them must be designed well like any other customer-facing content or system.
2. Just because you can take some humans out of a process by automating some customer interaction, don't forget that there's a human on the receiving end.
3. Processes should allow for a way to prevent the auto-response. Designers should allow for manual intervention to take the place of automated processes -- acknowledge that exceptional situations happen, like the death of a customer, and provide a way to handle those situations individually. Not all situations can be anticipated and some communications shouldn't be scripted in advance.

Autoresponses, if used well, can strengthen user trust in a company or site. If used poorly, they can make users feel like just another number -- another email address in a huge spam-sending database. Many companies talk about "building relationships" -- but the last few lines of the GrokDotCom article emphasize how superficial so many of these "relationships" are:

"My friend conscientiously sent emails to a number of online businesses who regularly sent both email and snail mail to her mom, requesting her mom's name be removed from their lists. Only one replied."

Clickz does a great job of explaining how to deliver value along with strong branding and marketing messages via email and auto-responders:

• Autoresponders Can Boost Efficiency and Effectiveness
• Shaking Hands, Email, and All That Jazz
• Leveraging Your Confirmation Emails
• Don't Show Customers the Door -- Automate Post-Purchase Retention

Web designer builds home out of Flash
"Conventional home builders aren't concerned just yet that they will become obsolete. "I see a fundamental usability issue with Flash homes," relates Greg Watson of J & G Builders. "For example, from home to home there will be design differences. In one house if you turn the door knob it'll open the door, but in another the house might start dancing."

[via xBlog]

Here's a past post about a site that only seems fictional: Dialing for Doritos

This is the best use of Flash I've ever seen...nothing like an "utltrainteractive kung-fu remixer" to spice up your day. Ja-ja-ja-jam on it.

Rising Costs of Free Web E-Mail
Oddpost is a new online email service that reminds me of Google when it was in beta. Within a few days of its release, more than 300 people have signed up for the $30/year Oddpost service. It just goes to show, once again, that a significantly better user interface can be used to sell products.

"Instead of the lumbering setup standard in Web e-mail, where each action takes a few seconds to complete, Oddpost gives you a quick, drag-and-drop design that looks and feels like a "real" e-mail program"

"The company spent no money on marketing and received no media coverage, but like the best technology often does these days, the site found its way onto various weblogs and discussion sites, and "we got slammed with traffic," Diamond said."

Related posts:
- User centered design sells products
- Outlook, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

Impressions after riding a Segway HT
Dan Bricklin has written a nice article on what it's like to actually ride (drive?) a Segway or "Ginger". His discription of how the Segway feels to ride was interesting. He said it feels as if it has four wheels, not two:

"Looking forward, you don't see the two wheels. In my mind, it always had four. (How else could it feel so stable?)"

"It always feels in control, never like it's coasting. That, and the low center of gravity (80 pounds under me rather than me balanced on a lightweight bike or something), distinguished it from other small personal transport devices. It reminded me of my few times on a jet ski on a lake (without the bumping or waves): When you stopped telling it to go, it slowed down very authoritatively."

After reading Dan's review I could see my mom, who has MS that affects her balance and endurance, riding a Segway. It seems like a viable alternative to a wheelchair or walker. My guess is the Segway won't be adopted widely as an alternative to cars, but Bricklin's final statement has a ring of prophesy:

"Gary hinted a bit to us about Segway's Stirling engine that with or without the Ginger could have great impact around the world. Remember, this is just the first general product using some of these technologies. There will be many more. Think of the Segway like the first uses of the microprocessor in a calculator, before the personal computer, PDA, flat panel LCD, DSP, GPS, etc. On my run when I saw a Vespa-like motor scooter putt-putt-putting along, I thought of the abacus."

Pictures taken on the road: American Mile Markers
Kodak has a feature story on Matt Frondorf, an engineer who took a trip from New York to San Francisco with his 35mm camera snapping pictures out his car window once every mile. The resulting photos are very cool, as is Matt's story about how he did it -- changing film every 36 miles!

“I think I got what I hoped to get,” he says. “I wanted to be able to assemble long, continuous pieces to get a feel for vastness. To look at one wheat field doesn’t have the same quality as looking at the whole wheat belt.”

He made the trip of over 3,300 miles in just 6 days. Tip: I preferred looking at the Qucktime movies rather than the Flash "picture viewer" -- seemed to be a better way to experience the photos.

[via Slashdot by way of Alterslash]

Anti-Simplification - How to Make Life Harder for Users
If we find out which factors make applications more complex, we can learn through bad examples which pitfalls to avoid.

[via cognitive Architects]

Need a LIFT in the accessibility department?
Digital Web reviews UseableNet's LIFT for Dreamweaver, a product that helps you build and test sites for compliance to section 508 and W3C standards. I haven't tried out LIFT, but after reading the review I'm more curious now.

Usability can save lives
Boxes and Arrows: The story behind Usability.gov
"One minute, a researcher seeking grant information is pulling up an NCI [National Cancer Institute] website for details on what grants are available and where to apply. The next minute, an ordinary citizen is frantically searching NCI websites for any information -- any clues about a type of cancer for which the doctor is testing them. Every day, NCI disseminates life and death information. Usability.gov ensures that users and their web behaviors are kept in mind when designing sites."

See also: my previous comments on the NCI guidelines.

On a related note, I'm very proud of some volunteer work I was involved with a while back for a Minnesota based cancer charity: The Children's Cancer Research Fund. It's a phenomenal charity, and if you're looking for a good charity that really makes a difference in people's lives, you'll have a hard time finding any better. (The site's been redesigned since I worked on it in 1997.)

I remember the heart-wrenching day when I learned I had to remove the photo of a beautiful, smiling little girl from the home page -- she had lost her battle with cancer. I'll never forget her face and the darling smile she wore under a flowered hat that I'm sure covered a bald head.

About a year later, I was proud as I could be that the large corporation I worked for donated the use of its corporate jet to take another little girl home from Minnesota. She too was losing her battle with the disease and needed to fly home to be with her family in the end. It was in the middle of an airline strike, and the doctors were afraid she wouldn't get a commercial flight home in time. CCRF gave us a call to see if there was any way we could help. A call was placed to our CEO, and within minutes we had the go-ahead to do whatever we could to help, with no questions as to the cost.

There was no follow-up story in the paper, no community relations release. It was just a large corporate giant silently committing an act of kindness because they could, and because it was the right thing to do. It's a side of corporations that never gets its due -- all too often we see corporations portrayed as cold, heartless, greedy monoliths. What I saw that day was genuine caring, giving and a willingness to help the community and individuals -- with nothing wanted in return.

The Boxes and Arrows article just reminded me of those days working with CCRF. It pointed out that the NCI's Usability.gov site can help researchers and doctors save more lives. The site can help cancer victims find life-saving information. Sometimes, usability can mean the difference between life and death.

Google tweaks search results

Either I've scooped everyone on this or I just can't find any documentation of this as a prior Google feature. Google now includes a "Description" field in a search result listing for any page that has a listing in the Open Directory. See this example. It's a nice addition as it provides the user a nice short description of a page. The way they do this also makes sense since there's an editorial process for those descriptions in the Open Directory whereas description meta tags are often used to mislead search engines.

Learning from hypertext's history

The web wasn't the first hypertext system created; many systems came before it: Intermedia, Hypergate, Hypercard, and Storyspace are just a few. In the early days of hypertext experimentation, developers came up with many different ways to represent links. A short historical sidebar to a HypertextNow article outlines some of the different link representations that were explored. After a comparison of different methods at the Hypertext '87 conference (a full 15 years ago), the consensus was that links should be hidden until users elected to show them. Why? Because the other methods had various issues: they gave links too much emphasis, they wasted screen space, or they looked strange and confusing.

Then Mosaic came along and ignored everything that had been learned -- it showed links as underlined blue text. "A link, even the most minor footnote, sticks out from its surrounding text almost as if it were blinking."

Lessons learned:

• Seek out existing research and best practices. Learn from the mistakes of others.


• Really think about where you insert links into your text, they can really be disruptive.


• See what else we can learn from early hypertext systems.

Resources on Hypertext from Useit.com:

• Two Basic Hypertext Presentation Models: note the various link styles and contextual navigation.


• Short History of Hypertext: Starting in 1945!


• Features Missing in 1995 Web Browsers: All are still missing today. Some of these like fat links, are fascinating.


• Navigation Features in Netscape 1.1: Sadly, we haven't added much to this list since 1995.

The technology behind Google's great results
"Page and Brin developed groundbreaking technology for converting poop to pixels, the tiny dots that make up a monitor's display. The clean white background of Google's home page is powered by this renewable process"

A better printable page
NUblog you how to prepare online content for offline reading, covering some good tips in the process.

Hobbits on Soapboxes
After watching the Oscars a few nights ago, I thought folks might get a kick out of this post from the archives. Compare Jakob Nielsen to a hobbit and Peter Merholz to an elf...you be the judge. Personally I think it's evidence of another government cover-up.

Modeling the user, the business model and the interface
Came across this diagram via Google...it's that whole "picture says a thousand words" kinda thing...or something. I'm guessing Jeffrey Veen is the master modeler. Reminds me a lot of my dot com days.

(see also articles by Jeffrey.)

People and Hierarchies
SAP Design Guild covers hierarchies in depth. Part one of their series has an especially good reminder on considerations to bear in mind when designing anything with a hierarchy -- like a typical site map.

"people have problems with abstract hierarchies. They cannot create a suitable mental model for them because the system seems artificial, and often they do not understand what the categories mean. Deeply nested hierarchies cause even more problems because people get disorientated. People already get confused in mazes, where they only have to remember a larger number of binary left or right decisions. It is even easier to get lost in complex application structures, hypertexts, Websites, or the Web as a whole, if there are no "anchor points" where they can regain their orientation. People need to know where they are, why they are there, where they came from, and where they can go."

[via InfoDesign]

Breadcrumbs > Breadcrumbs > Breadcrumbs
Keith Instone, previously thought to be hiding out in a cave in Afghanistan due to his silence, surfaces once again to provide the usual "Instone Insight". Keith recently made a few of the goodies from his poster at IA Summit 2002 available. He does a good job of cataloging different types of breadcrumbs, what they're used for, and examples of each. Here are the 3 types he covers:

1. Location Breadcrumbs: show the position of the page in the site hierarchy. Tell the user "where" they are in the site.
2. Path Breadcrumbs: show the path the user has taken within the site to get to the current page. Help the user navigation "back" the way the came.
3. Attribute Breadcrumbs: provide meta-information and navigation to related areas/products. Also used in search results to help explain what type of thing a particular result represents.

Attribute breadcrumbs were a type I've never seen well explained, so I found that especially interesting. Keith also asked a very good question about Path breadcrumbs, basically whether or not we need to manage the user's history on a site since web browsers already provide a history and a "back" function. An exception might be when you're using faceted classification and a page doesn't really have one specific residence in a hierarchy -- navigation is dynamically created based on metadata.

(Keith Instone is the owner and mastermind behind the highly useful Usable Web.)

Eating your own dog food doesn't work if you're a cow
AOL finally realized that corporate use of email is different than personal or small business use of email. All I can say is "Duh!" Here's what happens when you disregard your users' unique needs and go chasing after false cost savings:

Bad corporate mandates trap users in a bad situation:
Not all corporate mandates are bad. Homogenity and standards within a company can save money and create a healthy environment for good user support, reuse of code, and less training and re-training. BUT you have to pick the right product based on the business and user needs. AOL obviously didn't do that:

"management got months of complaints from both senior and junior executives in the divisions involved, who said the e-mail system, initially designed for consumers, wasn’t appropriate for business use. Among the problems cited: The e-mail software frequently crashed, staffers weren’t able to send messages with large attachments, they were often kicked offline without warning, and if they tried to send messages to large groups of users they were labeled as spammers and locked out of the system. Sometimes, e-mails were just plain lost in the AOL etherworld and never found. And if there was an out-of-office reply function, most people couldn’t find it."

AOL was clearly focused on cutting software licensing costs by using their own product. In doing so they also figured they'd quit helping out their competitors like Microsoft by not buying their software. While they were at it they should've just switched all their business users over to AOL dial-up accounts using a 56K modem. Of course, with no better, more usable option, AOL employees searched for ways around the horrible product that some myopic decision makers cursed them with:

"The e-mail problems have led many staffers to resume pre-Internet habits. Employees say they are faxing and using Federal Express more than before. They also are picking up the phone or wandering down the corridors in search of human contact. “If all goes well, we’ll never have to use e-mail and we’ll have to start talking to each other again,” says one magazine writer."

Businesses that allow decisions to be driven solely by false cost savings at the expense of business productivity and user needs will only drive costs up. One can only guess what this has cost AOL. Think about that in terms of real dollars, personal careers, inside political implications, employee turnover, and end user pain. Now instead of moving to one good unified solution, they'll have multiple products in use. One bad corporate mandate can spoil the appetite for any future mandates and the possibility of any corporate standard.

While it may be a good idea to eat your own dog food sometimes, you shouldn't make your business and thousands of employees suffer when your product won't work for them. If you represent a large herd of cows, making them eat your dog food is just plain stupid. If your product's target market is dogs, then just make it the best dog food you can. If AOL wanted to compete with Microsoft Outlook for the corporate email market, then they should have improved their product to compete in that space. Once they had a competitive product, then and only then should they have considered deploying it across their whole company.

KartOO
Quite interesting: Kartoo is a meta search engine which presents its results on a map.

Attendee-Centered Conference Design
Megnut discusses how the design of a conference can greatly impact the user/attendee experience of the event.

"I was considering holding questions until the end of my presentation because I didn't want to get off-track or lose my place in my presentation. I was placing my needs as a speaker before the needs of my audience. He recommended I take questions throughout, since I'd be able to gauge my presentation based on the audience's feedback. If I waited until the end, he warned, it would be too late to adjust. That one simple suggestion led to the best presentation I've ever given, and a very engaging discussion throughout my session."

Meg's article got me thinking. As much as I enjoyed CHI last year and am looking forward to it again next month, the CHI "attendee experience" could be improved quite a bit. 1) Special Interest Groups (SIGs), some of the most interesting conference events, aren't even listed on the conference schedule. SIGs also were given rooms that were way too small last year -- if you didn't get there at least 5 minutes early, you were out of luck. Dozens of people were often seen lined up at room entrances after the room was filled. In contrast, I attended a few paper presentations booked in huge auditoriums that were nearly empty. My take as a practioner was that many attendees wanted to share war stories and lessons learned (in a SIG) rather than hear some grad student talk about some HCI minutae (in their paper presentation). 2) Planning what conference events to attend is an adventure since there's no good visual outline of what events are happening when. The closest thing you get is a "conference at a glance" page that effectively tells you most types of things like "tech sessions" happen all day long -- "tech sessions" include panels, discussions, papers, plenaries, short talks, and posters. There's no view that tells you what your half-dozen options are from 10-11am on any given day.

I recall many people commenting on the poor usability of the CHI 2001 web site, and while the CHI 2002 site was designed by Diamond Bullet, I'm sure the work was likely donated and therefore didn't include any type of usability evaluation. Ironic, isn't it?

Light Keyboard
I have to wonder about the usability of "a full-size fully functional virtual keyboard that can be projected and touched on any surface."

Funny Stupidity
A hacker who is representing himself in court has claimed that the person charged must not be him because the government complaint listed his name in all capital letters. He also demanded to know whom the prosecution represented and when informed that they represented the United States, "He complained that I had not brought my client with me," the prosecutor said.

Of course none of his antics help his court case any...here's an article covering the story further.

[via Corante]

All my secrets exposed
Kudos to Peter Merholz for talking about how a potential client questioned his firm's professionalism. His story sparked a bit of discussion about client-vendor relationships and the Request for Proposal (RFP) process used by many companies. I think anyone involved in a vendor selection process (on either side) will get something from this discussion.

[Also picked up by SvN...]

Links save users 42 steps
A report on the NISO/NFAIS Linking Workshop held February 24, 2002 has some very ineresting discussion about linking. A couple of interesting points:

- When linking to a document sometimes the same one URL doesn't work well for all users. Links that are "user aware" would ideally link users to the most appropriate version/copy of a document based on who they are.
- Having the right link can save users a lot of time and effort -- typically saving them about 42 steps to access the same information versus getting there without a direct link.

...Of course we already knew that "links are good" and act like shortcuts. I've just never seen their effectiveness quantified.

Thesaurus Construction Set
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has a comprehensive document covering the ANSI standard for creating, displaying and maintaining a Thesaurus.

[via Andrew at HeyOtwell...]

This week's boxes
Boxes and Arrows just published two new articles. One covering how to define Information Architecture, and another that's a review of the Nielsen Norman Group report "Intranet Design Annual: The Ten Best Intranets of 2001". I recently read the NNG report, and I pretty much agree with Jeff Lash's review -- it's a decent report in that it provides snapshots of some interesting intranet sites. One slight misnomer is the report's name implies it covers "intranets", but it really covers "intranet sites" or sites on intranets...in my world there's a huge difference. At my company, we have (only) one intranet with literally hundreds of sites on it.

I'm scheduled to give a review of the NNG report and a couple of other recent research reports at an upcoming UPA-MN meeting. Jeff Lash probably just made my work a lot easier.

Adaptive Path Tour 2002
Guru's on parade...coming to one of five cities near you this year. If their tour is as good as their past presentations look, it should be worthwhile. Now if I could just become a professional Usability/IA "groupie" and attend all these conferences and other events like CHI, IA Summit, SXSW, and UPA, year round, I'd really be having some fun! But alas, like Christina said, sometimes you just have to go create something. I think that's to keep some kind of brain equilibrium established. After you fill your brain with a bunch of Usability/IA wisdom from the gurus, eventually you need some kind of outlet or your brain will implode. Why would it implode rather than explode? Because Jared says good content sucks.

Apologies to JJG for once again using the dreaded Usability/IA phrase! :)

NYC Mayor Bloomberg advocates UCD
Developers of technology products need to listen to user concerns and requirements from the beginning, and the user relationship should continue after a product is delivered, he said. "The best days are yet to come for your industry, but only if we are customer- and client-sensitive and we put ourselves in a situation of understanding what people need, and have the openness to go and see after we do things whether we were right or not."

He cited an example from his own experience in the business world to show why it's important to consider the customer from the start. He recalled an occasion in which a receptionist was charged with making name badges for all visiting customers. Because the fields in the program she was using were so small and required so much unnecessary information, the line of customers waiting for badges was often intolerably long. So Bloomberg went to the IT department, found the programmer who had developed the software, and forced that programmer to work the reception desk for two days. Needless to say, the software usability was quickly improved, Bloomberg said. But it was a situation that could have been avoided if the programmer had thought about the product from the user's perspective before designing it.

It's great to see someone of this notoriety advocating a user-centric perspective. My only critique is that it's not just "thinking about it from a user's perspective" that would have helped. A few unanswered questions remain: Did the programmer ever receive training on how to design user interfaces? Did the company have UI guidelines in place? Was the project given proper budget for doing it right the first time? User Centered Design goes much further than just "thinking like a customer" -- good design involves a design process, not just a thought process.

Full article: InformationWeek - NYC Mayor Bloomberg Talks Up Customer-Centricity
(Update: The "Great Google" turned up Jakob Nielsen's comments on this article as well. Note Jakob's page doesn't offer "permalinks", so you have to scroll to March 15, 2002...Jakob, needs to convert to blog software for better functionality for his spotlighted links page.)

Other similar statements from Bloomberg:
"I've learned that change is always evolutionary and is virtually never revolutionary. There are no simple solutions to complex problems. ... everyone says that they're going to revolutionize the world with a little piece of software. The press writes about such things because they're interesting. And the public would like to believe that you can get something for nothing -- but that's just not the case. ... Our customers don't care about what their suppliers sell, they only care about what we have that can help them. Our focus has always been to explain how we can improve their lives -- make them more efficient, more pleasurable -- as opposed to selling what we produce."
From Fast Company - Smart Steps (March 2001)

Profound it ain't...
Great quote I heard from someone in the pop group "B2K" on TV yesterday. This "artist" was referring to their recently released album and said:

"Anyone can listen to it. There's no profound lyrics or anything on it."

...I think he meant to say "profane", but I'll trust his actual statement is more accurate. I got a big laugh out of it!

Yahoo! Mail: Simplicity holds up over time Jesse James Garrett has done an excellent review/analysis of Yahoo! Mail for Boxes & Arrows. What’s so excellent about it? Well, it’s short, to the point, and provides a great example of using his visual vocabulary to document the flow of an application. He also doesn’t belabor explaning the whole visual vocab thing. He gives it to you and provides just enough “for additional info” links for newcomers to dig deeper. It’s a good example of Boxes & Arrows’ editorial aim of delivering content beyond the IA basics you get on other sites.

Boxes and Arrows Hit the Bull’s Eye
Boxes and Arrows is a new online magazine aimed at the “community of practice” that includes information architecture, information design, interaction design, and interface design. I can’t overstate how excited I am about this new site. Boxes and Arrows (B&A) is the most exciting thing to happen in the IA community for a long time. The content is top-notch, covering topics that you won’t see in other places, or covering them with a different approach.

All of the articles I’ve read in the first issue are excellent, but here are some that I think really stand out:

• Jess McMullin’s article “Getting into government consulting” – If I’m going to pay all these taxes at least the money should go to making better experiences for us taxpayers. Jess offers good advice, and I’m sure from talking with him in the past that it’s based on his experience as a consultant for government bodies in Canada.


• Nathan Shedroff offers an insightful essay on the titles we like to throw around and our motivations to do so. It's called The making of a discipline: the making of a title. His points hit home, and made me think about my title du jour: User Experience Architect. I'm sure this will rekindle some old topics on the SIGIA list...


• Got usability? Talking with Jakob Nielsen – Chad Thornton delivers the first truly innovative interview with Jakob that I’ve seen in about three years. He asks a lot of new questions, and from the perspective of those of us who already buy into usability as a goal. I think it shows a more moderate Jakob than what you get elsewhere. He’s talking to the choir here, so no need to preach.

Six months after September 11th
Watching the History Channel's program on the World Trade Center (pre-attack) it struck me how buildings and architecture reflect our various cultures. We build things that represent the thinking, technology and society of the day. You have to wonder when, as a society, we'll ever again feel up to building a huge skyscraper.

From the archive: You matter more than you'll ever know: about Paul Battaglia and what the story of his death represents.

Please take a number(ed beeper)
It often seems some of the best ideas are simple ones. Six Flags amusement parks recently announced they'd be offering visitors the option of paying $10 a day for a fancy pager that allows them to reserve a place in line for rides. When it's their time to ride it pages them.

"Instead of having to wait in long lines, park visitors can pay extra for the luxury of registering at a special kiosk for each ride. The devices will then notify them when they can return and get on the ride without having to wait"

"In Atlanta, guests "loved it" despite the fees, because the devices allowed them to eat meals, visit shops, watch entertainment shows and more without having to wait for hours at many rides...And the company likes them because if customers aren't in ride lines, they are often spending money in other parts of the park.

Popular restaurants that don't take reservations have been using pagers for quite some time to notify people waiting that their table is ready. Six Flags is just applying the same concept in a different business. Of course if customers aren't waiting in line like cattle, they can be shopping in a gift shop, getting a drink at the bar, or doing something else more enjoyable -- hopefully generating some revenue. It's the old concept of service order numbers used at so many grocery store deli counters over the years, but with more mobility.

I expect that businesses that regularly have long wait lines will eventually move to something similar. And in cases like Six Flags' where freeing customers from waiting in lines opens the opportunity for more revenue, I would expect that the paging service will ultimately be free.

Time to bring back vinyl?
Looks like the music companies and the new CD copy-protection measures they're testing have little regard for usability of the end product and also don't comply with existing standards.

"BMG, part of Bertelsmann, was forced to drop copy protection on two CD's it released in Europe when consumers complained that the music would not play on their CD players."

"the advent of silvery discs that do not quite act like CD's have angered Sony Electronics and Philips Electronics (part of Royal Philips Electronics), which co-developed the compact disc format, first introduced in 1983. "We do not approve the use of the CD logo on such products," said Rick Clancy, a spokesman for Sony Electronics of America. "It puts us in a position where we can't guarantee the playability or sound quality of discs that may be used with our devices." -- NY Times

How to copy a copy-protected CD
Of course what the clueless record companies don't get is that pirating will still take place, just as it has for decades with any other type of music format. "Dubs" can easily be created by going from digital to analog to digital. Using good quality analog equipment to make the copy, a listener wouldn't notice much difference on a typical stereo setup when playing back the copy. Sure, audiophiles might notice a difference, but they are unlikely to use pirated copies -- they want the real thing since they also tend to be collectors.

Digital isn't all it's cracked up to be
Further evidence that analog copies will happen is the tradition of bootlegs in the music culture. Hard-core fans create their own live recordings ("bootlegs") -- sometimes even with the band's blessing. Bootlegs are then traded or given to other fans -- a simple web search turns up many examples of available "boots" online. What's important to note about bootlegs is they are often very poor quality recordings, yet they are collected by rabid fans. If people want the music bad enough, they'll settle for lower quality recordings. From what I can tell, piraters could use a simple two-dollar low-tech analog patch cable between a CD player and a CD-R to defeat multi-million dollar hi-tech digital copy-protection measures -- and people would be satisfied with the results. As the old saying goes, "where there's a will, there's a way," and piraters will find a way. Ultimately, the music industry isn't going to prevent illegal copying of CDs.

Caveat listener
Even so, music companies are designing new "CD" products that only work with certain types of CD players without telling consumers what the new equipment requirements are. Another issue is that most music retailers don't allow consumers to return CDs -- a "defective" product can only be exchanged for a replacement of the same title. An exchange won't help an end user if the product design is flawed; an exact replacement fixes nothing. The unsuspecting person who usually listens to CDs on headphones with their CD-ROM drive, but who suddenly can't get a new CD to play correctly, will have no recourse. Oh, and there'll be no error message to tell them that their problem is an intended one.

The root of the problem: lack of user-centered-design
The core of the problem the music industry is creating is that they've forgotten their target user -- the music lover who buy CDs. They obviously haven't profiled and segmented their users. I would guess that many younger music lovers -- teenagers to thirty-somethings who follow current music trends and have more expendable income for entertainment -- are much more likely to use MP3 players and CD-ROM or DVD drives in computers to listen to and, yes, copy music from CD to hard drive or a mix CD-R. My assumption is that this is a very profitable market segment for the industry -- but more importantly, it's the new generation of music buyers. It's also the generation that is more technology savvy, more likely to use the web and e-commerce, and more open to change in music buying habits than the others. Why would the industry want to risk pushing these buyers away? My only answer to that question is it must be because they haven't spent enough time researching their users and designing innovative products that meet BOTH their users' needs and the needs of the industry. They've simply over-reacted with a crude application of available technology with little fore-thought on the implications.

My predictions:
The good thing to keep in mind is that markets work. Music companies and bands that sell copy-protected CDs will get bad press and will risk alienating their target market. Consumers who, for years, have been able to enjoy a music CD on their computer at work will suddenly find that the industry has "fixed" something that wasn't broke...and they will complain to retail outlets, which will flood distributors with exchanged or returned CDs. Warning labels will appear, and like the american NC-17 movie rating, in time they will be avoided at all costs. Only the biggest artists who already command a large market share will be able to withstand a copy-protection warning label. And eventually, the industry will find that CDs with copy-protection will sell fewer units than those without it, and they will drop copy-protection altogether. If not, they will create a huge market opportunity for un-signed artists and independent labels to sell their works online sans copy-protection.

Usability and products that meet the standards consumers demand will win out. The question is, what side will the existing music industry be on?

Practicing Usability in the future
You could say web design and development today is practiced by more people than just a few years ago, and you'd be right -- if you ignore the quality and complexity of the work. Lightweight HTML development and graphic design tools have opened the field to a much broader set of people. But companies didn't throw away their graphic designers and HTML developers -- they are still at work, but now focus on more difficult, more important, more risk-intensive projects.

Will the same thing happen with Usability and Information Architecture? Should we worry about it?
Yes and No.

Lightweight usability methods will continue to gain popularity. People like Steve Krug and Jakob Nielsen are acting as evangelists for usability. Those two "gurus" are very different in their approach to the unwashed -- Jakob can rub many people the wrong way -- being perceived as dogmatic, and Krug sells simplicity with humor and encouragingly says "you can do it too, this is easy" -- but both effectively convey the principle that "usability" as a concept revolves around being user-centric.

Yet while in the future there will be more developers and designers doing guerilla usability testing -- they will remain novices when it comes to the finer points of User-Centered Design. They won't know a heuristic from a urologist. The good news is that those same novices will get hungry for knowledge and skills...and they will promote usability-as-business-advantage within their organizations. In effect, they will create fertile ground for "the experts" -- who I'm afraid will remain in short supply.

Good information architectures will still be created by the pros in the future. Information Architecture (IA) is not a simple discipline -- just like building architecture -- you might be able to blueprint and build a shed for your mower, but a house or an office building is a whole different story. IA projects in the future will continue to get more complex, and integrating multiple sites, content, and workflow-intensive applications will require an experienced information architect with real training.

In the end, big, critical and risk-intensive projects will involve usability professionals and information architects with significant training and experience. Less experienced practitioners -- usually trying to play many roles -- will take care of the smaller, simpler efforts. We shouldn't worry about this. Instead, we should focus and enhance our skills so we can meet the new challenges ahead: systems that involve more integration, the need to design and test for multiple platforms and devices, and users that will come to expect an even higher level of usability and utility.

The Krugmeister, Krugeroonie, Krugster...
Okay, I don't know Steve Krug that well...I mean I know him a bit...alright, I had to pay for his book, and I've emailed him a couple times -- he even emailed me back once and didn't mention a restraining order.

Anyway, you should check out an excellent interview with Steve on an Irish site called webBusters. I think the things that've made Steve an instant hit are his sense of humor, practicality, and tone. He connects with people actually practicing usability and design in the trenches on real-life projects. Put simply, he doesn't claim to be a guru and knows how to have fun. Those of us practicing or selling usability can learn from the way Steve presents his material and opinions.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the interview:

"I wrote my book in hopes that I could make life a little easier for people who've been handed the job of designing a site, by teaching them how to think like a usability expert, an information architect, and an interaction designer. (It's really unpleasant to be doing a job when you don't feel like you know what you're doing.)"

On accessibility:
"...the people building the sites are between a rock and a hard place. If they want to do the right thing, they have to get educated about how to do it, which is not easy. ... And then they have to do all this on top of the design, which they don't have enough time for in the first place. ... I think the real solution in the long run is probably improvements to browser and screen reader technology so they work together better."

When asked which web sites will be around in 15 years:
"Sears.com."

And if you happen to be someone involved in web projects who'd like to get started just understanding what usability is about, READ STEVE KRUG's BOOK: Don't Make Me Think. Stop by sometime, I'll let you borrow my copy.

Requirements gathering is like sex
Peter Van Dijck's take on how clients fantasize about their conceptual applications. This short post is really great -- I think he's right on target. Of course, the analogy makes you feel a little dirty, and after reading it I don't think I can ever use a certain quote from the movie "Field of Dreams" in a client meeting again.

Elegant Hack redesign
One of my favorite sites, Elegant Hack, has recently been redesigned. Not sure I like the new home page -- kinda boxy, but cool photos. Anyway, Christina's style and content are top-notch, especially her blog: "Gleanings". (Come to think of it she also has great names for both, as well as a slick, IA-geeky logo.)

And yes, Christina, you can put "mentat" on your business card. More people in the biz world would probably know what mentat means than "information architect"...plus mentat is much cooler sounding.

How OS "upgrades" don't make 'da grade
Excellent post (a "ManifOSto") and very lively discussion at Signal vs. Noise about things an operating system upgrade should do (or not do). The discussion covers a lot of areas including future direction of desktop metaphors.

<excerpt>
It's wishful thinking, but an ideal operating system should...

1. Run on my current hardware.
2. Require equal or less system memory than the previous OS.
3. Require equal or slightly more hard drive space (for the core functionality) than the previous OS.
4. Run as fast or faster than the previous OS on the same hardware.
5. Include the previous GUI skin as an optional install.
6. Back itself up. Automatically.
7. Not reduce any of my peripherals to paperweights.
8. Allow me to do more with my computer than the previous OS.
9. Display error messages a human without a computer science degree can understand.
10. Not reduce me to a quivering ball of cytoplasm when things go wrong.

</excerpt>

A New Architect
Web Techniques Magazine is no more -- it's now called "New Architect". I have to congratulate them on doing one thing right that many other similar sites have done wrong in the past: their old URLs still work. Yes, that's right. They chose NOT to break the thousands of links to their old content. Why am I surprised? Because for some reason, many businesses don't think twice about revamping their site's file structure when they redesign -- they "clean up" things on the server, only to make a mess of it for their users, advertisers...and any associated revenue streams.

Resources on URLs -- why and how to not break them in a redesign:

• InfoWorld: Redesign 404 -- how InfoWorld did it all wrong


• Doc Searls on "Rotten Linkage" caused by some redesigns


• Merges Theory: How to make URLs user-friendly


• Keith Instone's tactics for preventing the dreaded 404 message


• Jakob Nielsen on linkrot


• Moving pages is #6 on Jakob's Top Ten New Mistakes of Web Design

See also previous post: Design Not Found

As far as the new magazine goes, if you're curious about what's the same, and what's different...well, according to the editor:
"We've held on to many of Web Techniques's unique ideas. For instance, we still believe strongly that the cornerstones of any Internet project are strategy, infrastructure, development, and interface. This structure lets you see all sides of the problem, and its solution, before you devote your time and money to it."

"We've added two completely new sections to the magazine: Critical Decisions and Case Studies. Each article in the Critical Decisions section is written with the intent of helping you answer a strategic question."

Web Techniques has regularly covered topics on design and usability in the past, and judging from the first issue of New Architect, it looks like they'll continue that into the future.

Uncle Sam needs Information Architects
"The IT systems in place at the CIA and at other agencies within the intelligence community have made analysts less efficient, because they spend valuable time searching for information stored in many different locations, Louie said. The systems don't allow users to quickly find or compare data especially if the search terms aren't exact.

"We had an IT failure — all of the systems that we put together with the best intentions weren't doing the job," he said. "We couldn't fuse the data."

"This fact was made glaringly clear Sept. 11 when CIA employees at almost every level ended up printing out stacks of paper and searching them manually because it was faster than searching through data stored in IT systems, he said."
Federal Computer Week: Systems fail to deliver

(Via SIGIA)

Why be stupid when you can keep it simple?
An article on spartan design from webreference.com. The first page is golden, the rest get down into development techniques (not all of which I agree with).

A few poignant quotes:
"The first goal I have is to convince some of you to simplify everything that you are doing. There are several reasons for this, the most enticing that your income will likely go up."

"It is not easy to create something very simple, and I believe it takes more artistic talent to create a beautiful page when the designer must work within usability restrictions. There is always one thing I keep telling myself as I ponder this age-old art question. My attitude towards producing useable work is the primary reason I have made a good living as an artist for close to fifteen years without a "day job." And isn't that what it is all about?"

Outlook, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.
ZDNet has a good rant and discussion of Outlook frustrations. Here are a few of mine:

• Can't drop a contact in the To field of a new email message
• Forgets any aliases I don't use after few weeks -- frustrating
• Rules management sucks...you end up with way too many rules
• Rules performance is horrible. They take forever to run and won't run in the background
• Outlook runs rules when mail "arrives"...but not if it "arrives" while Outlook isn't running.
• Takes forever to start up over dialup. Has to process all reminders, events, tasks, etc. before you can get to your inbox. (Hint to MS developers: multitasking means some tasks can run in the background.)
• HTML email authoring is a mystery...where do I enter my code, please?

The Web Standards Project: Phase II Coming
Hmm...looks like the WaSP is undergoing a metamorphosis. According to their site, they are "retooling, and a Phase II will "launch soon". Their last signoff on Phase I leaves some clues to possible new directions:

"Browser makers are no longer the problem. The problem lies with designers and developers chained to the browser–quirk–oriented markup of the 1990s...It lies with “helpful” software that generates sites optimized for 4.0 browsers with nary a thought for document structure, open standards, separation of structure from presentation, or the long–term durability and viability of web documents...above all the problem lies with clients who confuse the web with print...who are so concerned with “backward compatibility” that they neglect the far more important issue of forward compability."

Given the focus of "phase I", my prediction is that they'll target tool makers. Developers and clients are the more difficult of the three to tackle, and in phase I they went after browser makers...Let this serve as a warning for Adobe, Microsoft and Macromedia.

See previous post Whither (or wither) the WaSP?

(found via Zeldman)

Jakob Nielsen on false prophets
I received an email from Jakob Nielsen about my previous post on usability snake oil vendors. Here's what Jakob had to say:

"I noticed your essay on false usability a few days ago. I commented on the same phenomenon back in 1999, calling it "voodoo usability":

Unfortunately, as you point out, flawed approaches have been increasing, rather than declining, in the time since my essay, so it's good that you took the initiative to revive interest in the matter."
--
Jakob Nielsen
Author, "Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed"
Nielsen Norman Group

I've received a number of other comments via email, all supporting what I said. One person said they avoid using the term "usability" to describe what they do because it is just too vague. They think its vagueness allows an opening for "snake oil merchants". That may be, but in my book wrong is wrong, no matter how big an "opening" is provided by the victim or the environment.

False prophets of Usability - Part 1
In the past few years usability has become somewhat of a buzzword. That's both a good and a bad thing. What's bad is that the meaning of usability gets muddied, re-interpreted and sometimes even set aside. You have software companies selling "automated usability testing solutions" (no one really sells products anymore). You have traditional graphic designers passing themselves off as "interaction" this and "user experience" that. And of course most of the "buyers" don't know what is what -- they're just buying instant 'usability" -- or so they think. I'm not saying I'm perfect, but there are clearly some folks in the "usability game" who are just jumping on a bandwagon and bringing their own version of snake oil with them.

Here's an example:

NetConversions has some pretty neat software to sell. It's mostly event logging / data capture type of stuff. It could be very useful to a business or a usability engineer doing research. But, listen to this claim from the NetConversions site:

"True Usability™ is an innovative and rapid data driven method to test for website usability using your actual visitor traffic to improve the user experience and to optimize bottom-line results." [November 2005 Update: Netconversions is now "Atlas" and is still offering True Usability™]

Note that they've co-opted and trademarked "True Usability" as their product name. Of course this really has little to do with "truth" or "usability" as you'll soon see. They have a "white paper" on their site claiming to compare various "approaches to usability": heuristic evaluations (aka "experts"), focus groups, surveys, server logs, and of course "True Usability™". This supposed comparison has more errors in it than I can cover here, but here are the highlights:

Supposedly a heuristic evaluation is "an analysis of the site with respect to a set of usability guidelines. These usability guidelines are often based upon the expert’s past testing and consulting experiences." -- No, a heuristic evaluation is based on heuristics. A guideline review is based on guidelines, and most "experts" don't create their own guidelines from scratch. Clearly they don't know what they are talking about. Looking at their "about us" page, there isn't a person listed with a background in HCI, Usability Engineering or User Centered Design -- instead they are technologists and marketing data research types. Don't get me wrong -- I like those types of people, but I know usability professionals when I see them, and I don't see any at this company. If they're really selling "usability" expertise, shouldn't they show their qualifications in the field?

The "comparision" opens with a very nice quote about usability testing from the Industry Standard.-- evidently to promote NetConversions' product. Of course the types of usability testing Usability Engineers have been doing for decades -- involving humans observing and listening to users isn't even mentioned in this comparison. It seems anything that can help you evaluate usability of a system is now considered "usability testing".

Unfortunately NetConversions isn't the only company doing things along this line, and even many usability professionals can fall into the trap of promising to solve all of a customer's problems in one fell swoop. Usability (as a field) suffers when "experts" don't meet expectations. We have to set realistic expectations with clients, help them select the tools, methods and approaches that meet their needs. We can't over-promise and under-deliver. Perfect usability is a goal never attained, but great strides can be made in that direction if businesses, designers and developers work together.

There's plenty of bad usability out there -- more than enough for all the traditional usability professionals and the new entrants to the "usability game" alike. We can work together -- tool-makers and practitioners, researchers and designers, marketers and engineers. Let's just quit promising that we can get companies to the moon on the next bus leaving town.

Be realistic, helpful and truthful...and maybe Real Usability™ will happen.

Megway TH. Bigger than Jesus
This is amazing! I gotta find out where to get me one of these.

"Due to its unique Opposable Digits Technology™, each Megway is capable of carrying up to 120 pounds in its front cargo compartment in the form of either boxes or bags. The optional broom, mop, and floor buffing attachments (not shown) turn Megway into a powerful cleaning machine.

The advanced technology behind the Megway is really cool.

Thanks to Jason Kottke...great stuff.

Don't let your web site fall out of the window
The question of whether to open a new browser window for offsite links came up on CHI-WEB. Lois Wakeman has a nice article about why this generally presents a problem for users. She includes some good examples and usage scenarios (see the sidebar). Personally, I've seen every one of the scenarios she lists occur with users in usability testing. I've seen users with 6 or more windows open (unbeknownst to them) as well as users who accidentally close their only browser window thinking it was another popped-up window. She also covers the topic of popup (or pop-up) windows with a nice working example.

I'm still looking for some guidelines that talk about good uses of popups. If you know of any, please drop me an email and I'll post a link here. I think areas where popups MIGHT be useful are user assistance (e.g. help, glossary, etc.) and showing full-size images when browsing thumbnails.

Generally I avoid designs that open new windows for users. I've yet to find a web user who couldn't find the Back button or some other way back to the previous site when needed.

Faceted Classification Example
I've been trying to get my head around the concept of "faceted classification." This topic has been discussed a bit lately on the SIGIA list, and I wanted to understand what's different about
"faceted classification" from my previous understanding of "classification". FacetMap is an online example and tutorial on faceted classifications. I guess I've never thought of web "taxonomies" or classification systems as using strictly mutually exclusive categories -- where items only fit in one location. Maybe this is why facets don't seem to be a big revelation.

I think providing the user "multiple paths to success" is important whenever possible. For example, "Salt Products" might fit under both "Food" and "Industrial" categories since there is table salt and road de-icing salt. On an intranet, one user might think to look for an organization chart under "about us", while another user might look under "contacts". Where they look might depend on the task they are trying to accomplish at the time. I seem to run into examples like this all the time. Sometimes you can get away with supplementary navigation to get the user to the one spot where something resides (e.g. "Related Links"), but other times you have to actually place the content/item in multiple places.

So there is value in being able to distinguish between "faceted classification" and "hierarchy" or "taxonomy" -- "faceted classification" is a more specific term -- it lends clarity to the discussion. I also like the fact that conceptually "facets" should be determined by user needs. This helps focus the information architect on the user, rather than just on the content.

Read more about faceted classification at PeterMe:
- Innovation in Classification
- Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-cets!

Are you changing the world?
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, says "I keep things focused. The speech I give everyday is: 'This is what we do. Is what you are doing consistent with that, and does it change the world?'" Pretty neat attitude.

Here's the full PCWorld interview:Three Minutes With Google's Eric Schmidt

See previous post: When you want to be a millionaire, you use Google.

The Internet is NOT evil
A UK group has called for an "International Internet Free day". They are asking people take the day "to meet friends and family and rediscover life in the 'real world'."

This attitude that the Internet somehow degrades the quality of "real life" is absolutely ridiculous. The Internet, like other technologies is more often used to enhance peoples live than to degrade it.

But, if I were in London, I could spend the day with this bunch of technophobes touring Royal Festival Hall, Oxo Tower Wharf, the Tate Modern museum, and Shakespeare's Globe theatre. But since I don't live in London, maybe I could just check these interesting places out on the web. Some, like the Globe, even have a virtual tour. ...or maybe I'll chat or trade emails and photos with my friends and relatives who live far away.

Can people over-use technology? Sure. Take a look at telephones, television, pagers, video games and hair color. As they say, moderation is the key.

How to save 49 weeks of development time
If you're a developer or development team lead, you'll want to get familiar with Joel Spolsky's site. True to form, he's provided yet another article showing good development processes in action. His latest installment talks about why you should consider a code "scrub" rather than a complete re-write.

Other gems by Joel:

• Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To it.


• The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code


• User Interface Design for Programmers