templatedata

Boxes and Arrows ran a competition to redesign their site and the winners have been announced. I think I prefer the second place-getter...any comments?

--------

Planning a usable website: a three-step guide by Trenton Moss

1. Work out your site visitors' immediate needs2. Create an information flow3. Usability testing

(With thanks to Column Two).

Please make me think: potential dangers in usability culture

Should you, as a designer, be bound by some ethical mantra to make your work deeper, more thoughtful and complex, not aimed for the lowest common denominator of your user base?

A San Francisco bookstore that is allowing its books to be arranged according to colour. Someone has posted some photos, if you'd like to take a peek.

--------

Check out Google scholar, the Beta is online now. It allows you to:

search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

I would be very interested to see how libraries could utilise this. Will look at giving it a good workout and review in a day or two.

In the meantime,The Chronicle of Higher Ed, Searchenginewatch and ResourceShelf have reviews.

--------

The Poynter Institute has run an eye-tracking study and has published their results and analysis. One of many performed, this one focusses on news sites and advertising.

What do people see when they view a news website or multimedia feature? Is it what the site's designers expect? ... Perhaps not. The Eyetrack III study literally looked through the eyes of 46 people to learn how they see online news.

Althought this site has a narrow focus in terms of types of content, I think there are some parts of it that have a general application. For example, the section on article page design has some interesting results and tips about writing for the web.

--------

I was reading news in my newsreader today and I clicked on an advertisement in a particular feed, thinking it looked kind of interesting. (It was an ad for 'Career change tests'. I wanted to look at it purely out of interest! Honest!) This is what I got:

We Apologize!

The advertiser you clicked on has requested not to receive any visits from users outside of their market area.

Firstly, I am not sure what they mean by 'market area'. Do they mean their geographic area or their target market? I presume they mean the former and as my IP didn't fit the range of their area it was blocked. What could be so geographically sensitive about a career test? Secondly, even if they couldn't offer me any professional help, surely they could have let me into the site and included a note about their service area on the front page? What do they care if I look at their site? Because they can't make money out of me I am not allowed to even look at their site? The ad said 'Free' career test, obviously they didn't actually mean it.

I find this such a primitive attitude. I would have been quite accepting to visit their site and be notified that they couldn't actually offer me their services due to my location. To try to apply business rules like this is completely counter-productive. It's like telling people they can't link to you without your permission. This is how the web works. Websites link to other websites and people use links to get around, sometimes randomly. You can't control how people use the web, the best you can do is develop a strategy for your site that actually takes into account the behaviour of users and the nature of the web itself. To attempt to control the web is to make your site and more importantly, your organisation look foolish. Understanding the beast is the first step to conquering it.

(Just to add: stripping back the URL to the domain name only rendered only a white page. Googling 'edapebaf' didn't get me to their site either. They've done a good job!).

--------

Webword is running a portal q&a.They have a big list of questions about portals and are asking for answers/discussion.

Speaking of portals, Gerry McGovern's new article is online: Do you manage a website or a warehouse?

There are two types of people involved in websites today: those who see content as an asset, and those who see it as a commodity. The latter better start looking for a new career.Last week I talked to someone whose organization had just installed a portal. The homepage took 30 seconds to download, and that was just the beginning of the trouble. Staff demanded that the portal be removed so that they could go back to the simpler, more efficient website.

--------

Consumer WebWatch has published the results of a large study analysing how people evaluate a website's credibility. The 'Design look' of a site was rated as the most important feature in the evaluation criteria of web users:

One of the overall findings from this study is that our participants relied heavily on the surface qualities of a Web site to make credibility judgments. Our result about the prominence of Design Look was not what we had hoped to find; we had hoped to see that people used more rigorous evaluation strategies.

In some ways the results are not at all surprising. If you think about how you use the web yourself you would have to note that you spend little time assessing new sites. You may have a core of sites that you visit regularly and you don't notice their design anymore. You just look for updated content. On the other hand, when visiting a site for the first time what do you notice? Call me superficial but having read this study I acknowledge that in a split second I will make a judgement about the site. This judgement is more complex than "Oh, they couldn't afford a proper graphic designer", it is made up of half-formed assumptions to do with credibility, the information organisation of the site, the politics of the organisation running the site (including the place of web content and even technology in the organisation) and the ability of the organisation to perform offline tasks. I will usually persevere with a site to assess it's content however, unless it is very badly designed and has tell-tale signs such as "last updated Sept 1998" on the front page. A favourable initial impression prompted by good design encourages me to persevere for longer than I may have otherwise. I want to stress that this is a decision made in an extremely short space of time. We're talking nanoseconds here.

--------

Koders is a search engine that finds code for you:

Koders is a search engine for source code. It enables developers to easily search and browse source code in thousands of projects hosted at hundreds of open source repositories.

Not being a techie I don't know if this is actually any good but thought I would pass it on anyway.

--------

This site makes interesting use of RSS news feeds, not to mention the graphic design. How it works:

Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.

Via Usability News:

This project wants to map your first encounters with the World Wide Web. It is part of a larger project entitled "A Decade of Webdesign" that culminates in an international conference in Amsterdam, January 21-22, 2005.

As a core part of the project, beginning before and continuing after the conference, the organisers have initiated what they call an 'open research' website/database into the first decade of web design. The online forum takes the form of a visual and textual timeline generated out of a self-customizable questionnaire.

--------

Gerry McGovern's regular article is out: Do you make this obvious mistake in web design?

The most common web design mistake is to design for the exception, and to ignore the obvious. That's because designing for the obvious is boring, while designing for the exception is fun.

Raises some interesting issues about breadcrumbs and the fact that 'ordinary' (as opposed to 'super') users don't seem to use them at all.

--------

An interesting post at E-consultancy: 90% of users don't see the home page?

Does anyone else have any data or research they are prepared to share on what % of visitors actually see (their) homepages?

The reason I ask is that I suspect the % is much higher than many realise. The homepage is always given the most attention (along with the buying process typically) and it sometimes seemed assumed that this page will form the key part in most site users' journey.

Such a scenario reinforces the need to design pages that tell your audience the key things:

- What site am I on?
- Where am I in the site?
- Where can I go?

If every page is developed with the ability to answer these questions you would be well on the way to orienting your users wherever they land. The main Uni site, I believes, achieves this, with admittedly some clunkiness in points.

A lucky dip of links this evening (one day I'll get around to actually writing an opinion here...):

- James Robertson's CM briefing for this month is online: Scoping an intranet release.

- A draft chapter from Edward Tufte's new book is online and open for comment. Not familiar with Tufte? He's an expert in information design, from books, to signs to maps to...you get the picture. If you look at only one of his books, make it Envisioning Information.

- Build a simple style switcher in CSS. Allows users to view your site they way they want. Not sure if this is a good thing or not. Anyway, the CSS tip might be useful for something.

- Functionality is dead says AMR research:

The Issue: The name of the game in the 1990s was functionality and technology. The new game is ease of use and accessibility.

A client recently asked me to survey its customer base about what these customers consider of most value. We assumed that it would be some combination of functional and technological superiority. We couldn’t have been more wrong:

* “Ease of use, ease of use, ease of use,” said one interviewee.
* “Simple to use and low cost of implementation,” said another.
* “No training and the package is very accessible,” said a third.

--------

Some universities in the US are considering upping their fees to cover technology costs. The extra fees would be used to cover the costs of such things as upgrading labs and installing wireless internet access.

--------

I am just assuming y'all like reading as much as I do so...another collection of good stuff to read:

- What is usability? from Donna Maurer at Step Two.

- How to write effective headings and summaries for your site. We know people don't read as thoroughly on the web as they do in print, so how do you suck them in? Gerry McGovern has a few ideas.

- Sometimes it is difficult to communicate the positive or negative experience users are having with a site. Robert Rubinoff has outlines a method that helps to remove subjectivity and bias from a user experience analysis. It's not te whole answer but it is definitely a step towards making user experience analysis bullet-proof.

--------