D. Keith Robinson posts a list of web design details. These are things like "Is there relevant meta information?" and "Are fonts relative and scalable?" I'm thinking I'll incorporate some of these into the list of web heuristics I'm building at work...
I've collected a few good CSS-related items in recent days.
37Signals announced that they are releasing the framework they used to create Basecamp. It's all written in Ruby, a language that looks interesting, but I have no experience in. Regardless, it looks quite interesting, and probably worth exploring.
Peterme's lastest, and somewhat aggressively titled, post is a valuable reminder that most "stuff" out there is just too hard to use.
Anyway, the nub of this wee rant is, of course, simplify. It feels like we're reaching a breaking point with new technologies -- if we thought the blinking "12:00" on the VCR was sad, what terrors can we expect? Think about the lesson of rolled throughput yield -- how can we minimize the steps involved? How can we enable people to plug something in and *just have it work*? How can we do a little more work on the design and engineering, so the customer has to do none on their own?
I've seen software and web development projects quite often veer into complexity rather than simplicity. As Peter points out, the "more steps you take, the likelier failure is." Every added feature or field increases the possibility you'll end up with a bloated and useless piece of junk. One example I always think about in this vein is Basecamp. It must have been hard for the designers to resist the temptation to build all sorts of features into this product. But, they aggressively kept it simple. Sure, there are things I wish it would do, like assign to-dos to people. But, every little wish like that would make the system more complex, and probably harder to use. By keeping it clean and basic, they created a system that exudes ease-of-use. The road to software hell is paved with examples of designers and developers piling on features (okay, you can blame Marketing, too, I guess).
Maybe one rule of development and design is: do only what is absolutely needed to fulfill the mission, and do no more.
Plenty of people have commented on this survey of web design conventions. I'd love to see someone do a similar survey of corporate websites rather than designer's personal pages...
WaSP reports that the second edition of Eric Meyer's CSS Pocket Reference is out. I'm really pleased to see this little gem of a book updated to include CSS 2 and CSS 2.1. When I taught HTML and CSS classes in my previous job, I used the Pocket Reference as the course "textbook" (they were only one day classes). I even carried by copy of this around in my notebook bag for about three years.
Two recent articles look at computing pioneers Alan Kay and Dennis Ritchie.
"A PC Pioneer Decries the State of Computing by David Kirkpatrick, writing about Alan Kay:
But I was struck most by how much he thinks we haven't yet done. "We're running on fumes technologically today," he says. "The sad truth is that 20 years or so of commercialization have almost completely missed the point of what personal computing is about."
But the Labs were not only the birthplace, in this sense, of modern computer hardware. Much of modern software—computer programs and the special programming languages in which they are written—originated there too. Two instances in particular stand out: the programming language called C, which from the early 1970s has been perhaps the most popular programming language; and the Unix operating system, first booted up in 1971, and still going strong in everything from laptops to airline-reservation systems. Dennis Ritchie, who has worked at the Labs since 1967, was central to both projects. He is revered as the inventor of C, and, with Ken Thompson, as the co-inventor of Unix.
Whereby Karl dumps upon his few readers a long and disjointed list of nifty stuff he has recently come across.
More later.
My Google ranking for the phrase "A Panda Walks Into a Bar" has fallen from #1 to #12. So, in a misguided attempt to boost my totally worthless placement, I bring you links to two articles related to Eats, Shoots and Leaves:
"You pour thing, if you don't see the point of spelling correctly" by Lynne Truss:
It seems to me that people just resent having to learn things. "How do you explain to an eight-year-old that the word 'yacht' has all these strange letters in it?" a chap once asked me, on the Jeremy Vine Show. This seemed an unanswerable question at the time. It was only afterwards that I worked out my objection to it. Why should the comprehension level of an eight-year-old be our standard for anything?
"For Want of a Comma, the Meaning Was Lost" by Jef Raskin, writing an open letter to Lynne Truss:
And when you say that "you can't write comments in the margin of your screen to be discovered by another reader fifty years down the line," I imagine that you perhaps have not seen threaded discussions and "Wikis". Not only can I add marginal notes, but because of the bidirectional nature of the Web, a comment can become incorporated as part of the material that all subsequent readers see, not just the chance reader of my copy. For example, one comment I made on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu) became incorporated into the work (with due credit). My marginal comments on my paper copy of the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), however, are unlikely to become memorialized so accessibly.
Jesse James Garrett, "Six Design Lessons From the Apple Store":
1. Create an experience, not an artifact.
2. Honor context.
3. Prioritize your messages.
4. Institute consistency.
5. Design for change.
6. Don’t forget the human element.
Too bad he couldn't take photos.
I really like Dan Cederholm's method for creating slant spacers between menu items. It's simple, easy, and looks good. This also reminds me I need to order a copy of Dan's book.
I can't decide if this is cool, or just a bit too odd/creepy:
Your Amazon.com Plog is a diary of events that will enhance your shopping experience, helping you discover products that have just been released, track changes to your orders, and many other things. Just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. When we think we have something interesting or important to tell you, we'll post it to your Plog.
Maybe it's because things are "posted" by "Amazon NewReleaseBot at 12:00:00 AM PDT." Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, don't it?
At any rate, I guess it is an interesting take on the weblog concept.
ACMQueue has published a nice interview with Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle. Kahle discusses a number of topics interesting to those of us int he information management world, mostly revolving around the social, legal, and technical issues of archiving the world's collected knowledge.
Social:
I've grown up within this idea that universal education is good, and that people, if they can build on the works of others, achieve more. But this approach is not always in favor. Not all times in history encourage open societies and open knowledge.
Legal:
What the music and movie guys are doing, I can't tell you. I have not worked with many businesspeople who want to spend much time lobbying or in court.
Technical:
That gets about 8 million hits a day, or about 100 hits per second. That's running on this Linux cluster where there's no Cisco, no Oracle, no Sun, no special anything. Everything is built out of bricks, along the Jim Gray [head of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center] model. We do get help from people at IBM Almaden, HP Labs, Microsoft Labs—all helping to build these petabyte systems.
A side note the folks at ACMQueue: If you must break articles up across multiple pages, the printer-friendly format option should join them back together into one big document. If you did this, I could hit print once, rather than going to each page, then choosing printer-friendly, then hitting print. Doing this six times wasn't exactly a happy user experience.
Continuing the rant: all of us involved in putting content up on the web need to realize that people aren't necessarily going to read the content on-screen. I'll often print out longer articles and read them on the bus ride home. I guess lots of folks have figured out how to present content in a screen and printer-friendly fashion, so when I hit a site that doesn't do this well, it really stands out.
Okay, enough of that. Go read the interview.
There is still time to glom (is that a word?) on to the design trends mentioned by Cameron Moll. Okay, so I went right out and added the fieldset tag to an incessant redesign.
I'm all caught up on the blog-able material I've been collecting over the past couple of weeks. I'll now return you to your regularly scheduled silence.
I've run across a couple of recent interesting developments in the HTML and XML editing world:
FCKeditor is a cross-platform, open-source WYSIWYG editor. Nice.
Altova has released a free home edition of XMLSpy. Nicer.
Esther Derby: Skills are Only Half the Equation for Success:
Much of the time, organizations focus on the Person part of the equation. That’s important, because our work requires intelligent people with a wide range of functional skills, technical and domain knowledge, and appropriate interpersonal skills. Most managers work hard to hire the right people. Managers also provide coaching and feedback to help people hone their skills and develop their capabilities.
But that’s only half the equation.
Organizational factors, corporate culture, policies, and the direct work environment influence performance, too. The good news is that you can influence the environment for your group in ways that increase performance.
Gerry McGovern: Usability and listening to customers have limits.
When asked, Amazon.com customers seemingly didn’t want one-click ordering. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, felt otherwise. From his experience, he knew that people hated purchase processes. I read about this a couple of years ago and it really made me think. Here was someone who did not listen to his customers wishes, gave them something which they said they didn’t want, which after a while they really got to like.
In other words, don't turn off your brain. Usability tests and other User Centered Design activities are data points, not the gospel.
Very cool: PyLucene:
PyLucene is a GCJ-compiled version of Java Lucene integrated with Python via SWIG. Its goal is to allow you to use Lucene's text indexing and searching capabilities from Python. It is designed to be API compatible with the latest version of Java Lucene.
This should be much, much faster than Lupy.
(via Ted Leung)
From the Christian Science Monitor:
In the nation's 13th-largest market, the online version of the Tampa (Fla.) Tribune and WFLA-TV, called TBO.com, uses no less than six different methods - from outside surveys to in-house counts - to try to measure its audience. "Each measurement has its frustrations," says Kirk Read, general manager of TBO.com. "No method seems to be exact, so we use a number of different resources.... We're still trying to get our arms around it."
I've had to give people the spiel on the inherant fuzziness of web site stats a number of times. It's nice to see the message filtering down into the popular press.
(via Phil Windley.)
I'm about two weeks late on commenting on this Joel on Software piece. But, I think this post has helped further the discussion on ways to improve web/browser techology in ways that could lead to big improvements in web application design.
Stephane Lussier has a nice little article on the concept of a code review. The code reviews (or UI reviews) I've been a part of have been useful, if not always fun. It helps if people can divorce themselves from their work, but that almost never happens.