2008

I like the Google User Experience Guidelines. "The Google User Experience team aims to create designs that are useful, fast, simple, engaging, innovative, universal, profitable, beautiful, trustworthy, and personable."

  1. Focus on people – their lives, their work, their dreams.
  2. Every millisecond counts.  
  3. Simplicity is powerful.
  4. Engage beginners and attract experts.
  5. Dare to innovate.
  6. Design for the world.  
  7. Plan for today's and tomorrow's business.  
  8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.  
  9. Be worthy of people's trust.  
  10. Add a human touch.  

We could have a far worse 500lb gorilla, I must say.

Good customer service 2005

Good work, Netflix. I just went to the site to rate the movie I watched this evening (Just One Night, 2 stars, funny but just too choppy to sustain itself) and got this message:

The Netflix store is temporarily unavailable because of scheduled maintenance work.
This store is available 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. Well, almost ...

Every now and then we have to perform maintenance to the Web store equipment. Right now, we're working hard to give you an even better shopping experience.

According to your computer's clock, it is currently 11:46 PM

It is anticipated that the site will be available again at 02:00 AM  ( ~ 134 minutes )                

We apologize for any inconvenience this causes you.

Please visit us again soon.

Now that is how to do a system downtime message.

Prediction: a shift to the right 2004

As I begin using my Treo 600 more to access the web, I'm becoming more aware of the annoyance of wordy top and left-hand navigation areas when I have to scroll past them to get to the main content of the page. I made the decision to avoid this in my own designs long ago after testing sites in screen readers. As more web users gain access through narrow, linear browsers, I expect a general design trend of main content moving up and left while navigation and less important content moves down and right.

XHTML and quotes in code 2003

Anyone know any happy rebuttal to this grumpy comment from a developer?

The above phrase [target = "_self"] is enclosed inside a single-quoted parameter which is enclosed inside a double-quoted attribute value. It is thus a triply nested parameter value which (therefore) cannot be enclosed in quotes because XHTML-compliant HTML provides only two levels of quoting.

DEVELOPER COMMENT: This is an excellent example of perfectly good HTML which has no XHTML-compliant phrasing.

Puttin' the Grrr in the Grrrl 2003

So how do you know you're still a web designer even though your job is supposed to be "Product Manager"?
When you spend the day debugging HTML and style issues.

Why, by all that is good in this world, would a table with 4 rows, where the top and bottom rows are dark blue and the middle two are light blue, look fine in Mozilla 1.2.1, Netscape 7 and Netscape 4.7 and then in Internet Explorer 6 have a light blue row atop the dark blue. ARRRRGGGGGHHHHH!

The table is surrounded by a form, but removing the form's opening tag doesn't get rid of the problem.

The top row, dark blue, has this
bgcolor="3B6EE0" class="pageNavArea"

That style is
font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #000000; background: #3B6EE0;

The table and the tr for the top row have no style calls.

Why?! WTF?!

I want danger pay.

Help! I'm caught in the vortex of Internet Explorer, Javascript 1.1 and Arabic text! 2003

So I'm helping with the implementation of library software for a consortium of major Arabic universities and I've run into a problem. I've got a complex Javascript form which assembles a search string from information the user has typed into various input boxes. This form works in English. It works in Arabic in Mozilla and Netscape 7. In Internet Explorer, for some unknown reason, perfectly good Arabic text - which we can search fine from the simplified search page which doesn't store inputs in an array and then assemble a search string - is transformed from UTF-8 encoding to Unicode. We're going to support Unicode, but didn't think we'd have to do it today.

Does anyone have any idea what's going on? Is Internet Explorer's implementation of Javascript 1.1 somehow weirdly forcing a particular encoding scheme as a side effect of passing data through an array? Arrgggh...

ROT! 2002

I was just starting to read this new Boxes and Arrows article MSWeb: An Enterprise Intranet #1 about the massive intranet at Microsoft and how some knowledge engineers (information architects, whatever the hot term du jour is) tackled it. I was brought up short by this sentence:

It’s nearly impossible to develop a successful information architecture against a backdrop of explosive content growth, content ROT, and the political twists and turns common in any organization.

"content ROT?" thought I, "What do they mean? Return On Time, maybe? But how is that bad?" So I went searching on Google (God bless Google) and found, in a slide presentation done by my Adaptive Path buddies no less, that ROT in this case stands for
- redundant?
- outdated?
- trivial?
and is a mnemonic for weeding out useless content.

How handy!

I will have to go back and read that article later, but it's time to leave work and go enjoy one quiet solitary evening before computer maintenance, book release party, welcome home parties and my subsequent collapse.
How should I spend my time this evening? Cleaning the apartment, listening to a book on tape, going to bed early.
How will I probably actually spend my time? Playing The Game Neverending.

Image caching prohibited at the server level? 2002

A programmer friend just approached me with an odd problem which I couldn't explain. Basically what he's seeing is this:

On Server A, you can do a search and the results page will load and in the log you'll see the requests coming in from the client for the navigation image files. Then you can hit next to go to the next page of results and you won't see the image files re-requested since the browser already has them.

On Server B, when you search the behavior is the same until you hit next. Then the next page loads and requests all the navigation image files as though it was the first time it had ever heard of them. And if you hit next to see the 3rd page of results, again it will request all the navigation images.

He's seeing this in the same browser, so it appears to be an issue on the server not the client side.

Anyone got any idea what's going on?

One environmental note: Server A & B are, theoretically, running exactly the same proprietary web server which is integrated with the searching software.

Design as a process, not an event 2002

One of the better ideas I came across while researching for my masters thesis was William K. Horton's description of design as "a continual process of successive refinement" in his book Designing And Writing Online Documentation.

He describes this in a diagram thusly:

"Development of online documentation is iterative, cumulative, and empirical. It is iterative in that several cycles of development are required, cumulative in that you learn and improve through each cycle, and empirical in that improvements are based on testing and experience with working prototypes of the system."

I think this concept can be readily extended to all sorts of online development and, based on my experience with my bookstore, to other projects as well. The key factor is to do something from which to improve. Yes, you should think first, but don't feel you must solve every question in the first specification. "Ready, aim, aim, aim, aim...." won't get you anywhere.