Extra! Extra!

So maybe this will become a tradition:

• Thomas Vander Wal discusses the concept of being a Technosocial Architect (”To many people technology gets in the way of their desired ease of use of information. Those of us who design and build in the digital space spend much of our time looking at how to make our sites and applications easier for people to use. Do you see the gap? The gap is huge!”)
• History of the Button (”Up until the 1980s, all buttons were physical…”)
• Definition of User Experience Revisited (”Make it easy to be happy”)
• The Power of the Marginal (”If I had to condense the power of the marginal into one sentence it would be: just try hacking something together.”)
• Ross Mayfield posts a link to an update of a case study on enterprise wiki and blog use (”Specific use cases such as managing meetings, brainstorming and publishing and creating presentations collaboratively…”)

Happy Fourth of July weekend!

Seen in PCWorld.com:

The Web has long needed a universal checkout process. eBay’s PayPal and other online payment services rely on the various “shopping cart” applications of the Web sites they serve. While browser add-ons such as Siber Systems’ RoboForm can complete much of the order-processing information that different sites require, they exhibit little consistency in the type and quantity of data they collect.

Also, as you place your personal information on more Web servers, your security risk grows. Last but not least, the Web forms themselves are often poorly designed: How many times have you had to reenter all the information in an order form because a single field was skipped or included invalid data?

…

Google Checkout stores your credit card number, mailing address, and other ordering information. You can view all of the orders you place through the service on a single page, and Google limits how much of your information it shares with its vendor partners.

The article does note a potential security risk:

While having a single repository for all your orders makes makes online purchases much faster and simpler (and potentially more secure), Gmail users and other people already registered with a free Google service may have to beef up their security–one log-in name and password opens them all.

Until I signed up for Google Checkout, I didn’t worry much about someone gaining access to my Gmail inbox, because it contains no sensitive data. The first thing I did after adding the Google Checkout information was to change my Google password, and I’ll continue to do so regularly as long as I’m using the service.

I’ve been meaning to mention the IA Institute’s upcoming IDEA 2006 conference. (It stands for Information: Design, Experience, Access.) It’s being held at the Seattle Public Library, Central Library on October 23-24. I have a feeling I’ll be too busy to make it, but it looks intriguing and I’ll at least try to follow it via the blogosphere.

In other realms, they say when it makes Newsweek or Time (especially the cover), a phenomenon is over. Let’s hope that’s not the case for the hipster design-y sites picked in this Newsweek Design Dozen article (forward by Chris).

Dan noticed this article in which CNET says big business is embracing Web 2.0, which in this context seems to refer to the two-way web (or, as one author put it, the Living Web):

Though it lacks a precise definition, Web 2.0 generally refers to Web services that let people collaborate and share information online. In contrast to the first generation of Web offerings, Web 2.0 applications are more interactive, giving people an experience more akin to a native desktop application as opposed to a static Web page.

• Dan Brown’s “quick and dirty Visio callout”, an elegant solution to a common document-design problem
• Digital Web Magazine reviews Caphyon Advanced Web Ranking (”does a great job of tracking and reporting search engine rankings across websites”)
• Digital Web tutorial on ‘The Pinball Effect’ (example)
• UX Matters on ‘Deconstructing the Mobile Web (”The mobile Web is largely overplayed hype—the clumsy extrapolation of the behavior and use of a basic set of interfaces from one environment to another incompatible one.”)
• Luke Wrobleski on ‘Developing the Invisible’ (”the need to consider what’s not there”)
• Zooming User Interface (wikipedia link via peterme)

a new tradition? we’ll see…

Lifehacker links to a video demonstrating a proof of concept caleld BumpTop desktop. I’m not sure I’d actually want to manage my work this way but some aspects of the demo are fairly compelling. (via antiweb)

It’s amazing that Opera’s still around. Some say it’s the most standards-compliant browser, and Opera Mini is supposedly a great browser for handheld devices. On the IAI list they’re talking about how they’re using personas for marketing (though it’s just an assumption that these same personas were part of their process for tweaking the browser’s user experience). One of the personas looks a bit like the Columbine killers and another seems like the TV version of danah boyd.

A week or so back I was reading another one of those “Top 10 mistakes of website design” articles. All the usual stuff was in there like skip intro, splash pages, popup windows, and intrusive animation but what really got me was the mention of “right-side blindness”.

Most of these top 10 lists just regurgitate the same obvious design mistakes that really don’t bear mentioning further. If it’s not obvious that you shouldn’t have a flashing animation or intrusive popup windows then you’re in the wrong business.

But let’s get back to this issue of right-side blindness. Right-side blindness is the notion that people have become so accustomed to seeing advertisement on the right side of their screen they tend to ignore everything else in that region as well. Since reading this article I’ve really thought hard about the issue and started to monitor my eye movements as I navigate through the various websites I peruse.

Where do I expect common elements to be - search, login, home, logout?

How quickly do I hit a website and then leave - what was I looking for, how long did it take me to find it, what frustrated me in the process?

I’ve found the most usable websites either make things very obvious through a “web 2.0″ style layout - SIMPLE HUGE BRIGHT BOLD everything, tons of spacing and a general adherence to treating users like silly putty - making things very simple and very obvious.

This style of design is hardly applicable to the corporate B2B world however. For designers in that realm I recommend perusing the business sites you use most. Give usability a thought and ask yourself the following question:

Which came first - the form or the function?

Update: 2:24pm - I tracked down the original article that prompted this post and found that while I may have stretched the point a bit, the right-side blindness issue is still valid. Either way, the article made for my first Ironic Site of the Day Award.

Michal Migurski is annoyed with javascript delays and other “Ajax abuse” slowing down sites and points to a Safari plug-in that enables him to selectively turn of javascript at specific sites.