Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

I’ve seen people export stuff in Visio into images, and then paste those into Word documents. There’s an easier and better way: you can copy and paste stuff from Visio straight into Word, and it’ll look better (and print nicer) too than if you turn things into images first. One disadvantage: you can only paste what you can copy, so backgrounds don’t get copied along.

Interestingly, if you use a program like Windows Live Writer (which I use for this blogpost), you can also copy and paste from Visio straight into the program. The objects will be turned into images and uploaded. Funky!

Here’s an example, copied from Visio.

Long pages work. Just look at Wikipedia. In the 90s, we had a fashion where websites would cut up an article into 6 pages, 2 paragraphs per page, to get more page impressions. Luckily these days advertising runs on Pay Per Click more than Pay Per View (thanks Google!), so that practice is going away. But still, people seem to have a tendency to cut up good content, and often, they shouldn’t.

Look at this page for example. Over 100 comments, and what’s wrong with showing them all on one page? Sure, the page text is 116 KB, but that’s not too bad. And it’s compressed, so it’s really just 21 KB, which is fine and fast even for a dialup.

What it does is that it lets people scan over the conversation, scrolling, and get to the end and contribute their comment. If I were to cut those long comment strings in pieces, the experience would be worse.

Scrolling works. Long pages work. Anything else tends to be informationarchitecturitis (which I define as “the practice of adding too much structure when it’s not needed and even gets in the way”).

Digg is a smart ordering algorithm to show you interesting new stuff. Facebook’s newsfeed is a fairly smart ordering system to show you interesting new stuff. Google is a very smart ordering algorithm to show you interesting stuff related to your keywords.

Conclusion: ordering stuff is really powerful.