A Heuristic Review Tool
Surfmind gives us a very brief look at a utility for conducting heuristic evaluations...interesting.

The WASP is creating a Buzz
The WASP (Web Standards Project) clears up some recent misinformation about how developers code. The explain that developers don't develop web pages for IE -- they only just TEST with IE -- big difference.

"Many books on web development still teach outdated methods, and many practitioners take pride in delivering sites that look and work exactly the same in compliant and non–compliant browsers alike, at the cost of accessibility, long–term viability, or forward compatibility. Others develop proprietary code that works only in a handful of popular browsers."
- from The Web Standards Project's New Mission Statement

It's good to have the WASP back.

Previous posts:- The Web Standards Project: Phase II Coming
- Whither (or wither) the WaSP?

Back and down to UPA

After a long absence from blogging, I'm back in the saddle. The absence was due to moving into a new home -- all that packing, moving and getting settled takes a lot of time. The new house is great, although my current connectivity is horrible. Hope to get that remedied soon.

I'm heading to the UPA conference this week, and hope to meet lots of neat folks there and learn a few things.

Most People Never Question Statistics

Shirky has a great article outlining why the "Digital Divide" may not be as bad as some think. Trying to prove or disprove the phrase "half the people on the planet have never made a phone call", he uses telecom market penetration to outline some factors impacting the digital divide. His conclusions are very interesting - pointing out that government can be a huge barrier to closing the "divide."

Sticky fingers & hierarchical menus
Christina Wodtke is writing a book and has quietly released a short excerpt on her site Excellent Hack....er, I mean Elegant Hack. There's a bit of discussion related to drop-down / pull-down / fly-over / rollover / dhtml hiermenus and navigation. It also touches on right-hand versus left-hand navigation.

More blows to online trust
And we thought online trust was bad before...things will never be the same after this.

Cool color tools: Palette Master & Visibone's Web Color KiloChart
Palette Master by Nebulus Designs lets you select a base color and instantly generate a 42 color palette that is complimentary to your base color. Could be a useful tool when picking colors for a design -- especially if you hit a creativity roadblock.

Visibone's Web Color KiloChart offers "Hundreds of the girly pastels and manly earth tones that are so scarce in the web-safe color palette" as well as "protective coating". Go'n git ya some o' dat protective coating!

[Via Brainstorms & Raves]

Google labs demos
Google now has a site that shows off some of the new ideas they are working on. They currently have four projects you can test drive: Google Glossary, Google Sets, Voice Search, and Keyboard Shortcuts. I think the Glossary and Keyboard Shortcuts look like they could be ready for prime time pretty quickly. Here are the glossary entries for usability and information architecture.

The Google Sets project is interesting, but not something that I could see being used soon. For instance, a Set search for "radio button, button, textarea, listbox and label", all UI controls or widgets yields a nice list of related search terms like "window, frame, canvas, and menubar". The problem is that if you then select one of the terms, like "canvas" or "window" the new search results have no relationship to the set of terms you provided -- you get plain old results based on a single generic term like "window". The idea looks promising, but they clearly have a ways to go yet.

Update: John Dowdell of Macromedia provides a scenario where he used Google Sets to help him in a web search. He also provides some suggestions for improvements. (Added May 22)

Why I love pop-up ads
Madhu "madman" Menon has written a parody of an article called "Why I love spam" from CNET. You might want to read the "Why I love spam" article first to get Madhu's humor. Here's an excerpt:

"Now, in addition to the products being sold by real salesmen, I get pop-up ads on Web sites. Lots of pop-up ads. And for the most part, I love them. They tell me about things I'm interested in, such as services and products that might satisfy some of my needs. Since I have a voyeuristic streak in me, I enjoy seeing the X10 camera ads that I'm constantly bombarded with. I plan to buy several of them and plant them in women's toilets. I also love seeing the Internet casino ads. I haven't been very successful gambling in Vegas; maybe doing it online from some foreign country's servers will improve my chances. Hey, you gotta believe in blind luck, my friend. And that's as blind as it gets - after all, I have no idea what the odds are, whether the software is rigged to make me win, whether the business taking my money is legal, and all those mundane things I have to worry about in real life."

More good articles from Madhu:
- Why Big Freaking Flash ads won't work
- Useful "Page not found" (404) error pages

Related:
- Pop-up ads are viruses

The Best Influences on Software Engineering
An IEEE Software magazine article from 2000 lists the top 11 influences the editors thought made the biggest impact on Software Engineering in the last 50 years (PDF). Here's their list:

- Reviews and Inspections
- Information Hiding
- Incremental Development
- User Involvement
- Automated Revision Control
- Development Using the Internet
- Programming Languages Hall of Fame: Fortran, Cobol, Turbo Pascal, Visual Basic
- Capability Maturity Model for Software
- Object-Oriented Programming
- Component-Based Development
- Metrics and Measurement

The field of "usability engineering" has activites related to many of these influences:
- Heuristic inspection and expert reviews
- Information Hiding is much like the concept of progressive disclosure in user interface design
- Incremental design involves prototyping
- User involvement -- that's what UE is all about
- Usability testing and other types of evaluations are ways to gather metrics

Related:
Previous article: Web projects don't iterate, they use the waterfall method

Bogroll my butt
Malevole -- the site that brought us lap dancers a few weeks ago -- has taken the traditional blogrolling concept and twisted it into something suitable for flushing down the toilet: a "bogroll". Here's the rationale.

Related:
- Better Living Through Software discusses blogrolling and linking, making a few good points:

"So the law of "link reciprocity" is based on the idea that flow is something that should be returned, if you can. And since there is no "law of conservation of flow", then flow that someone directs at you isn't necessarily diminshed by you directing flow back at them later."

"Blogrolling is sort of like making introductions between friends. There is no easy way to measure how "appropriate" readers find a particular blogroll. Probably blogrolls that have a low clickthrough ratio are less appropriate than blogrolls that have high clickthroughs (if only 5% of the readers click on a link, it was obviously not very interesting to the audience)."

- In Big media beats the blog drum -- Seven blogger traits threaten media incumbents, Pressflex says this about blogrolling:
"By regularly commending and linking to other blogger's posts, bloggers weave new broadcast networks. (If you don't own a network, invent your own!)

Pop-up ads are viruses
Pop-up ads are the scourge of the web -- they waste users' time and effort and erode their patience and trust of the Internet. Now Salon reports that one unethical company has taken it to an extreme by using pop-up ads and malicious coding to effectively deliver "malware" -- basically a virus.

"Thousands of unsuspecting visitors to a family entertainment site are discovering a cornucopia of unwanted, potentially malicious software on their computers -- the result of a pop-up ad campaign, a booby-trapped Web site, a compromised Web browser, and strange doings at a shadowy Los Angeles company.

[The ad] was designed to automatically redirect visitors away from Flowgo (no mouse click required) and to dump them at a booby-trapped site called KoolKatalog." "[A]ccording to virus experts, tens of thousands of Internet users have been back-doored by the KoolKatalog-distributed "malware," which they have added to their lists of malicious code for scanning. While researchers have not yet completely decoded all functions of the programs, they say two of the files" "attach themselves to victims' browsers and covertly monitor which sites they visit. Other components" "appear to enable the program's authors to secretly send updates or other files to the infected computer." This really takes the "viral" in "viral marketing" to an extreme.

Although most pop-up ads aren't intentionally malicious like in the KoolKatalog case, most are harmful in less obvious ways:

Computer viruses and pop-up (or pop-under) ads have a lot in common:
- They victimize unsuspecting, uninformed and unprotected users
- We've had to create specific utilities and software to protect users from them
- They interrupt users intended workflow
- They provide no value
- Users don't want to see either of them
- They are created by selfish, unethical people who have no regard for others
- When they "attack", they make users feel violated

Backlinking and Xanadu
In Ghosts of Xanadu, we discover yet another innovative idea from the past -- a way to "move forward through the rear view mirror" as stated recently by someone on the SIGIA Information Architecture list.

"Backlinking crudely approximates the two-way linking feature of an early hypertext system invented by Ted Nelson called Xanadu. Nelson coined the term Hypertext—the linking of information and a system for viewing it—in 1963"

I think backlinking is a very powerful concept from an Information Architecure (IA) standpoint. It provides rich links back to sites that link to the current page. These often would be pages highly related to the current page in some way. It's kind of like the Google "related pages" concept, but more timely as it would constantly age off old referrers and add new ones as they appear. It also would appear as part of the current page as auxilliary navigation.

Related:
- Wired magazine archives of articles on Ted Nelson and Xanadu -- Nelson is a strange character.

- The Xanadu Project home page
"PROJECT XANADU MISSION STATEMENT:
DEEP INTERCONNECTION, INTERCOMPARISON AND RE-USE
Since 1960, we have fought for a world of deep electronic documents-- with side-by-side intercomparison and frictionless re-use of copyrighted material. We have an exact and simple structure. The Xanadu model handles automatic version management and rights management through deep connection. Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivializes our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents. WE FIGHT ON."

- "One profound insight can be extracted from the long and sometimes painful Xanadu story: the most powerful results often come from constraining ambition and designing only microstandards on top of which a rich exploration of applications and concepts can be supported. That's what has driven the Web and its underlying infrastructure, the Internet." -- Vincent Cerf comments on The Curse of Xanadu (September 1995)

Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile
A lot of people inadvertently come here looking for information on "Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile" -- a great children's book by Bernard Waber. There's actually a whole series of Lyle books. I've compiled a complete list of "all things Lyle" on Amazon.com. If you have children ages 3-8, these books are highly recommended. (Currently everything on the list with a rating is rated at least 4.5 out of 5 stars.) These books are fun for adults to read to kids or for kids to read on their own. They provide fabulous stories and illustrations. Books are cheap and make great gifts!

The list also has another kids' "Lyle" title: VeggieTales -- Lyle the Kindly Viking. VeggieTales are funny videos that have valuable lessons for kids.


For the record, I grew up being called "Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile" and "Lyle the crocodile" in grade school. Somehow I never read the books until I had kids of my own, and they are some of their favorite books. Currently this site comes up second on Google when people search for "Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile" due to my explanation of the site's name:

"The name Croc O' Lyle comes from people at work calling me "crocodile", as in the famous childrens' book "Lyle, Lyle Crocodile". The nickname went from "crocodile" to "croc" and then someone morphed it into Crocolyle. It's also a play on the phrase "Crock O' Gold" -- showing the Irish in my Heinz 57 hybrid genetics. ...and some people will probably say this whole thing is simply a crock."

This is simply an attempt to redirect people to something more suited to their interests.

Tacit knowledge and software usability
Jon Udell talks about how technologists are a breed apart.

"For years people have argued that software must relentlessly improve its score on the "mom test" and that is certainly true. But there's another angle here comes back to the KM aspects of blogging. When we narrate, we externalize what we know. We convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge. This can help software become more usable for two reasons. First, when technologists narrate what they know, they're more likely to realize how much tacit knowledge they have and expect in others. Second, when non-technologists narrate what they know, technologists can see more clearly that the expected tacit knowledge is missing."

[via David Watson]

Web projects don't iterate, they use the waterfall method
In The Bottom-line of Prototyping and Usability Testing, How user-centred design techniques can make a cost effective workflow, Henrik Olsen commits blasphemy. He says that most web projects don't follow an iterative development process. Everyone talks about iterative development these days. How could Olsen say such things?! Yet Henrik's points ring true for me. I've talked to many web development professionals, and rarely do I hear stories about projects involving refinement and iteration of a product. Usually, projects are "greenfields", creating something new, or they involve a wholesale redesign, completely re-doing the application or site.

My own experience is that larger initiatives like ecommerce sites, extranets, and portals tend to follow a more iterative development cycle, but the more common basic web sites and smaller applications tend to follow a waterfall or mud-throwing type of process.

Olsen summed it up best when he said
"The majority of Web projects employ what we could call a no-nonsense approach to product development, where none but the most obvious steps from idea to the finished product are taken."
Many business people would say this "no-nonsense approach" makes perfect sense. Who needs extra steps anyway? The problem is that, generally, projects blow their whole budget and timeline in release one. They don't budget time or money for iterations (e.g. multiple prototypes) within release one. They don't have plans or budget for a release two.

In one of my presentations for development teams I advise them to listen for a warning sign related to project iteration that might indicate a product or project is ill-fated:

If the client says: “We’re going to put something out there and then get feedback.” you should ask the following questions to help assess project risk:

Q: How and when will they gather feedback?
If they're not sure or if they're just going to monitor complaints, then you're in trouble. Have they budgeted and planned for appropriate "feedback gathering" activities?

Q: Is there budget for the next iteration? Two iterations? Three iterations?
No budget often means no next iteration. So even if you get user feedback, you might not be able to do anything about it.

Q: When will the next iteration or phase start?
No timeline equals no real plans to fix anything. Clients rarely expect to find problems, so they don't plan on fixing anything. They see fixes as exceptions to handle if necessary.

Q: How long can users suffer if good usability isn’t there? What if it's really bad? What if the help desk gets a lot of calls?
If you can't move to the next iteration quickly, you could end up creating a lot of headaches for yourself -- not to mention negative brand impact, extra support costs and resistance to use the product in the future.

Q: How about just developing a paper prototype and getting feedback on it?
Rather than iterate product releases, which is costly, why not iterate within your release? Get user feedback on prototypes to accelerate your overall process and deliver a better product right from the start.

"Getting something out there and getting feedback" is often just an excuse for cutting corners on the User-Centered Design (UCD) process. Don't let your clients fool themselves into thinking they're being "iterative" when they're really heading for a waterfall.

Related:
- Joel on Software: Picking a Ship Date -- an excellent, realistic approach to managing software releases. If you're faced with "timeboxing" a project, you might want to consider Joel's thoughts on release schedules. It also applies if you're really and truly following an iterative lifecycle.

- BusinessWeek: IBM.com Looks for Big Improvements from Some Subtle Design Tweaks -- Quotes: "As we built a user experience map we decided we needed to focus on top to bottom information architecture," and "You can run into the trap of subjectively tweaking versus objectively tweaking,"

- UIWeb.com: Why Good Design Comes from Bad Design

[via Elegant Hack]

Dell.com design case study
Frog design has a nice case study of their work with Dell (albeit in a badly framed page). It covers some of the design rationale used to make specific design decisions like use of color to highlight main path navigation:

"We established a primary purchase path defined by bright, bold colorful buttons which lead the user down the path. To address other types of shoppers, less prominent monotone image links are used. To lead users through shopping paths, we established a system of way-finding link icons with primary ones leading to the next step in the path and secondary icons leading to tangent content."

Bring a product vision to your project: Design the Box
"One practice that I've found effective in getting teams to think about a product vision is the Design-the-Box exercise ... The team makes the assumption that the product will be sold in a shrink-wrapped box, and their task is to design the product box front and back. This involves coming up with a product name, a graphic, three to four key bullet points on the front to "sell" the product, a detailed feature description on the back, and operating requirements."

The World Is Complicated. Get Used To It.
Joel provides an excellent example of real world design trade-offs in a recent post.

"Design is all about making hard choices and, hopefully, sometimes, hitting upon elegant solutions that solve conflicting goals. But when you can't solve conflicting goals, you have to be smart enough to decide which goal to solve, and not just be a lazy punter and pretend that adding a checkbox to the options dialog will solve it."

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.