May 11, 2010
TMI, automated
Given that I’ve always treated my Facebook account as if it were 100% public, the ever-creeping publicness of Facebook hasn’t concerned me much.
But if you think — or worse, act as if — Facebook is still the same private walled-garden you joined in 2006, you’d be well-advised to spend a few minutes with this excellent infographic from All Facebook which shows the steady march toward a much more open Facebook.
May 11, 2010
Hello, future. You look awfully familiar.
Do concept cars look like they do because that’s the natural progression of design, or because some Sci-Fi artists in the 1950s decided this is what the car of the future will look like?
Either way, if I have a spare $50k in 2015, I just might get one.
May 10, 2010
NYT on iPad: Almost as good as…paper?
At first, I tried to enjoy its simplicity, but the NYT “Editor’s Choice” app is starting to get really ridiculous. Witness this article that’s nothing more than a collection of links that — are you ready for it? — don’t link.
(Failure highlighted in yellow for your reading pleasure.)
The only explanation: the focus group was infiltrated by radical newsroom curmudgeons.
No wonder Steve hates it.
(UPDATE: Apparently this particular “Editor’s Choice” is just shovelware, badly done. The original page makes a whole lot more sense with the links intact.)
May 10, 2010
Is it easy for a new user to get lost on iPad?
Jakob Nielsen* and crew have churned out a quick usability study of the Apple iPad. And while it’s far, far too early (and the number of test subjects too small) to be making any hard and fast recommendations or rules (and Nielsen stipulates as much), the report reminded me of something that struck me this weekend watching a new iPad user (and non-iPhone user) try to acclimate herself to the device.
It’s odd that a company (Apple) known for its rigid user-interface standards has bet the farm on what is literally and figuratively a tabula rasa, where anything and everything goes. The only constant is that the hardware button takes you to one of the home screens. That’s it. Every single user-interface decision beyond that is open to the interpretation of the individual app designer. Certain conventions are emerging already (such as the sidebar/popover internal navigation scheme seen most prominently in Mail), but every app can be, and often is, a UI adventure.
To exacerbate the problem, once they do figure out how something works, users can’t transfer their skills from one app to the next. Each application has a completely different UI for similar features.In different apps, touching a picture could produce any of the following 5 results:
- Nothing happens
- Enlarging the picture
- Hyperlinking to a more detailed page about that item
- Flipping the image to reveal additional pictures in the same place (metaphorically, these new pictures are “on the back side” of the original picture)
- Popping up a set of navigation choices
Nielsen has always been something of a design puritan, so I don’t find myself agreeing with everything he’s selling here. But this report asks some excellent questions.
The appeal of iPad is how the interface essentially disappears, allowing the user to interact directly with the elements on/behind the glass. But that invisibility also presents challenges to designers to understand that a user may be able to hold only so many interface schemes in his long-term memory.
* The first time I’ve ever typed Jakob Nielsen’s name twice in the same day, I think.
(Traffic photo from flickr user UweBKK. Creative Commons.)
May 10, 2010
Middlebury College rewards inquiring minds
A colleague sent me a link to Middlebury College’s web site recently, and I was really impressed.
It’s very simple – just a name, a search box, some navigation and a horizontally-scrolling series of colored bars:
But hidden inside those colored bars is a candbox-like invitation to sample stories about the institution that’s kind of irresistible. The folks at Middlebury answered the same question we all do — “How do we show the breadth of ours schools and universities in a limited space?” — in an innovative fashion. Yes, as Jakob Nielsen would say, it’s Mystery Meat, but in this case, the mystery is compelling enough to be part of the charm.
It’s not perfect — I wish whoever is preparing the photos and screengrabs would take more care that they not lose their vitality in the downsizing — but overall, it’s a site feature that works hard to tell the story of Middlebury. And that’s really all we can ask of our sites.
May 10, 2010
Is it time to retire our digital card catalogs?
I raised a ruckus recently on a higher-ed web design listserv by suggesting that it’s time to dump the A-Z index from our websites.
You know. Those alphabetically organized Lists of “Things You May Be Looking For On Our Site”?
Why do we still make them?
Haven’t we come down the road a piece from 1997? Back then, manually building a comprehensive site index was part of the job description. How else will people find what they’re looking for?
And yet, many much more complex sites these days manage without. Look at the top sites on the web. Does Google have an A-Z index? Does Craigslist? Twitter? CNN? YouTube?
OK, one that does is Wikipedia. And it’s a doozy:
Given that Wikipedia is, in some ways, aping an analog counterpart which has the alphabet as its primary organizing system, having an A-Z index is understandable, even if it’s not the best way to find content on that site.
Because — and this is the point of this argument — we may call these things that display the internet browsers still, but the activity of the typical user these days is less about browsing than it is about search and following links. And, given that we’re talking about a non-scalable resource — time — I’d rather spend it making pages more findable in search than in a hand-curated, printed (to screen) database.
We threw out the card catalogs in our libraries. Why can’t we do the same on our web sites?
One counter argument goes like this: We maintain incredibly complex sites for our institutions, so an A-Z index is necessary to give the visitor some grounding.
I don’t think so.
It’s entirely possible that I’m mistaken here — maybe there are good reasons for preserving the old ways of organizing for certain types of web sites — but it’s a limb I’m at peace being out on.
I moved our A-Z guide off the university web site’s home page because 1) it’s a less than optimal experience for users and 2) it’s guaranteed to rot almost instantly. Our old index has more than 1,300 entries, all manually encoded. That’s a lot of upkeep.
True, it can be automated from a CMS, but I see a list like this as something that really should be curated, if you’re going to do it at all.
Ultimately, though, the real reason we killed the A-Z list was that, in 2010, it just seems that there are better ways:
- Search. We have Google search on our site. It’s awfully good at finding what visitors are looking for. And, when it isn’t, it’s not Google’s fault — it’s ours. Getting the “right” pages to rise to the top of search is an incredibly valuable exercise for us because it has the same benefit outside our virtual walls, in Google (and other search engines).
- Navigation. If you do navigation right, you may find that you don’t need an A-Z list. This is your opportunity to guide your users toward what you want them to discover. It’s like an A-Z list, except it’s organized logically, not alphabetically.
- sitemap.xml. I’m surprised that more universities aren’t using this simple but effective way to speak directly to the search engines crawling our sites. It can be 100% automated if you want or you can tweak it to your needs. But it’s a very useful tool in helping your search engine to make sure that visitors can find what you’re looking for.
- SEO. Similarly, I’d rather spend time tuning the SEO of our site than in manually updating a public-facing site index.
So, what do you think? Is there a future for the A-Z index online?
(First photo from flickr user mamsy. Licensed through Creative Commons.)
Me, elsewhere