Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Out to clients - no posts this week.

(via Simon) Usability Myths?: Signal vs. Noise debunks the debunkers. There is too much faulty reasoning (Jakob!) in the usability world. It doesn’t mean their conclusions are wrong though.

BlogShares is a fantasy stock market for weblogs. Players get to invest a fictional $500, and blogs are valued by inbound links.

SmartPHP.net (via Simon) Since I’ve been developing Taxomita I’ve been interested again in good PHP (as opposed to my usual make-do PHP).

I am trying to figure out how to treat screenshots (I want that nice 3D look where a screen is “standing up”, slightly turned away from the viewer, with a little shadow - can’t find any example sites right now) for the new Taxomita site (Taxomita 1.0 should launch soon-ish). I also want to do a box image and have an easy way to update that. Any tools out there? Photoshop plugins? Tips?

The IA Summit in Portland was fantastic. I am still suffering from a severe cold that seemed to be doing the rounds, but it was by far the best conference I have ever attended.

When my head clears up a bit, I will go through my notes and report on the happenings. Meanwhile:

- Erin Malone
- Adam Greenfield
- Mark Bernstein
- Lieke (aka Pauline)
- The collaborative summit blog
- Lou Rosenfeld
- Victor Lombardi
- Thomas Vanderwal

(Hey, Peterme’s back)

A public beta of Taxomita can be downloaded here. You will need PHP and MySQL to install it. Please note this is an early beta. Everything should work fine, but no guarantees. If you install it, please join the Taxomita mailing list and tell us your impressions or ask questions.

The Arrogant Empire: “Some in Washington have pointed out that whenever the United States has taken strong military action—for example, the deployment of Pershing nuclear missiles in Europe in the early 1980s—there was popular opposition in Europe. True, but this time it’s different.
[...]
the United States will spend as much next year on defense as the rest of the world put together (yes, all 191 countries).
[...]
The U.S. economy is as large as the next three—Japan, Germany and Britain—put together. With 5 percent of the world’s population, this one country accounts for 43 percent of the world’s economic production, 40 percent of its high-technology production and 50 percent of its research and development.
[...]
Given this situation, perhaps what is most surprising is that the world has not ganged up on America already.
[...]
go back to 1945. When America had the world at its feet, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman chose not to create an American imperium, but to build a world of alliances and multilateral institutions.
[...]
But should the guiding philosophy of the world’s leading democracy really be the tough talk of a Chicago mobster? In terms of effectiveness, this strategy has been a disaster. It has alienated friends and delighted enemies. Having traveled around the world and met with senior government officials in dozens of countries over the past year, I can report that with the exception of Britain and Israel, every country the administration has dealt with feels humiliated by it.”

No more blogging until Tuesday.

If you want to ignore my war links, they will be called “Pro” or “Con”. Con

How to get the most out of conferences.

Community IA Summit Blog

Application profiles: mixing and matching metadata schemas: “Application profiles are useful as they allow the implementor to declare how they are using standard schemas.”

When Joe Clark says he’ll follow up on a presentation, he follows up on a presentation. Good stuff there, even if you haven’t seen the presentation itself.

Any tips to prepare for my first IA Summit?

The book

Xsitable 0.8 released. It is a package for running sites that is heavily based on XML technologies like Topicmaps (XTM) and supports XFML. For an example site using it, see Shelter.nu.

Zempt: “What’s wrong with you? You stumble upon our super-secret, under development site, and you expect the links to actually work?”

Mike Lee: “I recreated part of JJG’s Yahoo! Mail diagram. Since I can do text entry with the PocketPC block recognizer pretty well, the diagram came together in about 30 minutes - about as long as it would have taken in Visio. Not surprisingly, I found it difficult to build a diagram while on a moving subway car, train, or ferry.”

Spell Check Demo: very very funky. (Simon Willison)

Jorge A. Toro: (via IASlash) “CardZort is a computer application that runs card sorting exercises. Its main purpose is to offer a complete computer-aided system that allows the fast creation and execution of card sorting exercises, and the analysis of the resulting groups via cluster analysis.
CardZort makes use of a graphical metaphor that closely mimics the real card sorting process. Cards are dragged and dropped over each other to create piles, which is very similar to the way it is done by hand.”

HubLog: But why?: “So Seb had some nice ideas, and said let’s get everyone to write structured blogs with metadata, and everyone went yeah! that’s great let’s do that, it’ll be semantic. So I made blam!, because I could. And then I thought, that was easy: I could make some kind of Blosqlom, that stored all the files in a database so they could have loads of keywords attached, like metadata, instead of single categories. And I could make a form that was launched by a bookmarklet from an Amazon page that you could fill your review into and it would post your review to blam! and give you the HTML with pictures and metadata and everything to post into your own weblog, where allconsuming could find it as well.”

Interesting.

Marc’s Voice: some nice thinking, but this is where it all breaks down: “Each of these would have (one or more) standard format(s).” Standardizing metadata is harder than Marc seems to think. XFML uses published subject indicators (a concept nicked from Topicmaps) and direct connections between topics.

Marc’s Voice: lots of metadata thinking.

Funny and scary. (via Meyerweb)

I’m not sure if this proliferance of on-page widgets is good or bad. I like the clippings widget on the IHT, and the sacbee toolbar is very well done but contains some gratatious functionality (toggle to non-serif?). Beautiful though. The Rush Limbaugh disgronifier (don’t ask) is typical as well, but pretty ugly. (Links via the CMS-list)

Can someone have a think about this and come up with some rules? (For our readers called Jakob: not you!) Something like: when to use this, what to include and exclude, and how to deal with the icon problem/opportunity. I have to get to work.

If you’re attending the ASIS&T IA Summit this weekend and haven’t picked a pre-summit seminar, there are seats available for the AIfIA Leadership Seminar on Friday (March 21, $US 575).

How this one slipped under the radar until now I don’t know. “Our research seeks to bring modern information management and retrieval technologies to the average computer user in order to make computers a more compelling place for users to interact with their information.” Screenshot using faceted classification.

ongoing - XML Is Too Hard For Programmers

My new theory is that referrer spam is used to increase the amount of links to the referring websites since many pages detailing referer logs get crawled by Google. It’s probably effective: do a search for “Generated by Webalizer Version” on Google (Webalizer is a popular search analysis tool), thus pre-selecting 112,000 referrer logs that are crawled by Google, and spam those sites with your site as referrer, thus increasing your pagerank. I would have kept my mouth shut but people are already doing it, so I might as well speak out.

This Century Sucks turns out to be the guy in the cubicle next to me.

Google Search Appliance: FAQ: “3. Will Google’s ranking work behind the firewall?: Google’s search algorithms use more than 100 factors to determine the ranking of search results, many of them independent of link structure.” Many people think Pagerank won’t be very effective within an intranet environment, but we may well be wrong - Google surely has other tricks up its search algorythm sleeve.

How Google Grows…and Grows…and Grows: insights in Google’s culture.

DonnaM: A new use for scenarios: “We spoke with the client last week, who filled us in on what this new app would do etc. I thought I understood, but wanted to make sure. So, I wrote what I understood of the requirements in scenario form, not to communicate with the developers, but to show the client that I had understood.
They thought this was a fantastic idea - they could quickly see that I was thinking in the same way, that I understood the issues. It highlighted some things that they hadn’t thought through yet, and showed how real people may use the system. They now have more trust in me (given that this is the first project I have done for this client, this is important). And they are thinking of using the scenarios in focus groups, training etc.”

Macromedia part 2: Macromedia - Macromedia.com Progress Report: Beta 1 a more detailed report on the new design details what needs to improve: “The ‘Experience Matters’ promotion [Peter: which takes up half the screen real estate!] had a click-through rate of more than 3%, which is above average for us and 10X what static promotional elements obtain industry-wide. So from a business point of view, it was very successful.” 3% clickthrough is successful for something that takes up half your homepage? What are these people thinking?

They did use some clever pageload metrics:

- “Initial render” is the number of seconds it takes to see something change in your browser. Our goal is 7 seconds.
- “Threshold of interactivity” is the seconds it takes before you can start interacting with the application or content. Our goal is 14 seconds.
- “Complete render” is the time it takes to complete the entire rendering. Our goal is 25 seconds.

An approach worth copying. The case study also notes: “A statistic that surprised us was that the satisfaction index did not change with connection speed. Said another way, connection speed didn’t have any impact on satisfaction.”

Also interesting: “At the same time, the new features we put in our home page application weren’t used. Less than 1% of our customers used the tray nav and less than 5% used the product and solution pickers.”

The next page of the report discusses what worked well: “We’ve seen great success this first week with our rich Internet applications. [...] In the first week, we saw a 93% increase in extension downloads. Said another way, the number of downloads almost doubled with the new exchange application. [...] Membership was up more than 300% this week. We should note that part of this increase was due to a change in registration processes. [Peter: plus the incoming traffic from the publicity generated by the redesign itself].”

There are more progress reports:
- On how the site works technically.
- The second beta. They seem very focussed on removing the amount of clicks to get somewhere, which leads to mistaken ideas like very expandable menus and such. In my opinion they should balance the user experience - the amount of clicks isn’t always the most important thing, as long as you find what you’re looking for and don’t get lost the experience will be positive.
- What did we learn? (in short: homepages don’t need complex apps)

Good to see an influential company open a conversation with their users like this.

The Design of the New macromedia.com Beta Scary picture! (via Lucdesk)

Peter writes about his recent international usability tests.

word bursts within BBC search logs

InfoWorld: Technical trends bode well for KM: March 14, 2003: “What k-loggers do, fundamentally, is narrate the work they do. In an ideal world, everyone does this all the time. The narrative is as useful to the author, who gains clarity through the effort of articulation, as it is to the reader. But in the real-world enterprise, most people don’t tend to write these narratives naturally, and the audience is not large enough to inspire them to do it.
There is, however, a certain kind of person who has a special incentive to tell the story of a project: the project managers.”

Mike Lee’s weblog is better than poetry.