Security’s First Mistake
Earlier last week, the mighty Joshua Kaufman brought my attention to Jakob Nielsen’s latest alertbox about removing masks from password fields. This sparked some interesting debate, and it got me thinking again about passwords and security in general.
It has often seemed to me that the first mistake people tend to make in applying security is they think more is more. But to paraphrase Burroughs: without analysis of the threat, security can never be a means to any practical end other than simply more security. A wonderful example of this mistake is in Cory Doctorow’s recent Guardian piece about how he and his wife tied themselves up in knots when they tried to work out what would happen to their encrypted hard-drives and network passwords once they died or were incapacitated. The result being almost complete paralysis.
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Outlook 2007’s Silent Clipboard Revolution
While I’m obviously rather late on the uptake here, I recently (and rather reluctantly) upgraded to Office 2007 on my work laptop. The “ribbon” UI is now sapping my will to live – I had to resort of Googling to work out where the “Links” dialogue had gone in Word, and many functions in Excel seem to have just disappeared.
But one thing suddenly jumped out and grabbed me the other day as I was using Outlook. Finally, after about 15 years of total and utter madness, the one feature I have wished countless times was different, has changed:
The Office 2007 clipboard in Outlook preserves target formatting by default. Here: watch the video (923Kb FLV).
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Kill the Gateeper
With the Kindle DX — Amazon’s new large-screen e-reader – the debate about the delivery of information via printed paper compared to that of digital is starting to pick up even more. Earlier, I’d wondered about reasons to prefer dead tree media that weren’t based on just aesthetics. I see that in reviewing the new Kindle, and much to their credit, Slate has avoided misty-eyed discussions of ink-stained fingers or the timeless aroma of newsprint. Instead, they’ve gone for “graphic design” (although they actually mean information architecture, but I’ll let that pass):
“But both versions of the Kindle are missing what makes print newspapers such a perfect delivery vehicle for news: graphic design. The Kindle presents news as a list—you’re given a list of sections (international, national, etc.) and, in each section, a list of headlines and a one-sentence capsule of each story. It’s your job to guess, from the list, which pieces to read. This turns out to be a terrible way to navigate the news.”
Sticking up for books and paper
“To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet. It’s distracting. It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”
Ray Bradbury (90) doesn’t explain why he doesn’t like the Internet, but I think I can make a good guess based on the “it’s in the air somewhere” remark.
Whenever anyone discusses the merits of books over digital literature, somebody always says something about how nothing can beat the feeling of a nice book: the paper, the ink, the smell of it, the weight of it, the warm, friendly feeling, etc. etc. Indeed, the emotional aspects of printed media usually seem to be the only argument presented in favour of them. Fans of dead tree media say that books and paper are emotionally better because they’re tactile and look nicer than [insert technology under discussion]. Bradbury’s attitude seems to be no exception.
What is it with Americans and Swearing?
What, exactly, do otherwise intelligent Americans find so objectionable about the effective use of swearing? Here’s Seth Godin, marketing guru and otherwise all-round sharp cookie, upholding the grand US tradition of wondering more than seems even remotely reasonable about somebody who likes to put swear words in their books. Who cares? You may as well fret about somebody who puts too much sugar in their tea. File under Impenetrable Cultural Mysteries.
Dateless Idiocy from Squidoo
This has been a pet peeve of mine for a long, long time: if you’re going to put information about something on the web, PUT A DATE ON IT. It’s not hard – it can be automated, fun even. As it is, I have to ignore stuff like this because I don’t know if it was posted yesterday, last year, or 10 years ago. What was the author thinking? For all I know, the article is completely irrelevant.
Breathtaking.
Somebody is now going to point out that there is in fact a date on the page and I just didn’t notice it. Or they’ll say you can query the HTTP server for the last modified date or something. Not that I would be remotely bothered. Dates on information are of crucial importance. Not giving them the prominence they deserve is crass stupidity.
Google Wave: OpenDoc Redux
I’m watching the keynote from Google I/O the other day and it’s impressive stuff, technically at least. I can count on the fingers of one hand the occasions I’ve wanted (or needed) to collaborate on the same document in real-time with anyone, but I shall curb my natural cynicism. The mere fact that they are releasing a large part of Wave as “open source” (no mention of actual licence as yet I don’t think) makes it all an order of magnitude more exciting than if (for example) Microsoft or IBM were presenting these ideas.
There is a lot to take in here, but some initial thoughts from my notes:
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User Experience in the Real World
I’ve just been mailed by a company called Zetetic about their mobile password storage application called Strip.
Zetetic are interesting in that they are a small, cutting-edge software development house specialising in RoR and .NET. They appear to be principally a consultancy, but also develop and and sell their own applications. This is very similar to that other noo-tech (and intensely American) poster child, 37Signals.
Have a look at Zetetic’s about page. What (to me) is also immediately interesting is that there is nobody on the team who is putting their hand up for user experience. Both of the developers also have the word “senior” in their title, as if that meant anything in this context (the only other people in the company are the founder and a support hand). But I’ll let that go.
Avoiding Being Watched
First, let me say that I have nothing to hide.
Well – I wouldn’t want random strangers looking at my bank statements. Medical records would also be private (although I’m sure I’d put a brave face on any public revelations). Where my kids are is also off-limits. I won’t tell you how much tax I pay (other than it’s too much), or how much I earn, what party I actually vote for, my sexual predilections, my membership of various clubs and societies, where I went on holiday and when, and … lots and lots of other things.The potential list is long. I would think that most people’s lists would be of a similar length. In reality, we have a lot we want to hide for no better reason than privacy. Living in a panopticon is not something we want to do.
You’ll Never Have to Pay to Hear this Song
Swedish artist Montt Mardié has made an anthem for the Pirate Bay. Rather nice. I’ve never met a Swede I didn’t like.
Geek Reward
I know people love to hate Slashdot, but I’ve always had a soft spot for their experiments.
Teethgrinder
Just so wrong – and you have to dismiss it with a mouse click as well. Possibly an even worse violation of the principle of avoiding user distraction than Windows networking trumpeting its wireless connections. Why should I care?
It’s so hard living through the dawn of interaction design. All I can hope for is that we will see a day when people who are responsible for design decisions like this are burnt alive on a pyre of unsold copies of Acrobat Professional.
It’s ‘Internet’ – with a Capital Eye
The campaign starts here.
The word “Internet” needs to be capitalised. It needs to be capitalised out of respect for its importance and the fact that it’s a proper noun. We don’t write about “the pacific” or “oxford” or reading “the times newspaper.” We should not write about “the internet” for the same reason.
I’ve always capitalised the word “Internet” because if it wasn’t for the Internet, I wouldn’t have a career, a house, a car, or a life. The Internet is a place, a concept, a thing – and a very important one at that.
So it’s time all those closet Internet-hating sub-editors (the ones that secretly – and needlessly – fear that their jobs are being stolen from them by the machine) to grow up and pay homage to the word. And the word takes a capital eye.
On Maps and Ecommerce
I remember an English teacher asking us what, in our opinion, was the most useless thing we would have to learn at school. I replied that I thought it was the capital cities of the world. What possible advantage could you have over anything with the knowledge that the capital of Peru is Lima? I was somewhat surprised that he agreed with me – although I later found it would be a trick question. He was making the point that education itself is useless – something about Milton. But that’s another story.
Googlebay
So, jail terms for the Pirates of Pirate Bay.
“Judge Tomas Norstrom told reporters that the court took into account that the site was “commercially driven” when it made the ruling.”
Commercially driven? What then, your honour, is the difference between Google, and The Pirate Bay?
Yes, you could outlaw all trackers, but that’s not going to happen. The fact is that the verdict – as the defendants have always pointed out – is merely theatre. The music industry had to do something, so they did this. It is significant that the trial was a pretty close run thing, and the prosecution didn’t get nearly all they wanted. The damages awarded in no way reflect the music industry’s fiction that every illegal download is a lost sale, and the appeals process has yet to begin. The site itself will carry on, and the entire affair will be more fuel for the likes of I2p and others.
The Mystery of Documentation
It’s that time again, when my fragile designs need to be encased in a sturdy barrel of documentation and set off down the rapids of implementation. All I can do is hope that they end up at the bottom in one piece.
If there’s one thing that’s constant about documentation, it’s the maddening inconstancy of its form. This seems to be due to the inconstancy of the development process itself, which is something now gradually being accepted via things like Agile methods. For example, I was interviewing somebody for an IA position the other day and we talked about what kind of documentation they had done. To him, documentation is like doing bird impressions: the lesser spotted prototype, the crested sitemap, the heavy spec. He could do them all to order. None of them was any better or worse than any other. What mattered was whether they were appropriate to the circumstances of the project. Stodgy waterfall methods demand huge detailed documents, while groovy Agile projects demand throwaway prototypes. The IA just produces what’s needed. None were a magic bullet, and none very effective really, and he was the first to admit it. We can only do our best.
Derivative Work?
Come Together – and I put a donk on it (3.2Mb mp3). Wonder what the rights position is on this?
Please Help Stop Bad Things Happening
Hello? Can you hear me? This might sound boring – a technicality. It involves industrial regulation, copyright and law. But it’s important, and we should all be at least concerned, if not angry, about what is now happening in the European parliament. What is more, time is running out and we need to act now.
What is this about?
The music industry (people who make money from musicians: for example Sony Music, EMI and industry groups that represent the recording industry like the BPI) want more money. Various reason are given: piracy, advances in technology, the situation in their markets in general, musicians needing pensions (er, no that one doesn’t make sense to me either), and other things. But we all know you don’t really need an excuse to make more money. If you see a way of getting more of it, you go for it regardless – just ask bankers. Greed is good. So, the music industry is asking politicians in Europe to make a change to copyright law so that recordings can be under copyright for up to 95 years. Right now, it’s 50 – not a very long time to make money from anything, as I’m sure you’ll disagree.
Tag Clouds: The Final Word
Regular readers of Webtorque will know that I’ve droned on about tag clouds several times. Here I go again, but this time, it’s final. I promise. It comes of a brief discussion about our opinions about tag clouds at work this week, which was a good opportunity to summarise what I thought about them – and over a nice cheese sandwich, as it happened.
Tag clouds are good at doing a very specific task very well, but are also hideously misused to the point of utter meaninglessness in a great many contexts. While I don’t think there was any researched intention behind their first use as we know them today, it turns out they are extremely good at giving a semantic summary of a large body of text. As such they offer a level of abstraction above the traditional synopsis, and this can be valuable in the right context.
Zoopla: The Ocotopus Did It
In January of 2008, a new property website called Zoopla! started up. With property prices going ever skyward, it wasn’t exactly a surprising launch, but Zoopla! itself was surprising. Like all very good ideas on the web, it was simple and well executed, yet allowed for good, often complex, effects to happen: list every house in the UK and allow their owners to “claim” them, declare their intention to sell, and tune the price with extra data against a global price estimate, itself refined by network effects. Estate agents were (at least in theory) nowhere to be seen. The CEO even gave me a bottle of wine.
I’ve re-visited Zoopla! a few times since then, but today I see they’ve changed. They have, to put it simply, sold out to the estate agents. Gone are the comprehensive listings, the house price algorithm presumably now a figment of the agents’ traditional hype. I learnt in the new year that they’d found a large investor – the ominously named Octopus Ventures. From the press release:
‘Alex Macpherson, Chief Executive, Octopus Ventures, said: “Zoopla.co.uk has the potential to become the UK’s most valuable property asset. It is an extremely compelling proposition…”‘
He was right, but what he did with his £2 million doesn’t make Zoopla compelling in any way at all. They’re just like any other estate agency site now. What a pity – and what a waste of a good idea.
RIP Zoopla – you’re going nowhere now.
Demolition Man
Headphones are wonderful things, and I’ve been amazed at what I’ve been hearing through them recently. In a fit of nostalgia, I decided to sit down and re-visit Grace Jones’s version of Sting’s Demolition Man (mp3, 5.6Mb). Leaving aside its merits as a pop song, I think it’s one of the greatest feats of studio sound production ever achieved. Here’s why (warning: what follows is dancing about architecture).
Play More Music
So I bought an MP3 player this week. The reason I’ve not owned one before is simple: motorcycles. For the past 10 years or so until the end of 2008, my main form of daily transport was two wheels powered by internal combustion. But when I started work at Expedia, my route in was too easy by tube. Being almost at the end of the Northern Line, I can get a seat most mornings, so with some regret, I sold my bike and joined herd. Yes, there have been delays, train oddies, and the occasional ride down the wrong branch, but so far it’s been OK. Really.
First stop on the line for music I’ve been wanting to listen to is The Pixies, and maybe the Violent Femmes, although I’m currently giving the Prodge’s new album a go. At this rate I might have to add my Last.fm widget.
Guilt Upon Accusation
Join the blackout.
The Term Extension Argument
So I’ve been asking my MEPs what their position is on the proposed EU extension of copyright term in sound recordings. The motion, as currently tabled, calls for copyright to be extended from its current 50 year term to as much as 75 years plus the life of the artist. I am in strong opposition to any extension, but not in any particularly rigorous way, so I thought it would be good for me to examine the arguments to better understand why it is our elected representatives in Europe seem determined to flush culture and common sense down the toilet.
Here is a summary of the main arguments put forward, and my rather amateur thoughts interjected (thanks Ben for some hints here too). This is based on a reply to an email sent to me by one my MEPs, anonymous because they have yet to reply to my request for publication.
Ma.gnolia Down?
Cripes – looks a bit serious!
As of 9:00pm GMT 31st Jan 2009
An Information Theory
Quoting a single statistic to support an argument is rarely very impressive, regardless whether the numbers themselves are right or wrong. I would say that most statistics are nothing without context. Context is the air that statistics breathe and the engine which powers them to make a point. Yet far too many people simply pluck them off a tree and offer them up as withered, emasculated and pale.
Here’s an example: the famous statement, “Half the world has never made a phone call.” The effect of this adage was analysed by Clay Shirky in 2002, and it’s a prime example of a number rendered powerless by a lack of context.
Knocking Out The Morvilles
Peter Morville has put together a list of twenty user experience deliverables with links to relevant resources and examples.
This is certainly interesting, and Morville is an interesting cove, not least because he’s been on the scene for so long. However, I can’t help reflecting on the fact that he is a consultant. Seen in that light, the “deliverables” culture he presents takes on a rather different hue, and I wonder how many of his admirers fully appreciate that.
Quote I Like
“Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art.” — Charles McCabe
So take that, “programme managers”
The Copyright Term Extension Con
Let’s hope the march of paid lobbyists and other industry schills in Europe will be stopped by these clear and concise arguments against extending copyright in sound recordings. It’s rare that politicians don’t take the side of big business, but when the pandering to greed and the destruction of the public domain is this blatant, perhaps common sense will prevail. The European Commission is due to vote soon on the issue.
(Thanks Ben – Link)
Write to your MEP, as I have, and ask them what’s going on. What is copyright for, who does it benefit and why is it always being extended?
The Data of Dates
I’ve blogged before about how I think calendars are to dates what pie charts are to numbers, but recently I’ve been thinking a bit more about this issue.
The background to this was a discussion I had several months ago around the pros and cons of using calendars for date range selection, for example in booking a hotel. As with many design issues, this is one heavily encrusted with tradition and gripped by the dead hand of the “design pattern.” In an attempt to think about it more effectively, I cast the calendar (in the context of date range selection) as an anti-pattern: wasting space; requiring you to interact in more than one dimension; an inappropriate emphasis on days of the week, and other problems. In response, I came up with the idea of a time line instead. That too had flaws (not least because my initial approach attempted to build in too much into a single UI), but I think it had legs.
BBC iPlayer for Me
Whoo – it works! Get it here!
With the illegal shell script I’d been attempting to use previously (circled) – now it can be told.
TESLA
From BoingBoing today (guest blogger Clay Shirky!):
Mark Hurst, the user experience expert [at MeetUp.com], talks about Tesla — “time elapsed since labs attended” — a measure of how long it’s been since a company’s decision-makers (not help desk) last saw a real user dealing with their product or service. Measured in days, Meetup approaches a Tesla of 1.
Coincidentally, last week I suggested that we should have a company policy to allow all employees to have an opportunity to see a real person use our web site at least once every few months. I would think that MeetUp’s staff don’t number much above 20, so in a company numbering rather more than 10 times that, a low TESLA count measured in months wouldn’t be too bad.
Of course, this wouldn’t speed up our development cycle, but it might put a fire under some of us! I still have doubts as to exactly how “dead simple” it would be to recruit – and keep recruiting – normal people off the street every day. See my comment on the post – people (bless ‘em) are all different, and the meet-and-greet overhead alone would be significant at least for somebody. But it’s certainly worth trying to institute.
I’m also tempted to make a comment about whether MeetUp.com is any better or worse for this technique. But I won’t.
The Canary Is Doing Its Job
Phew. I’ve just got out from a large amount of IRC and email about this and this bug on Wikimedia. As of about midnight this evening, it’s boiled down to what seems like (at worst) some over-zealous censorship by the IWF which has now been corrected.
I spent a while hanging out on Be Internet’s new IRC channel watching a couple of people discussing the issues. One of the chatters was kicking up a fuss about it, while just about all the others thought they were over-reacting, mainly because it was about child porn. Kiddie porn is of course a terrible platform on which to make any case for libertarianism, so he/she obviously wasn’t going to get very far. The consensus was that the blocking of a Wikipedia page was of no consequence because most thought that the blocking of such material was acceptable.
What I found more interesting about the debate was the point when the lone voice tried to cast about for non-porn examples. The suggestion that ISPs might block sites with material that infringed copyright seemed rather more contentious. That, agreed all, would be unacceptable.
So, perhaps an interesting test of the net canary in some ways.
Proof That the Internet Needs Stopping
If you land on a web site you know nothing about and it asks you for your authentication details to another system, you should (if you have any sense) immediately hit the back button.
Yet with all the hand-wringing about phishing, identity theft and net crime in general, a site called Power.com apparently sees a business model in blithely asking people for their Facebook (and other) login information. They then use that to plonk all your network information into one place. Incredible, but true. I hope for all our sakes their fail abysmally.
Don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing automatically bad about pooling all your social data (we have emerging protocols for that), but the idea of asking for authentication in this way completely undermines best practice for identity protection and general security. How on earth are people supposed to navigate the datasphere safely if this kind of idiocy catches on?
This is even worse than the practice of sites like Facebook asking for your Gmail credentials so they can mine you for contacts (”We won’t store your login details – honest!”), if only because you have usually established a relationship with them first. There is also some measure of trust involved, however scantily considered that might be.
Yet another example of how, in 50 years time, people will look at the use of networks in the early 21st century and shake their heads in sheer disbelief. And providing the historians some evidence of the lunacy, Mashable thinks it’s all a-OK! Words fail me.
Well, I posted some words about it in a comment – couldn’t resist.
Will it rain?
Several years ago, I was looking at the then newly-redesigned BBC weather page. I marvelled at how bad I thought it was because it failed to answer the one question that I always want to know right off the bat when I ask for a weather forecast: will it rain? I don’t care about wind direction, millibars, visibility or even temperature much. I just want to know whether to take my umbrella.
So, I sent them a ranting email about it. A couple of years later, I found out by complete chance that the email had been read (and boggled over) by somebody I later ended up working with on the BT.com redesign at Oyster Partners. Whatasmallworld.
Anyway, here’s a site that almost gets it right. It just needs to express the forecast as a percentage as well, and I’d be as happy as Larry.
Empty Gesture
Ever since Minority Report brought gesture-based interfaces into the public eye, there are been periodic demonstrations of their evolution in the real world. Here’s where MIT’s John Underkoffler, one of the consultants who were used by the producers of Minority Report, has got to with his g-speak “spatial operating interface” (SOE):
As with most of the demonstrations of gesture-based and multi-touch interfaces, they are high on wow factor but rather low on suggestions for how such a UI would be useful. That’s not necessarily a problem of course – research is research. But it’s notable that whenever such interfaces are displayed, there are a large number of people who seem convinced of their utility.
The Pirate’s Dilemma?
The Pirate’s Dilemma – How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism – Matt Mason, Free Press 2008
The subject of politics, as they say in college, is history with the work taken out, and history is politics with the brains taken out. While I wanted this book to be an analysis of the political, if not economic strata of Internet-age capitalism, it is in fact little more than a pleasant wind through the recent history of “underground” music, with some loose observations about how people make money along the way.
Mason’s thesis is that art, and in particular the art of making money, progresses by internalising marginal forms. Despite the fact that this should come as a surprise to nobody, we spend most of the book being persuaded. The potted histories he provides are on the whole well summarised: how Richard Hell founded the punk styles that came to be sold into the mainstream via VICE Magazine; how a teenager from London became a millionaire without having a record deal or any commercial airplay; how hip-hop came to be the ultimate commercialised youth culture by maintaining a lucrative stasis of “being real” while managing to funnel large amounts of money to a small amount of people, and so on. Nor does Mason seem to mind losing his way in this. At one point, an entire chapter (“Real Talk”) takes a detour into the biographies of assorted hip-hop artists, lapsing at times into simple hagiography. He treats us to various titbits along the way: step-by-step instructions on how to create a remix is doubtless informative, but leaves one wondering exactly how this helps us to understand the “reinvention of capitalism.”
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The Opposite of Search?
Just noticed this old idea dressed up as a new one on TechCrunch. Out of curiosity, but mainly because I thought it might not be as lame as it first looked, I installed the Firefox add-on and it showed me this:
“Kickass search results”, eh? Not only is it yet another Alexa clone, but isn’t this opposite of search?
A real bugbear of mine is that popularity is far too often confused with relevance. The fact that people can self-suggest relevance based on the perceived preferences of others is highly insidious. Even if it didn’t, just because 20,000 people are looking at a website doesn’t mean I should be as well. Worse, it’s usually easy to game the system by exploiting these effects. I’m sure that’s how Stock, Aitken and Waterman sustained much of their output, for example.
Things are so bad that even the BBC News website now shows links to “popular stories.” The editorial effect of having the BBC decide for you what is and what is not relevant is bad enough, but to compound that by presenting “popularity” as a desirable filter for news is just evil. So it is with OneRiot. Don’t count on finding anything that you’ve not found already.
Knocking ‘em Out
I’ve not been writing (that’s what we posh people call blogging) nearly enough. Look at me: two posts a month in the last 18 months or so, yet my life is a sumptuous feast of complex events, rare occurrences and fascinating adventures – and that’s just with my UX hat on. Why, just today, some designs I’d done several months ago went into UAT!
So, I’ve been looking to other writers for comparison. Seth Godin fairly blasts it out on his blog. How does he keep it up? It’s all good stuff considering he’s probably writing it with one hand while chairing some huge marketing meeting of corporate pillars with the other.
It’s a funny thing this writing business. Maybe one day I’ll find out what it’s all about. Stand by for a book review next though.
Where Will Content Lead Us?
Nothing is completely new, it just evolves. So it is with content on the web: the traditional free print model of allowing access to content as a way of getting readers to do something profitable has been transmogrified under the influence of SEO and Google’s all-powerful PageRank algorithms.
It now doesn’t matter how good your product is, or how satisfied your customers are – if you have any competition, you need Google on your side to pull in the punters. What the web gives with the promise of reach, it takes away with the threat of obscurity. The need for Google visibility is, to say the least, pressing.
What’s particularly interesting is that as a side-effect of this need, the generation (some would say abuse) of “related content” becomes as important to businesses as traditional goods and services. So it’s not enough to sell spanners – you need to have articles about using spanners that get linked to and talked about. How to open a tin can with a spanner, the history of the spanner, using spanners in dressmaking, how spanners won the war, and so on. Such content fertilises profitability on the web because when people link to it, and Google sees the links and indexes the content, you’re visible – hopefully beyond your competition.
So far, so Seth.
From eBay – Some Design
I’ve just sent this to eBay in response to their request for feedback on their new item page design:
“You are definitely on the right track with this.
For years eBay’s page layouts have been painfully bad. Not just run-of-the-mill poor like Amazon or Buy.com, but wilfully, painfully, awful. While most sites merely ignore user experience, eBay positively buries it.
With the new item page design, you have at last discovered the use of typography and colour to aid the presentation, and tabs to remove much of the initial distraction. You seem to have actually produced a design based on some kind of imagination of how your customers use your site. That is something I am deeply grateful for.
So for this I congratulate you with all my heart, and hope that future design changes show a similar awakening to improvements that in many cases are about a decade overdue.
Jonathan”
Here, in case they change them, are the screen shots for the record:
- Old layout – a usecrime in progress
- New layout – not at all bad in comparison
- Message window – the worst piece of information design normal people are ever likely to encounter on the web. Just stunningly bad.
Prototyping Tools Playoff
I must have followed (and contributed to) dozens of conversations about web prototyping tools over the years. Having skimmed through yet another thread on the topic this week (this time on one of the LinkedIn UX groups), pretty much the same pattern repeats itself. Some swear by Visio, others Axure. Some say Fireworks has no equal for the task. PowerPoint might also get a few fans. There is always somebody who declares that Omnigraffle wins hands down. Somebody then usually mentions iRise, sometimes Flash, and then perhaps we’ll get a left-field suggestion like Acrobat, Excel or some Photoshop plugin. Like all “what’s best” discussions though, it ends inconclusively, and usually on a tangent about something unrelated.
But what if we were to organise a playoff? A playoff would not determine the “best” tool (boring as is may be, I think that depends on circumstance), but it might throw up some interesting observations. If nothing else, it would be fun to do.
MoD Data Loss – Can It Get Any Worse?
Another day, another… hardly a week goes by without… if I had a fiver for…. I’ve lost count of how…
The latest incident of data loss really, really plumbs the depths. I’ve started to pay less attention to the detail of such cases recently because it’s plain they’re simply endemic, human failings and not something we can somehow cure by tinkering around the edges. But I’ve just been reading this, which says:
“The portable drive contains the names, addresses, passport numbers, dates of birth and driving licence details of around 100,000 serving personnel across the Army, Royal Navy and RAF, plus their next-of-kin details.”
Wow. Just… wow.
The icing on the cake is that it was all on a portable drive as well. Words fail me. All that data in ONE PLACE.
Will Web 3.0 increase a user’s experience?
I’ve just spent about 10 minutes of my life trying to re-boot my mind after it suffered a cognitive blue screen of death on reading the question “Will Web 3.0 decrease or increase a user’s experience?”
Deon Jenkins, an information architect at IBM, asks this question on a LinkedIn forum I’m a member of. It fell into my inbox like some kind of existential hand grenade this evening.
Every now and again, you have to evaluate what it is you are doing in life that’s so important. I find that a lot of that evaluation comes down to the value of the language you use in your work. If the words work, make sense, and aid the progress of ideas between you and the outside world, then things are probably going OK. If they’re anything like what Jenkins is using, you’re screwed.
Just as various people in the banking industry must have worried what would happen when all that toxic debt was discovered, people (well, me anyway) sometimes worry that the whole experience design and usability thing is being ridden out to the wilder plains of lunacy. I just hope Mr Jenkins has his cover story worked out.
iTunes UK and the NMPA
Apple have threatened iTunes-listening Britons with the closure of their iTunes store.
I think this is unlikely to happen, but if it does then the P2P networks will get rather more traffic, thereby providing even more proof that the publishing industry just doesn’t understand what’s happening. Every time they try to throw their weight around like this, it make them weaker and the darknet (1Mb Word file) stronger.
Be that as it may, now might also be a good time to point out an inaccuracy in the BBC’s reporting on this. They say:
Apple pays an estimated 70% of digital music revenue to record companies which in turn pass on a percentage to artists [my emphasis]. It is that percentage that is expected to be changed on Thursday.
Actually, I think the National Music Publishers’ Association pays this percentage to songwriters and composers of works via the publishers that the NMPA represents. And (surprise!) the publishers cream off between 3 to 15%. In many cases the composers are not the same as the artists that perform the works, and many will in fact be dead (the money goes to their relatives, estates or licensees, or nowhere if these cannot be found).
But who cares? The way the money works in music is – to say the least – opaque. With the exception of a tiny minority of super-stars like Cliff Richard and Simply Red, when you listen to your favourite band, you are listening to indentured servants. What will happen when we realise that the copyright system overall is completely iniquitous? In 1994 (MMC, 1996), 10 UK composers received more than £100,000 (from performing and mechanical royalties). How many people working in the UK music industry that year who were not composers earned more than £100,000?
I’m betting that it was rather more than 10.
No, that really IS my surname!
Southern Electric are total muppets. Accessing their site using FF3 under Linux shows nothing but the Flash background (I hardly ever find sites that are completely broken these days). Not only that, when I try to update my profile, they tell me to choose a “proper” surname!
Could there be a less effective wording for an “invalid character” message? When it comes to something as sensitive as people’s names, if you can’t parse characters in them, just silently replace with spaces on submit. What Southern Electric are doing is just insulting.
Megatripolis Nostalgia
For no particular reason, I’ve been editing the Wikipedia entry for Megatripolis this week, mainly tidying it up a bit. I added something about pHreak a while ago, but in the course of editing this time, I found this photo, taken in about 1996, of the pHreak BBS being demonstrated at the club. Ahh, nostalgia!
Ubiquity: The Command Line Comes Home
When Apple launched the Mac, one of its supposed great advantages was that it was graphical. “Just point and click” – what could be easier? Certainly better than the awful DOS (or even UNIX) command line! The command line was thus condemned to be seen as symbolic of the old school. Arcane commands typed in a green or black screen – unfriendly, cold and unsympathetic.
Apple may not have intended this to be the case, but I have always thought the opprobrium of the command line to have been an over reaction exploited by clueless marketeers. It is in fact exactly the opposite of what its detractors have it to be, and I believe will become central to the way we use computers, just as computers become central to the way we live our lives. The arrival of the Internet, and specifically “Web 2.0″, means the CLUI’s time has come.
Happy 25th Birthday, GNU
Is The Future Really Mystery Meat?
I’ve just been watching this video from Adaptive Path in response to Mozilla Lab’s call for participation. The video seems to be more of a PR play for Adaptive Path though, and not a serious attempt at design direction – which is a bit disappointing, but no matter.
There are a number of things that can be said about the concepts presented, but one thing in particular caught my attention: the appearance – stunningly – of mystery meat navigation. This time it was in the form of radial menus and clouds of anonymous icons that stay anonymous even after they achieve focus.
Delicious the Movie
Here’s a fun, and quite interesting, post-launch “movie” of the changes made in the new delicious UI. You have to be fairly familiar with the old one to appreciate the differences, of course.
Oddest thing I’ve noticed with the new design so far: in common with the old design, they seemed obsessed with limiting the number of links on a page to a measly 10 before paginating. Unless there is some awfully negative side-effect, pagination should really be delayed for as long as possible. Webtorqe’s pagination is set to kick in at 1000 items (I have 285 posts at the moment so you won’t be seeing it for a while). I can only assume this ruthless truncation of pages on delicious is down to performance reasons because it’s certainly a UX downer. Surely 10 is ridiculously low though?
Incidentally, my favourite change is the fact that they’ve finally got delicious.com and not that damn domain I could never remember.
Majectical Electrical
Michael Forrest has his new album out today. I’m downloading it now, and I commend you to do the same. It reminds me of artists as diverse as Cobra Killer through ATR to Momus and Barry Adamson. This is definitely going out on my ShowCenter.
I’m always interested in the way artists choose to distribute their work – in may cases more so than the work itself. Forrest is notable not least by adding some weight to a casual observation I made about a similar online distribution of a work by Paul Robertson. Forrest distributes the work via the Internet direct to the audience, but this time imposes a time window of 25 days. He also says nothing about any licence.
In the absence of any further information about the license, we must assume it defaults to restrictive copyright. However, I find this an intriguing development not only because Forrest is silent on this point, but also because he invokes the concept of scarcity.
In the digital age, there is copyright and shades of it meditated by CC. There is also the idea that nothing matters as long as its free. I don’t quite know how to deal with scarcity in either context. Perhaps I’m making too much of all this – but my point is that I think those who have championed alternative licensing models may have misjudged the way the public will use (or ignore) the provisions of such schemes. If REM can release videos under a perl licence, “rip, mix, burn” may start to apply to more than just the work itself.
BBC Spinal Tap Joke
At least I assume it is:
EU Parliament Net Neutrality Attack!
Argh! The reform of the “European law on electronic communications” (AKA the “Telecoms Package”) will be debated in the European Parliament on 7th July – Monday!
Why the sudden flap? Well, it seems they’re at it again. Here’s what’s going on: take one, large, boring piece of regulatory legislation up for routine amends that most MEPs have little interest in. Insert some clauses that bypass the rule of law to allow unregulated surveillance and denials of the right to privacy. Make sure nobody notices. Wait for it to get rubber-stamped by a snoozing bunch of representitives.
That, my friends is democracy at work in Brussles whether we like it or not. All we can do is get on the wires and pummel our representitives to do something.
More info here and here.
Here’s my letter just sent:
We-Think: Documenting the Present
I’ve recently read We-Think by Charles Leadbeater, having attended one of his talks a couple of months ago. I thought I’d record my thoughts on it.
Books about the socio-political or cultural effects of the Internet are rolling fast off the presses right now. I’m now feeling a little less like the pallid geek I once was. The penny has dropped, even in the hallows of Downing Street (Leadbeater was a Labour advisor under Tony Blair for a while), that something rather important is happening out there in cyberspace. Territory is now being claimed by everyone from the plainly trivial likes of Macolm Gladwell and Andrew Keen, to the highly constructive, if sometimes baffling, Clay Shirky and Seth Godin.
Leadbeater sets about documenting the various phenomena he finds on the net to support his formulation of what he calls “we-think.” In a nutshell, we-think is the practice of solving problems or enhancing the quality of life by the free exchange of ideas and resources. Such activity tends to move from the periphery to the centre until – if it survives – it pervades the normal way of doing things. Examples of course are free/libre and open source software, but also offline activity evident in grass-roots initiatives in developing countries that spring up independently of governmental or official sanction. All this, he says, may be a new phenomenon in modern history, but a return to aspects of ancient modes of life which hitherto had been sunk beneath the waves of industrialism and refinements of capitalism that came with it. Well, I’d by that for a dollar, even if I can’t understand Leadbeater’s connection between a third-world micro-loans system and playing World of Warcraft.
Removing The Home Page
In many cases, the design and content of a “home page” – the first page you see when you view a web site from its document root – owes its existence more to tradition than sense. Perhaps a home page speaks to the idea of a “cover” in the same way as a cover for a book. However, web sites don’t have pages that need protecting from the outside world – quite the opposite in fact. In the age of Google and ever-increasing findability, providing a summary of the site is often unnecessary. There are several other reasons to abandon home pages as well. Here are a few thoughts I’ve been having about the issue.
Calendars and Date Range Selection
One thing that bothers me about “design patterns” is that they don’t always seem to be the best method of solving a design problem. In many cases, patterns are patterns simply because they are popular. This of course is a phenomenon not limited to design (music, for example, is another case in point). However, it becomes particularly frustrating for designers when a sub-optimal pattern then gets in the way of better designs because the pattern becomes something that people expect. Significant modification of the pattern is seen as negative, even if those modifications are demonstrably better. But you can’t do something better by doing the same thing as everyone else.
One example of a design pattern being a poor solution to a problem is the use of pop-up calendars to allow date range selections on form fields. Here’s an example of what I mean. I’ve chosen an example of a single calendar for selecting ranges because I think it illustrates better the points I’m about to make. A more common example is the “from/to” calendar: separate calendars for the “from” date and the “to” date, usually as separate fields on the form.
Here Comes Big Buck Bunny
It’s out! Not seen it yet, but I’ll be downloading as soon as I get out of the bath.
In case you’ve not been following – Big Buck Bunny is a feature-length 3D animation – and this is what makes it special. Do them a favour and download it (preferably by BitTorrent if you can).
Faviki.com: No OpenID – Fail
While I yield to no man in my admiration of Tim Rowe, I cannot accept his latest invitation to join him on faviki.com. This is because I have resolved to boycott any new service unless it supports OpenID.
I have written to Faviki about this. Let’s see what happens (nothing probably), but in my opinion, these days any new service not supporting OpenID deserves to fail. I have upwards of fifty different logins for on line systems and it’s driving me nucking futs. It’s got to the stage where the cost of having to comply with yet another “must contain two numbers and capital letter” idiocy is just too much unless the payoff of demonstrably huge.
While I’m at it, Marcus has been doing some creative thinking on ways to manage on line systems without login, or at least without the traditional hassle of having to remember user IDs and passwords. He also drew my attention to OAuth the other day. It seems very interesting – if only I could understand it.
Joi Ito: Why Mobile Hasn’t Happend Yet
In my dreams, I like to think that if I ever made a lot of money I would be like Joi Ito. He must rank as one of the most worthwhile people on the planet, and somebody that I’d love to meet. Today, he writes an astute post about the “mobile Internet” and why nothing very interesting is happening in that space, nor will it ever while the current closed systems exist.
Incidentally, he recently re-vamped his blog, so even if you have no interest in the subject matter, it’s well worth a look: there’s some excellent design going on there.
Worst Interaction Design Yet
What a beautiful mess. Your mission is to work out how to unsubscribe from one of the mailing lists in the “Newsletter Subscription” section. A lot of work went in to avoiding having check boxes in this design.
Administrivia II
Server upgraded, Webtorque will be looking rather sqiff for a while until I work out the Wordpress theme that I heavily hacked up and forgot to note any changes to… Enjoy.
[LATER] Pretty much done now. Wish I could work out a way of removing that pesky horizontal line beneath the header image.
Administrivia
Webtorque will be down this weekend for maintenance while I try to upgrade the server. It went wrong the first time, so here’s hoping. My Tiscali hell is also continuing though, so the downtime may be longer than it needs to be. Think of it as a rest.
The User Experience of Britannica Online
I have a 12 month subscription to Britannica Online. This was advertised as a way of letting me link to full Britannica articles free of charge from my blog, should I so wish. Indeed, have a read of this entry, which you would not have been able to see unless you had been a subscriber (try linking to it directly – clever, eh?).
I assume this is an Old Media marketing ploy to get me to buy a real subscription once my free 12 months is up, or at least a tactic to fight back against Wikipedia or something, but that doesn’t concern me here. Instead, I couldn’t resist the temptation to look a gift horse in the mouth.
The Time Is Now for Local Networks
My ongoing experience with Tiscali’s appalling broadband offering has made me research the overall broadband industry in the UK. The picture is now becoming alarmingly ugly. Something has to happen to avert a disaster, and that something may be local networks. But before I elaborate on the solution (although not a new idea), let me outline the problem.
There seem to be several horsemen of the information apocalypse riding over the horizon towards us. First, there is market economics and the primary fact that the ISPs have clearly oversold their capacity. This has resulted in hoards of disgruntled consumers wanting access to content that is increasingly out of their reach, while the ISPs compete on price after having exhausted what (if anything) they spent on infrastructure. This is also compounded by many other related factors including the BT Wholesale monopoly, the feeding frenzy whipped up by the 3G auctions, and the subsequent reluctance of network providers to invest in better delivery platforms after the spectacular failure of 3G technologies to deliver.
I Had No Idea
My god this is awful. The entire weekend my net connection with Tiscali has been so slow that YouTube, podcasts, BBC news and even Gmail have been pretty much unusable. I tried running a speed test just now and it timed out!
I now realise why I’ve always found broadband hell stories so boring – it was because I was living in a HomeChoice bubble! Broadband (DSL at least) has seriously crashed and burned in the four years we’ve been on our HomeChoice LLU cable. There was I wondering why people would grumble about getting less than 8Mb when our 2Mb connection gave me more than I could possibly download at speeds I was perfectly happy with. That’s because it was running at pretty much full speed the whole time.Now that we’ve been booted on to Tiscali’s execrable DSL system, I know what all the fuss is about. This is a disgrace. Something has to be done.
Current candidates are Sky and Virgin, and possibly Be. The complicator is the TV though. Tiscali is a TV/Broadband/Phone bundle. Coincidentally, FreeSat launches next month – or does it? Despite being a huge BBC/ITV joint venture, it seems more like a top-secret SAS mission. Not even Lord Grade’s mother knows the truth, I’ll be bound. Mind you, if it’s all a Great British Cock-up (as I rather suspect), there’s always FreeSat From Sky. Good to know we still have good branding agencies in this country, eh?
The No Net, No TV Challenge
For the past two weeks, and coincidentally at exactly the same time as my family have been away, I have had no Internet access, and very little TV reception at home.
I count myself as a pretty intense Internet user (although I watch very little TV), so was interested to see what would happen without any connectivity. This was not by choice of course, but due to a problem with my Tiscali (formerly Homechoice) set top box, which for some reason Tiscali took 13 days to sort out.
When Films are Free
I don’t watch nearly enough films, but my attention has been drawn to two animations recently. Both are free.
Firstly, the Blender project has brought out a new film (I wanted to embed it here but it breaks the page). It has a CC licence, and looks like an impressive bit of 3D animation (all the models and source files are also provided on the CD).
Secondly, there is the incredible new production from Paul Robertson: Kings of Power 4 Billion %. I assume this is public domain, but he is clearly is too cool to say anything about anything as boring as licensing, so I’m not sure. I’ve now watched it about … eighty times.
See also the wonderful anime geek flame war between the kuns and chans in the first thread on Robertson’s Livejournal page announcing the film. It’s Internet gold, I tell you.
Waste
For some reason I’ve been noticing a lot of greenwashing recently. At work we have plastic recycling bins along with receptacles for waste paper and cans. This is good because we get free bottles of water, juice and other modern comestibles. So, at least by recycling we can do something to offset the wanton destruction on the environment that these things bring. Incredibly though, I find myself pulling out three of four empty milk, drink and other plastic bottles from the general waste bin, and putting these into their correct place. Every day.
Are the people that throw plastic bottles into the general waste the same people that also print out everything they see on their screens? Some of the things I have seen by printers (uncollected) are mind blowing in both their pointlessness and sheer volume. At LBi all the printers doubled as shelves for mounds of unclaimed printouts. If it weren’t for the cleaners, we would have probably been able to cover them completely with this jetsam by the end of each week.
Expedia, however, practice one thing that is both convenient and green (as a side effect at least): “secure printing.” I’d not encountered this before I arrived, but everyone’s printer drivers default to this mode. When you send something to print, it is held by the printer itself in a queue shown on the console. Your print job awaits the input of your password before the printer actually prints it. This is convenient because it ensures your job is not lost inside somebody else’s run, or misplaced before you can get to the printer. It also removes the need pathetically to spam the office with “Please do not print to the printer in the next 10 mins because I need to do 80 copies of my report now.”
It is also of course green because it means the aforementioned print lunatics are unable to waste energy: the secure queue is automatically erased at the end of the day.
Identity Cards are Useful
A friend of mine recently said they thought ID cards could be useful. They said they thought one day they might forget to take their passport to the airport or on the Eurostar. It struck me that I’d not blogged about my thoughts on this (and hey, what’s a blog for if it’s not for idle pontification?).
ID cards will no doubt be very useful – in the same way as DRM is useful, or restrictive EULA contracts are useful. What matters is the consequences of that usefulness.
Take one small example that I’m interested in: the fact that the Identity and Passport Service today has 3,800 employees. That’s 3,800 potential points of data leaks, mistakes, abuse, impersonation, blackmail and other chaos.
Exiled from Plaxo
I ‘ve had a login on Plaxo for about two years now and have only received a couple of invites from people I know, but I’ve had a several in the last couple of months. Maybe it’ll be the next Facebook?
I won’t be there if Plaxo does explode though. Plaxo is so far my only OpenID casualty. Since trying to convert my account to using OpenID, I’m now in exile from the system. Previously, this wasn’t a problem, but today I had an invite from the mighty Nick Crascke. Since anyone who is anyone would jump at the chance to accept such an invitation, I naturally followed the invite link. But it hit an infinite loop on some OpenID request requesting something on Plaxo requesting something on myopenid.com.
A similar thing happened with and invite from Jon Curnow a few months ago. I tried mailing Plaxo. They replied with a solution to my OpenID woes. It seems I’ve got two duplicate accounts at the moment, one of which is my OpenID attached one, the other now orphaned in Plaxospace. Or something. But the fix sounded horrendously complicated so I thought better of it.
I suppose I could counter-invite all my invites… or something. Anyway, here’s the video (2.7Mb AVI) of what I’m getting. I should show it to Plaxo’s support I suppose…
Persona Insight? You Decide
At last, people are openly acknowledging that persona development, or at least the dogma that comes with it, is weird. I’ve been rude about Alan Cooper before, but this is another chance to stick the boot in.
I blame Cooper for coming up with the wonderful idea of personas. They’re great for summarising research. They help people – anyone really – get closer to design solutions when things get complicated. In my opinion, however, the problem space needs to be complex or personas are more trouble than they’re worth. Well, that’s one of their problems anyway (a bit like use cases really).
The Gnome System Menu
Having recently upgraded to Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, I see the system menu hasn’t changed. Other than a couple of minor tweaks to the contents, it’s the same as it was in Feisty Fawn.
Video: How Difficult Can It Get?
With various digital media building up on my little hard drive, I thought I’d get one of those media streaming boxes so that I can watch or listen it all in my living room downstairs. TED talks, podcasts of various kinds, camcoder movies – ah lovely.
I knew video formats were going to be a bit problematic, but I had no real idea of the sheer jungle of codecs, containers, incompatabilities and various other weirdness that’s out there. It would be hard to imagine a more ridiculously arcane situation than we currently have with video. Here’s my experience with a Pinnacle ShowCenter 200 so far:
Serves Me Right
Regular readers will know that I had a free mobile phone last year, thanks to a 100% cashback deal. This year however, I’ve not been so lucky.
After hearing nothing from Phones 2 U Direct.Co.Uk Ltd after my first cashback claim in September, I served them a court order to get a response. They replied to the court, admitting they owed me the money. That was over three weeks ago, and I’ve still heard nothing. Now I see that they’ve gone under.
They will be served a judgement by default for non-payment, but it now doesn’t matter much. Oh well, I think I’ll write to their MD, a Mr David Ellis of Hartley, Longfield, Kent DA3 8EX, and send him a copy of a letter I have for Arun Sarin about the conduct of his company and why Vodafone should keep better tabs on their affiliates.
It’s good to talk.
Administrivia: Site Move
Webtorque will be moving servers soon (maybe this week… maybe next). I’d be delighted if anyone actually notices, but we may be down for a day or so while I get the web server back up. There’s a chance I might delete everything in the process – indeed sometimes I want to do that anyway, but a sugary sentimentality prevents me.
Another Gear Shift in the Cross-Country Rally of Life
Travel broadens the mind, and so it is that today I leave LBi to start work with Expedia. In my case I shall be joining hotels.com as an interaction designer.
Expedia makes a lot of sense. Having worked for about ten months on First Choice Holidays while at Wheel last year (although my work has yet to go live following their merger with TUI), I see travel as a suitably complex experience design challenge. Expedia is also a real online business. Not for me the clicks and mortar, or the pains of transformation to that.
Not since IPC and my involvement with Yachting and Boating World have I worked in-house though, so this will be a change. I feel sad to leave LBi though, and wish everyone there well.
I wonder if this was a co-incidence?
We Love Firmware
The two things that have most irked me about many devices I’ve owned is response time and shoddy UI. Usually, I assume there’s not much the manufacturer can do about response time, so I’m pretty forgiving on that point. But shoddy UI is another matter. Mobile phone UIs have of course been done to death on this point (although it’s fun to read this one), so I won’t harp on that – too much. However, I was recently pleased to discover a way out from bone-headed implementations or crass, commercially driven design. Free firmware – once beyond my powers of geek – is now well within it.
Now that’s what I call user experience!
Last week I got a mail from somewhere announcing the launch of a new property website called zoopla.com, so I thought I’d have a look. It’s a pretty nifty residential property sales site: good web2.0 thinking going on, nicely executed. Whoever put it together knows their stuff.
But it has a few things I thought could do with improving, so as is my habit, I bunged them a mail with my thoughts. I got a reply thanking me, and that was that. Meanwhile, I continued to play with the site.
Yesterday, I arrived home to find they had sent me a Waitrose Wine giftset in the post, with a note from their CEO thanking me for my feedback!
Lovely!
(PS: Happy new year all!)
SingStar Plug
I’ve not worked on an FMCG site in ages, so I’m taking the liberty of plugging this one, which we did for Sony Computer Entertainment this year. SingStarGame.com went fully live in all territories last week.
I’m on there too if you look hard enough. It’s running at about 1,000 registrations a day right now so it might get rather interesting in a while. My favourite so far though is this guy. Also, while we’re on the trivia, the video files uploaded by users are transcoded to FLV on the fly by a service called Hey!Watch at 0.07€ a pop. Props to them.
Yahoo! Political Dashboard Redesign
Yahoo! has a “dashboard” to let you track the progress of the various candidates in the US presidential race (at http://news.yahoo.com/election/2008/dashboard). Since I’m currently working on a dashboard myself, I thought I’d have a go at improving it from the point of view of information design.
Monoculture Reloaded
I used to think I had a handle on the state of spam and malware. I chuckled at the obfuscated spam content, marvelled at the botnets, and secretly admired the general ingenuity of those skript kidz and their r00tkits.
But I didn’t know the half of it until I read this (670K PDF – thanks to Francois for sending it to me)
“Professional Paranoid” Peter Gutmann, of the Department of Computer Science in Auckland, lists a deluge of flat-out evil business models and techniques in use by spammers and online criminals. This assessment of the current (but fast-moving) state of the industry fairly leaves me quaking.
The Man From Marblehead
"cookingforfun (http://www.grouprecipes.com/people/cookingforfun) wants to be your cooking buddy. You can login to accept or decline (http://www.grouprecipes.com/profile/)."
Is it me, or is this getting a bit silly?
Banking Innovation
Well, sort of. The recent sale loss of my data by the Revenue prompted me to change my bank account this weekend. Not that I think I really needed to after the fiasco at HMRC, but I thought some rate tarting was in order.
Alliance & Leicester have two interesting things in their online banking interface: a “unique image and phrase combination” and a fake logout (no, really).
The former is quite interesting. You are given a picture to which you attach some phrase known only to you. When you’re shown that picture, you give them the phrase as part of the login process. I’m not sure how secure or otherwise this is, since the temptation to simply describe the image is very strong. However, as long as it’s used as an anti-phishing method (which it appears to be) then it’s rather nice. Would have preferred to have been given their public key for some 256-bit blowfish goodness, but hey. Who wants PKI when they can have a sand dune to look at?
The latter is a somewhat surprising bit of UI design. I finish my session and log out… but what’s this? I’m not logged out – I’m being sold to! Good job I wasn’t in an Internet cafe, because the first time this happened, I didn’t notice the message. I was so surprised, I’ve shot a video of it (1.1Mb ogg).
French Thinking
I see this news from France last week. It’s an interesting innovation in the copyfight, but it’ll be a flop. With margins already wafer-thin, ISPs will be reluctant to ban their customers, and those that do will be removing people who will be clever enough to get round the bans.
However, it’s measures like this that might eventually mean the Darknet moves off ISP-controlled networks. Keep an eye on wireless: Consume.net is dead, but others like it may well rise again. And this time, they’ll be encrypted…
Vimeo.com – Nice Design
Only just discovered Vimeo.com. I like the overall design very much. It’s pushing the the stereotypical “web 2.0″ conventions on rather well: desaturated colours, rounded corners, etc., but it’s very well thought out – everything is there for a reason. I also note some interesting things going on: no scroll bars (just up/down arrows), no “handles” for users – it’s Facebook-style real names.
Wikipedia and Conflicts of Interest
Will Wikipedia survive the constant sniping its been getting about quality, style and everything else? In the last few weeks, I’ve observed (nay, been involved with) two issues relating to their conflict of interest policy. To save the blushes, I won’t divulge who was involved, but the first incident started when a PR operative at a medium-sized company decided that because a rival company had an entry in Wikipedia, they should have one too.
Facebook Coincidence
One of the things I like about Facebook is spotting odd coincidences. Here are two friends, one living in Tokyo, the other in London, neither of whom know each other from Adam – but their status messages make nice bookends.
Will Thermo Be Too Hot for Axure?
With the advent of Thermo “some time next year” things are at last hotting up in the RIA design space.
Regular readers of this blog (if there are any such people) will know that I have been wondering for a long time in a somewhat Pooh-bearish way about the future of “The Designer” in the “The Development Process.”
While this is hardly a topic unique to this blog, my particular angle on it can be summed up by the following idea. Designers (by which I mean anyone who specifies a system that other people build) will get increasingly nowhere unless the tools they use to describe their designs work directly with the tools used to implement them.
Continue reading this entry »
Won’t Anyone Think of the Children?
When I’m murdered in my bed by a gang of bored teenagers, I’ll try to remember to blame the RIAA as I expire.
Some issues are too big to arrive at any useful perspective until you have thought and experienced a great many ideas relating to them. For a long while now, I have tried to fathom what it is about my concern, not to say alarm, about the increasingly draconian imposition of copyright law and the erosion of fair use that has come with it.
Too Loud To Ignore
I am usually completely unsuccessful in hiding my glee at the demise of music publishers, and this post is no exception. I have been hoping for the last few years that what started as a trickle would become a flood. And now with Radiohead and even (gasp!) Madonna, it surely has.
I think the penny is dropping. If you are an artist, you now have a choice to become an artist and a business, or an artist and a slave.
Facebook, Google and Nothing to Hide
I’ve been looking at my Facebook profile in the light of their recent decision to make members’ profile data indexable by Google and other search engines. Trying to make sense of what I thought about this, and about privacy in general, I found the works of Daniel J. Solove, associate professor of law at the George Washington University Law School. He specialises in privacy and its relation to information technology.
Looking at his list of publications, I thought I’d get a primer on his work by reading a short essay called “I’ve Got Nothing to Hide” and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy (240Kb PDF)
Anyone who’s interested in privacy issues needs to read this. I’ve always been frustrated by the “nothing to hide” argument, trotted out whenever somebody complains about privacy violations (I note it turned up in defence of CCTV cameras in a letter to Metro last week).
Continue reading this entry »
“We have a diagram of this.”
I’ve been thinking about “info graphics” again, and what a tricky area this is. It’s doubly so because a large part of what I do for a living is information design.
There is essentially an “emperor’s new clothes” problem prevalent in the production of information graphics. To me, the vast majority of subjects that I see addressed by such graphics (in particular, complex ones) would be better expressed in words – either spoken or written.
I recently found a quote by William S. Cleveland, a scholar in the field of graphical representation of data. He sums up the background to the problem I’m wrestling with:
“When a graph is made, quantitative and categorical information is encoded by a display method. Then the information is visually decoded. This visual perception is a vital link. No matter how clever the choice of the information, and no matter how technologically impressive the encoding, a visualization fails if the decoding fails. Some display methods lead to efficient, accurate decoding, and others lead to inefficient, inaccurate decoding.”
– William S. Cleveland, The Elements of Graphing Data, Hobart Press, 1994, p. 1
Vodafone Broken Calling
I was in Spain last week, on the Vodafone ES network, and dialled a wrongly-constructed number. The call didn’t connect (just went dead, no ringing) and I got this message. That number at the bottom is the number I was calling, properly formatted. If the system knows how to format the number – why not just dial it and not pester me?
The notion of “service design” can’t come on these companies too soon if you ask me.
Euro IA, Barcelona
Eric Reiss mentioned that at conferences in the States you have pre-conference workshops, whereas in Europe you just have lots of drinking. At the start of Day Two of Euro IA – I’m feeling rather sleepy after the cumulative effects of the the pre-conference party, and all the tappas last night. Hope I can hold out for the rest of the proceedings today!
It’s been great to meet lots of people I’ve been corresponding with – and so many people with whom I’ve not but who know my name from my various rantings. So far, everyone’s been kind about me, which is nice – despite my hogging the mic on the floor on most sessions. I realise I abandoned my post somewhat at the poster session to talk to others about theirs, and take some of the 500+ photos that I’ve got to edit down when I get back…
So far my notes are full of things like sentiment analysis techniques (Peter Van Dijk), cognitive organisation of requirements (Wiebe & Confer) and the incredible amount of data that Yahoo! Spain crunches per week (Ricardo Baeza-Yates) among other things. Today there’s service design and cross-context IA and other stuff – but it’s a two-tracker so I can’t have all of it (and we leave early for the airport later this afternoon).
No doubt I’ll be expanding on some of these things in later posts (although I may do this on Stream since this is in fact an expensed trip) – there’s a lot to digest – and it’s all been top-flight stuff.
Putting People in Control of Personal Data
I was thinking about how much I like using OpenID. I’m registered with myopenid.com, who could do with ironing out some kinks in their user experience, but it’s good enough.
One thing struck me after reading Tomas Baekdal’s excellent blog post on the subject of privacy policies. I summarised this in my comment on his post, but to cut to the chase:
“… statement of intent is all very well, [but] the practical reality of the situation is that data leaks. No matter how much you “respect” the people that gave you their data, respect alone won’t stop you leaving 10,000 names and addresses on a laptop in the local KFC.
This is why the real battleground needs to shift to putting users in control of how much data they release – regardless of privacy policies.
I would like to see, for example, the introduction of revocable keys for personal data. Have my name and address, but only in a form encrypted to you, with a key I can revoke at any time.”
Byrne/Eno Pean Again
I’m very rarely inspired to write about anything. When I do, it’s usually in reaction to something from outside. It doesn’t come “from me” in the artistic sense. Admittedly, I don’t write much uplifting stuff though – it’s mostly boring. This post is different however because I don’t know where it came from.
I was going though some bookmarks today (I remember a time when I thought I’d never use a bookmark manager), and saw My Life in the Bush of Ghosts go by. This, you may recall, is the incredible album from 1981 that turned into an incredible re-issue in 2006 accompanied by the CC-licensing of two of its tracks, both in their original 24-track form. This to me was a combination of two great tastes that taste great together: music and copyleft.
I’d not been to the site since just after its launch in 2006, when it had about five or six remixes uploaded. Now it has masses, and they are all wonderful.
I once thought we had lost the ancient art of the remix – the fuel of all music from the stone age to jazz. From about the 1970’s we witnessed the onset of the copyright plague that incubated the flesh-eating virus of pap pop, SAW and disco (we had to fight the punk wars to stay free – never forget that). But sites like this remind me that I was wrong.
I like being wrong. In the end, it feels better than being right.
Women on the Web
The female twist to Ofcom’s annual report today on the use of new media is interesting. One view of Internet use that’s always intensely annoyed me is that it’s a solitary medium best suited to male, sociopathic geeks. That may have been true of the web for a brief period between the decline of the dial-up BBS and the arrival of HTML 3.2, but with Usenet and the embers of the London dial-up scene in the mean time, my own online experience has always has been highly social. I assume this aspect of the web in it’s 2.0 incarnation is also one reason why the female audience now seems to be taking the ascendency in some areas.
I hope this will put paid to those who see being “on the Internet” as some kind of mindless activity akin to watching TV. May it make such an attitude seem as ridiculous as berating somebody for “reading books” or “having fun.”
Max Hole: It’s Businesses as Usual
Max Hole is President, Asia Pacific Region and Executive Vice-President, Marketing and A&R for Universal Music Group International. He has some soothing words for anyone who thinks the internets might be a bit worrying for music publishers.
When he’s using words like “… record companies … sign and encourage great music by great artists. This will never change”, you know they’re in trouble. At least, in trouble in the long term. One thing that’s true in business as in life is that nothing is forever. Mr Hole’s analysis of the situation for record companies seems to be based on the idea that nothing will, or really needs to, change for the music publishing industry. Musicians have no interest in business or marketing… consumers demand much more than just the music… pirates are sapping the ability to find talent… We’ve heard it all before. If you repeat it often enough, it might just make it true.
Hole completely fails to address what happens if, as seems at least likely, the making, discovery and consumption of music moves from the physical world of gigs and CDs to a virtual one, and along with that, whether the gatekeepers will see the fences come down.
Why Has My Son Been Fingerprinted?
My six year-old son went on a trip to the park today with his holiday playgroup. There were various activities there, and among them it seems the Met were hosting some kind of “meet the Police” event. Part of this appears to have involved his fingerprint being taken.
What the hell is this about? He describes it as being something the policemen did “for fun” – but I’m not laughing.
I don’t know (and I need to ask the teachers who were at the event) whether the police kept a record of this print, what was said about it, or whether anyone other than my son was asked about it. The fact that the “certificate” he received (which I found in his bag when he came back) is glaringly unsigned adds insult to injury. There’s no contact details, no reason, nothing on the back of the paper… nothing.
Talk about sleepwalking into a surveillance society. The police randomly fingerprinting six year-olds? You couldn’t make this up!
For the First Time, Ever
The UK government has rejected calls to extend the length of copyright on sound recordings beyond 50 years.
This is the first time any government in the history of the world has refused to extend copyright, and it’s great news. 50 years is of course far, far too long, but at least the madness of extending it has been averted for now. To quote Doctorow in the Boing Boing today:
“Extending copyright dooms nearly every author’s life’s work to obscurity and disappearance, in order to make a few more pennies for the tiny minority of millionaire artists like Cliff Richards (and billionaires like Paul McCartney).”
(and I’ll spell Sir Cliff’s name wrong because I can)
While Labour will have to do a lot more to make up for the Iraq war if they want me to actually vote for them, they get my approval on this outcome at least.
Going to Euro IA
I submitted an idea for a talk at this year’s Euro IA in Barcelona a few weeks ago (just met the deadline). The anonymous review process has now taken place and the results are out: they’d like me to do it as a poster.
While I would have preferred a talk to be able to do it justice, I am of course grateful to have been accepted. So, it’s off to Barcelona in September with my rolled-up poster under my arm. Let’s see if anyone understands what they hell I’m on about there.
Administrivia: Comment Posting
I’ve been told that comments aren’t working. I think this might be related to a relatively recent upgrade to Wordpress that might have broken the theme I’m running (I’m hoping it’s not to do with the very low version of PHP the server’s running).
I’m going to see if I can fix this, but if you have been dying to tell me something, then jonathan at webtorque dot org will do you.
The Rights and Wrongs of Tag Clouds
I’m not obsessed with tag clouds, really I’m not, but I think they are the single most useful, yet criminally misunderstood and mis-applied UI device out there. I’ve written about tag clouds before, but this time I’m turning up the heat.
Controversy time: writing about “best practice” for tag clouds in terms of what fonts to use and other minutiae is the hallmark of the usability nerd. The other hallmark is forgetting – in this case utterly – to consider context. Whether or not a tag cloud is useful at all is 100% down to the context it’s in. Everything else is as near as dammit to irrelevant. The fact that few things in information architecture are as clear cut as this is particularly damning here. The one thing you have to understand in user experience design is context.
Continue reading this entry »
Paul Birch of Revolver Records
If you want to know what company directors think about how the government in this country works, look no further than this flabbergasting statement by Paul Birch of Revolver Records:
“I … think allowing indiscriminate criticism of the RIAA is inappropriate for a Government funded institution”
At least in terms of editorial integrity, if you are being funded by the government it should be case that it would be wholly appropriate – if not actually desirable – to criticise a private company!
Paul Birch is probably not alone in seeing the government as being simply a tool of corporate influence. This just shows how bad things have got – that people like him now need to make no secret of the fact that they expect governments to work exclusively for commercial interests. This is just staggering I think.
The User Experience of Photosynth
There was a flurry of interest in Microsoft’s Photosynth this week. I’m not sure why, since it’s been around for a while, and was one of the WPF/e showcases at Designertopia last year. The engine for Photosynth is Seadragon (acquired by Microsoft last year I think), explained here in more detail.
Photosynth (or at least it’s primary concept) comes alive when it’s pointed at Flickr. So I was at first mystified as to why the public demos of Photosynth all used photos taken by one person, but the video explains that they were not able to use a Flickr feed for legal reasons.
However, whether or not the photos used are heterogeneous, there is a problem I think. Spatially relating the images is of course very clever, but if we ignore this and look at what it’s like to use the interface, there is clearly a “keyhole” feeling to it. You are, at any one time, simply flicking though similar photos. Despite the occasional panorama that jumps out at you, it is far too easy to become disorientated (even with the homogeneous photos, so I assume even more with the heterogeneous ones). I thought at first that this may have been due to my unfamiliarity with the UI, but I’ve been playing with it quite a bit today, and I still feel as if I’m looking though the wrong end of a telescope while walking on a high-wire. Overall it mainly delivers the same experience as sifting though a stack of photos grouped by place.
There is, however, something of the Bladerunner here. The promise of discovering something hitherto unknown about a place (cf the example in the video using the poster of Notre Dame). It’s all quite intriguing, but I have my doubts about its actual utility.
I Was Mugged By Wolff Olins
I now realise that I hated the logo for the XXX Olympiad* because I was meant to hate it. Wolff Olins grabbed me by the throat, shoved me up against a wall and made me. At exactly the same time, they forced everyone else to take a stance on it too. Now the Sun has centre-spread hate pieces, 50,000 people sign petitions against it, and the London digerati pretend they loved it the minute they saw it. For god’s sake Wolff Olins – it’s only a logo! Why have you visited such pain upon us?
I have to admit I don’t really know if the logo is good or bad, or what a “good” logo would be anyway in this context. Good for what? Multichannel deployment? Recognition? Attracting the kids? The only thing we’re told is that it’s supposed to be doing the latter. I don’t know if anyone’s asked them, but I just wish it would all go away.
I’m with Ken Livingstone on sport: it bores bores me to tears. If people want to do it they can; I just resent been beaten over the head by it in this way.
* Ah, now I see why they aren’t using the official name this year!
And Design Shall Start With Observation
The project I’ve been working on for the last ten months is now winding down for me, so I’m getting involved with some new stuff. One of these couldn’t be more different from the rather rigorous approaches I’ve been taking since last year. Having attended a “workshop” for this project recently, I can’t help feeling I’ll be firing off shots in the war against intelligence.
But perhaps that’s the rule, and not the exception. Certainly, looking at the vast majority of sites right now and their seemingly total disregard for considered design, it seems to be the case. I found a rather typical example of this today when I bought some SkypeOut minutes. It wasn’t until I’d chosen Visa credit card and submitted the payment for processing that I was told the method of payment also determines how long it takes for the minutes to be allocated to my account. Not only that, but they only gave me times for debit cards (about 15mins) and bank transfers (about 3 days). No mention of credit cards or PayPal. Don’t worry, I’ve mailed them my thoughts on this.
All this makes me even more impressed with Nokia. This article about Jan Chipchase’s world of contextual research is interesting. I know that mobile devices are a bit of a different kettle of fish to web sites, but it’s good to know that at least one company (the only company?) out there recognises the value of such research. I like the last observation “The question is how can we do our job as a large corporation and show people we interact with sufficient respect.”
Wise Guy, Eh?
Until yesterday, I’d not tried Any Questions Answered (AQA) – the old-school (as in not P2P) SMS-based answer service. For a mere £1, they will answer any question you have. I’d heard good things about them.
Their website allows you to ask one free question, so I did:
“Since 1950, how many people have been shot by the police in mainland Britain (excluding N Ireland) who were not later found to be innocent?”
Submission to Euro IA 2007
Here’s an idea for a Euro IA submission I was thinking about (eh Barcelooona!) to fulfil one of my annual HR objectives: the one that says I need to ramp up my public profile to attain the status of European Experience Emperor.
Some prodding about seems to indicate that people do see this as a problem worth addressing, so I’ve finished filling out the submissions form today. Just got under the deadline too, which closes today. See what you think:
Persona Development What/How Thoughts
From time to time it’s fun to think things through using the “what/how analysis.” This can be summarised by the statement “One man’s ‘what?’ is another man’s ‘how?’” and it can be applied to lots of things in order to work out where you are in a set of processes and how, or whether, some things have a natural relationship or hierarchy to describe.
I’ve been trying to apply this technique to the process of persona development, because in particular this seems to me to cut the designer off at the point where they actually need to design the end product (the UI of the system in most cases). In short, I wanted to know whether performing a thought experiment like this would reveal whether modelling users necessarily supports the design of a better system for them or not.
Maximising Profits, Minimising Innovation
When our grandchildren look back on the late and early 20th century – the dawn age of computing and the information revolution, they will see a company called Microsoft writ large across it. Just how large is difficult to grasp until you compare the profits that Microsoft makes from their nearly unchallenged monopoly.
Now compare these profits to the amount of innovation displayed by Microsoft in the marketplace. Who is this a problem for? I think it’s a problem for all of us because when I use technologies not produced by Microsoft I think of what might have been. What might computing and the information revolution be like today if we had had a competitive market in operating systems and software?
We will never know – but it’s interesting to wonder. Not least because Microsoft are now moving into areas like publishing.
Lull Before the Storm?
Cultural issues and technology are subtle things so I may be barking up the wrong tree, but on my recent trip to Japan, I met some teenagers who told me that they didn’t know much about computers (I’d told them that I design web sites. They were not impressed).
Instead, they use their phones for almost everything. Why didn’t they use computers? The answer seemed to be that they didn’t need to, so had no interest in them. Computers are big, phones are small. You need training for computers – but everyone can use a phone, they said. This latter statement appears to be true. I was struck by the consistency of the physical interfaces of most people’s phones in Japan, even across vendors the key layouts are pretty much the same, and I assume the virtual interfaces are therefore similar too. Why shouldn’t they be when content is king and the network operators business models are stable? Adults (sometimes even quite old ones) talked about their phones in the same way as quite young people in the West do, but not in terms of the features – they cared about the content.
I sometimes wonder if my skill set is too web-based, too classically client-server and desktop orientated. For all I know, a wave of mobile usage scenarios that I can barely guess at is going to break over my little world and obliterate it. How long can I chuckle over what I see as the risible user experience of contemporary mobile comms in the West and its utter failure – so far – to engage people?
Life with Linux
There are some posts that no real blog can be complete without, and that is some opinion about Linux. I’ve been using Ubuntu for over a year now and it occurs to me that I should write up something on it. Not that anyone’s asked, but then that’s what blogging is all about really isn’t it?
I switched from Windows to Ubuntu for no reason other than I wanted to see what it was like. I kept my Windows install in place on a dual-boot just in case, but mainly because I need access to Windows from time to time in order to work from home. Since installing Ubuntu, I’ve experimented with OpenSuSE and Kubuntu for a few months, but went back to Ubuntu when the Edgy release came out. I have a two year old Dell Dimension 5100, upgraded with an NVidia 7300GT video card.
UCD Crisis
There are too many methods of designing digital media. We currently have “agile” (hip, groovy) at one end and “waterfall” (a term of abuse) at the other. Each of our projects at LBi inhabits a space somewhere in between these two extremes at any one time – although because we’re an agency it’s mostly just different takes on waterfall. There have recently been some laudable attempts to be hip and groovy, although I’ve not yet had the pleasure of that myself.
From time to time my department (now close to fifty people I think) needs to vent a bit of excess energy (or hot air) in the form of periodic email discussions about industry tends, methods and related stuff. Some of this comes out on Stream, but mostly it’s by internal email. Today was a good example. Dan Saffer has written an article called Research Is a Method, Not a Methodology. This was duly discussed in fairly measured terms as Saffer makes some interesting points.
But then, I cracked.
The Joost TV Business Model
I will not be buying shares in Joost any time soon. This is not because they don’t have a good product – having been on their beta testing swarm for the last few months, I think it’s quite nice really. The trouble is, according to the Guardian they will be getting their content from media owners based on a lie. The lie is as follows:
“… Joost boasts a secure, efficient, piracy-proof internet platform, and is guaranteeing copyright protection for content owners and creators.”
What a wonderful example of hubris: DRM will preserve the sanctity of copyright for the owners of films and videos and they can use the net as just another distribution channel. Phew! Thank god for Joost!
Unfortunately though, that won’t happen. It takes approximately 4 minutes for cracked versions of music from the iTunes store to appear on the P2P networks (according to Big Champagne). What makes Joost – or more accurately their investors – think that won’t happen to them?
I suppose the Graun can’t get it right every time, but let’s make this the subject of experiment. Give Joost the benefit of the doubt, put them up against Cory Doctorow’s assertion:
“I believe that we live in an era where anything that can be expressed as bits will be. I believe that bits exist to be copied. Therefore, I believe that any business-model that depends on your bits not being copied is just dumb, and that lawmakers who try to prop these up are like governments that sink fortunes into protecting people who insist on living on the sides of active volcanoes.”
Joost are pitching their tent right now. Let’s see how long they last.
Julian Cope Rarity
I was going through some stuff at the weekend, and found a CD I bought in the Los Angeles from a shop in Melrose several years ago. Fans of Julian Cope will of course spot why it found its way into the bargain bin with a hole punched through the barcode.
If you’re not a fan, the clue is that the back cover art is supposed to say “That’ll be the deicide” (a typical Copeism, like “floored genius” and “Jehovakill” – the name of the album itself). I bet somebody was pretty furious at the time. I wonder how many they pressed before the plant was told to stop?
Blimey – It Worked!
I took out one of those incredibly dodgy-looking “100% cashback” mobile phone deals last year. Much to my surprise – it seems to have worked. £35 a month for a 12-month T-Mobile contract with 200 free any time/any network minutes per month. The handset was free too – a K700i.
I didn’t go over my 200 minute limit, but did spend some money on texts. I think I ended up spending maybe £20 over the year (a couple of mistaken calls to 0800 numbers I think too). I also spent £12 on special delivery postage costs for the cashback claims. The deal was from The Mobile Outlet, who tried to refuse my initial claim after six months on the grounds that I’d not complied with their contract terms. This seems to have been a mix-up though, and a couple of weeks later I get a cheque for £192. Last week, I got the other one for the remaining six.
Now I’m doing it again, this time with Phones 2U on a K750i handset with Vodafone (500 minutes, 200 texts).
As long as these deals are around, I’m not going to use PAYG again and that’s for sure! I wonder how much they make out me?
Is the future PPV for the Beeb?
So the BBC is now the latest broadcaster to sign a deal with the force that is YouTube.
Right now, the Beeb (and CBS, NBC and Fox) are all saying that YouTube is a “promotional vehicle” for them. Nothing to do with their core programming or anything like that. OK, and what about all those naughty uploads that were on YouTube before the agreement? “We don’t want to be overzealous, a lot of the material on YouTube is good promotional content for us.” So, if you can’t beat ‘em…
Mind you, I’ve not watched a full-length programme on line yet but I’m sure in a couple of years I will have done. Hell, in a couple of years I might not even have a telly, preferring instead to stream YouTube (or Democracy Player, or Joost or whatever) to a screen attached to my PC. I know the deathknell has been sounded many times for the Beeb before, but under those circumstances – how does a licence fee fit in?
Teaching the Machine
I like this video for a number of reasons. It’s text speaking about text speaking about content, and has no aural commentary. It uses real imagery yet is figurative; it connects the edge of an arcane concept (hypertext markup) to the edge of some very big issues (love, communication and copyright) yet makes this connection clear in just a couple of minutes. It’s produced by an academic and appears on YouTube – it’s about Web 2.0…
But most of all I think it sums up why I’m interested in the Internet, and why I’ve always been. Whenever I encounter stuff like this I repeat the words that I saw on a sig on a random email on a random BBS on the end of a random 9600-baud dial-up somewhere in London in 1993:
“Death to the communications monopolies! May ten thousand autonomous systems bloom!”
The Right Way To Do It
I like Flickr more every time I go there. I like it so much I’m now paying for it just as soon as my PayPal echeque clears. As a rule I pay for nothing in life if I can possibly help it. This alone is a measure that they are doing the right thing.
And here’s one reason I like them even more. Today, in their news announcements, they said this:
” In our ongoing efforts to Make Flickr BetterTM, we’re introducing two additional limits: the new maximum number of contacts is 3,000 contacts (good luck with that), and each photo on Flickr can have a maximum of 75 tags.
We love your freedom, but, in this particular case, limiting these things will actually improve the system performance, making pages load faster across the site for everyone and cut out some unwelcome spammy behaviors. Both of these new limits apply equally to free and pro account members.”
This is the right way of doing system limits in my opinion. Far too often I am asked by developers when designing a system to impose some arbitrary limit on things like input fields or address book entries or whatever. Not only am I extremely reluctant to put a cramp on my users’ style (if you want to attach a 200Mb file to a blog post, you should be able to as long as it’s done right), but I am hardly ever given any convincing argument as to why such limits need to be imposed from a technical point of view. So I just refuse, and they think I’m insane.
Far better in my view – and obviously in Flickr’s – to eschew limits, or perhaps impose extremely high ones, and then modify these at a later date as (or if) the need arises. This of course implies some system architectural thinking in advance, but anyone I work with should be capable of that…
AKQA In Da Second Life House
Those groovy people at AKQA are so groovy they are even in Second Life. Here’s a picture of me in their lounge, marvelling at the slideshow on the wall. And here’s one of me leaving a groovy comment.
Although quite deserted (it’s a Saturday night after all – they’ll be at home looking at their KPIs), it’s all very groovy, as I’ve said.
I’d better stop now because for all I know we’ll be merging with them in a few months time and I’ll have to be nice to them all…
Roundly Confusing
Having taken this photo while waiting for our kid to chomp through a McDonald’s Kids Meal at new year (mea culpa – but it’s the winging, really), I’ve just noticed another frankly amazing example of a nutritional content “explanation.” This time, it’s on the cardboard sleeve of a pot of Sainsbury’s Cornish clotted cream (again, don’t ask). Here is a pack shot, and here is a close-up of what Sainsbury’s are calling the “Wheel of Heath” printed in the top right corner.
Because the Wheel is a pie chart, it would seem reasonable to assume it shows the proportions of each nutritional element in relation to a whole. However, quite what whole is not immediately clear. Perhaps it might even allow you to compare the amount of fat and other things you might get from a portion cream compared to, say, a ready meal or a bar of choccie displaying the same style of chart. But again, that too seems doubtful on further inspection. So what does is show?
Continue reading this entry »
The Right to Copy, Won
Most people don’t know that under UK law, it is currently illegal to copy music from (say) a CD you have bought, to your own MP3 or other music player. As a result of a petition to Downing Street organised the Open Rights Group, the government has responded positively to the suggestion that we should perhaps not be thrown in prison for making copies of stuff that we own.
“As you may be aware, in December 2005 the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, announced that there would be a review of the intellectual property framework in the UK, led by Andrew Gowers.
The findings of this review have now been published and recommend the introduction of a private copying exception for the purposes of format shifting. This would allow individuals to copy music which they have legally bought on compact disc onto an MP3 player without infringing copyright.
The Government welcomes this recommendation and is currently considering how such an exception should be created in UK law.”
Unfortunately, this is only a small victory in the face of far worse restrictions being imposed, or attempting to be imposed, upon the listeners of music, the readers of books, the viewers of films, television and indeed the consumers of all media. Time shout “Protect your bits! Support ORG!“
Northern Line, But Northbound?
I don’t often travel on the tubes, but this must confuse the hell out of tourists! I wonder why they did it like this? Seems to be the case all along the line – well, as far as Camden anyway I think.
Those Tag Clouds Again
Just posted this to Sig-IA in reply to somebody wanting some examples of good tag clouds (see also my earlier venture). I’m sure the following will be wonderfully arcane in about 10 years time.
I was looking at movietally.com the other day. While it’s not exactly a shining example of good design overall, the use of the tag cloud struck me as particularly good when applied to the movie pages.
Kevin Kelly and Book Scanning
It being near the end of the year, I find myself in retrospective mode, so I’ve got an excuse not be very topical in reviewing Scan This Book! by Kevin Kelly of the New York Times, written back in May this year. I’ve just finished reading it (it’s that long – doesn’t the NYT have editors?) and I can’t resist a pop.
Kelly says some interesting things about the future of digitised books. For example:
“Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before.”
myminute.tv – Return of the Schedule
Now this is interesting. Kaoru has been working on a site that allows you to upload videos – and schedule them.
I like to think of myself as a contrarian (well, until it becomes uncomfortable), and there’s something about this site that tickles my contrarian fancies. Timeshifting, PVR-fuelled, 24-hour living is all the rage, and this is of course tearing society apart as we know it, obviously. But nobody, until now, has had the courage to explore that grandest of old media devices – the schedule.
Schedules bring back memories of coal-blackened miners racing home from t’pit at the same time as stockbrokers and museum curators around Britain, all bursting through their front doors just in time to kiss the wife, gab a cuppa and jump onto the sofa as the theme tune to Top of the Pops bursts from the oak-laminated box by the fireplace. Ahh, Bisto.
Google Jamming
I’ve recently been using StumbleUpon more, and although it’s fun, it’s not as fun as putting interesting strings into Google to see what turns up. For example, using this:
“parent directory ” MP3 -xxx -html -htm -php -shtml -opendivx -md5 -md5sums
and this:
?intitle:index.of? mp3
Brings up all sorts of interesting stuff.
Getting Real
I’ve been reading 37 Signals’s book Getting Real on line. This caused a bit of stir when it came out as it self-consciously throws out the rule book(s) on application development and looks firmly towards the new dawn of Web 2.0, and (sort of) in the direction of an extreme “agile” methodology. All the rage.
I have no doubt that if I were them, I would do things much as they describe. Don’t document – just start building. Don’t have meetings – just create stuff you can talk about. Don’t listen to users first, listen to yourself, then listen to users when they’re using your prototypes. The application is never finished; iterate, improve and re-factor. And so on.
But I’m not them, and my circumstances could hardly be more different. While I have designed a system using the methods they describe (a project that had no budget and no official status), reading Getting Real is like looking at a documentary on some strange aquatic species. If I seriously tried to implement even half what they advocate then I’m confident it would be as much use to me as living with turtles. To be fair, they address my boring old objections in their introduction, although I think they’re overreaching themselves when they say that Microsoft is “getting real” – even 37 Signals won’t make pigs fly.
The Soul of Socialism Under Hucknall
I don’t read the Guardian much these days, but I’ve always known it as a broadsheet with a sense of humour. Their printing today of this article, “written” by Mick Hucknall, and the inevitable comments about it on line, must be one of the funniest online occurrences this year.
Hucknall (oh OK, it’s some music industry lawyer, but let’s just imagine) inexplicably steps into the copyfight on the side of “socialism” and then plays Alice in a Wonderland of inverted logic. Some highlights include:
“Copyright’s democratising effect is seen most clearly in the music business.”
“Far from obstructing this exchange of inspiration, copyright facilitates sampling, …”
“Allowing valuable sound recordings to pass into the public domain does not create a public asset: it represents a massive destruction of UK wealth…”
“The benefits of extending the copyright term will last a long time. “
This is clearly the voice of somebody who has (to use the analogy coined by Cory Doctorow) pitched his tent on the side of a volcano, and is now asking us to rescue him at our own expense. His audience are not amused.
I could go on, but I’m sure you’ll be relieved to know that I’m not. Instead, I highly recommend you read the comments to the article. Choose your favourite riposte because, as one commenter puts it, “Hegemony isn’t a word used a lot in Denton.”
Will X-Series Light the 3G Touchpaper?
It’s not long now until 3 starts selling its X-Series in the UK. Hidden among the usual bundling and partnerships fluff (eBay, Skype, etc.) is a rather quiet, yet potentially cataclysmic feature: X-Series will have flat-rate pricing.
So, after the glorious £4.3 billion they spent on their 3G license and the completely predictable failure of picture messaging and video calls after that; the lying to the City about their churn, and having to rely on voice and text rates just to keep afloat – it’s finally come this. The one thing that anyone who has ever used a mobile handset to access the net could have told them from the day they hit the market: un-metered charging.
All we need now is to know how much it’s going to be.
Distributed Boing Boing on Webtorque
One of the sites I read rather a lot is Boing Boing. Some over-enthusiastic web filtering software (and possibly some oppressive regimes) classifies Boing Boing as an undesirable site and blocks it. So, I’ve installed the Distributed Boing Boing proxy on this website.
The URL for the proxy is http://www.webtorque.org/dbb.php
Now might also be a good time to mention the fact that I installed a Tor server here as well a few months ago. Call me a card-carrying cyber information liberator! The node is called Doormouse.
Christian Lindholm at UX 2006
I’ve been meaning to record my thoughts about seeing Christian Lindholm, head of Yahoo! Mobile (and former Director of Multimedia Applications for the Nokia Ventures) talking about “Mobile Usability” at the Neilsen Norman Group’s User Experience 2006 in London a couple of week ago.
Firstly, let me state that I’m not exactly a mobile phone freak, but I do use the things quite a lot. My experience with most of them has been that usability is generally very poor. So I was interested to see Lindholm speak.
Continue reading this entry »
Worthy Petitions
10 Downing Street, in conjunction with mySociety, have recently launched an on-line petition system where citizens can collect signatures for issues with which to petition the government.
If you haven’t already, I strongly encourage you to lend your support to petition set up by Suw Charman of the Open Rights Group:
“Thousands of people own MP3 players which they have filled with copies of CDs that they have legally purchased, yet making this copy is itself illegal. Copyright law is out of step with this common behaviour which is seen by the majority as morally and ethically acceptable. The law should be changed to reflect new, fair uses of copyrighted materials.”
You may also wish to support this cause as well.
Graphics and Relevance
This graphic “explaining” what the BBC’s honeypot might have been employed to do had it been hijacked (which I assume it wasn’t – how boring) is all but pointless.
While rather an extreme example, I think it highlights rather well what I’ve realised recently is the biggest single problem I have with graphical representations of things like this: relevance. For example, how relevant, if at all, are the pictures of “Net routers” in order to understand that a honeypot might be used to send spam? Do you need to understand what the arrows mean? If so, why are they all running from the honeypot through the “network” to the list of “possible uses”? What is the relevance of the “Wider Internet” and the “The Internet” and so on? Bad graphics are characterised by either missing out concepts or larding them with irrelevant ones. This seems to be an example of the latter type.
I sometimes think I’m the only person who struggles with this issue when confronted with graphics that are supposed to “explain” even moderately complex things. In this particular case, I would say that in order to do the same job as the graphic, you could use at most three lines of text for complete clarity.
It’s All Your Base, Redux!
I’m only barely aware of this meme, but it’s bubbling up from here, apparently.
User Experience 2006
Originally uploaded by Gilgongo.I’ve been at User Experience 2006 (London). Don Norman looks even more like Capt. Birdseye than normal, but he had some good things to say along with bashing Microsoft and spending rather too long talking about cars. A good day out I think – and one that also might need to see me revise my attitude to Alan Cooper.
A Great Disturbance in The Force
As prophesied, the roll-out of IE7 via Windows Update started today, and as a “High Priority” update no less. Webmasters everywhere now need to be afraid. Well, afraid of those running legitimate copies of Windows, since the wording on the download mentions that it’s for those with “genuine installations” – so WGA will prevent the bewarezed from downloading it, I assume. Future IE6 users – by their browser version ye shall know them…
Seven After Five Years
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 was released in August 2001. This week, one of the biggest and most damaging private monopolies in human history relented, and fully five years after, we now have their MSIE 7. I installed it today.
Coincidentally, a couple of days before I heard that the 7 was out, I happend to read an interview with Jakob Nielsen (Interaction Design, Reece, Rogers and Sharp, 2002) in which he says:
“My prediction has been that Explorer Version 8 will be the first good web browser and that is still my prediction, but there are still a few versions to come before we reach that level.”
Given that Explorer Version 6 had shipped the year before, my powers of higher mathematics reveal to me that we now have approximately one more version to go. But I could be wrong.
Tag Cloudy
I’ve become a bit of a tag cloud hawk recently, looking for examples of their use and what I think is abuse, or just plain old misunderstanding.
My definition of a useful tag cloud is something that allows you to get a feel for the “mood” of the information tagged on a site. On the web, it’s traditionally been hard to communicate this in any other way apart from using numbers (for example with faceted navigation) or worse, plain old lists.
So I quite like this application on Movietally (a site set up by a 14-year old, apparently – that’s pretty Web 2.0 if you ask me…). If I’ve never heard of the film, I can get a good feel for what to expect from it in about 0.5 seconds. Great for people like me with a gnat-like attention span. Compare the summary with the cloud – which would you choose?
But other times it’s just, well, wrong. Like Yahoo! Tech’s home page. What the hell is that tag cloud doing? Slap bang in prime screen position too. Yahoo! Tech is basically an ecommerce site with reviews. The help text tells you “The more popular a product type is, the larger its word.” So, I’m looking to buy a monitor – what does the tag cloud tell me? That I should in fact want a laptop? It maketh no sense. The fact that they feel the need to have to explain the tag cloud is also an indication that they have not much of a clue about the context of their own site.
But then I’ve always thought Yahoo! were muppets – easy targets. Here’s a new example from a hitherto unknown (to me) outfit: Collectivex.com. Have a look at that cloud. Looks nice, doesn’t it? Go ahead, click on something.
Gotcha! It’s fake. Still, have to admire them for effort – lets hope for their sake their VCs don’t click through too!
Online Payment Form Patterns
When designing an e-commerce site, it’s hard to avoid the payment form. For an industry barely a decade old, the payment page has a powerful mystique – associated as it is with high technology like i-frames, fraud, mysterious loss of life savings, and alien invasion.
I was thinking about this last week after reviewing some work that the mighty Ash Gupta, interaction designer of repute, had done for us last month. His design eschewed the traditional card-type drop down that seemingly all credit card forms have. He mentioned in the annotations that the system would simply detect the card type from the Bank Identification Number (BIN) – the first four digits of the number on the card. I thought this was an interesting innovation. One less form element to bother with and one less thing to go wrong – particularly as I know that you can quite happily choose a Visa credit card from the drop down on most forms only to supply the number of your Visa debit card instead. The payment fails on the round trip to the server, of course.
So I decided to see what other designers of The Union (as the newly-formed LBi International has chosen to describe itself recently) thought about the matter.
Continue reading this entry »
‘It’s just all kinds of filth’
He’s gone for the irony hat trick…!
Boingboing reports on this article is about a man who has asked his daughter’s school to take Fahrenheit 451 off the curriculum because of its use of “bad language” and (for extra irony points) smoking, amongst other things. The incident is wonderful not least for the fact that he chose to lodge the complaint last week – which just happend to be the American Library’s Banned Books Week as well!
I checked to see whether Fahrenheit 451 had itself been a banned book in the past, but sadly not. Perhaps if he belonged to a religious or ethnic minority he could have claimed the Guinness Book entry for “most ironic attempt at censorship” – a record currently held by Jackson County, Florida for their attempt in 1981 to ban George Orwell’s 1984 due to it being “pro-communist.”
On second thoughts, that’s not actually ironic so much as plain stupid.
World Usability Day, Cheap Shot
I’d hate to be responsible for a website like World Usability Day, but since I’m not – I can’t resist a cheap shot.
Pink for Breast Cancer Awareness Month
Webtorque has gone Pink for National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
I know it’s American, but breasts know no frontiers.
Giving RIAs an STD
I’m sure there’s a wittier subject line for this, but it’s hardly worth the effort.
The project I’m currently working on has some “wizzy” interactivity planned, and verges on being a proper “rich Internet application” sometimes. As mentioned here before though, people like me working in the stultifying confines of a web development agency are sometimes wary of RIAs because there’s no accepted method of communicating their design to the Mongolian hoards. Getting beyond the conceptual stage of describing even mildly complex “rich” interactions is also hard.
However, a glimmer of hope came may way when we hired Ash Gupta (the famous interaction designer and UML guru) to cover for some of the team over the holiday season. Ash got to work on some thorny problems, and suggested we try some state transition diagramming.
Cut Lavender
Blogging from Flickr – I am so Web 2.0! Not sure why I’d want to blog many photos on Flickr, but you never know. Another benefit of moving to Wordpress though: at least I can.
Assuming it works – which, if you’re seeing this – it has!
The ‘new link between designer and developer’
I’m a bit late with this, but last weekend’s Slashdot discussion of this article on the ZDnet blog was interesting, if somewhat awe-inspiring in so far as some of the opinions expressed about designers (and the software development process in general) were breathtaking stupid.
Ever since I got preview of Expression and the wonders of XAML last year, I’ve been wondering about the effect of elevating UI design to the same (at least practical) level as writing executable code. I have to say that I’m rather mystified as to why so few – indeed apparently none – of my profession are running around screaming about it in some way or other. The ZDNet article put it pretty clearly I thought:
Just as the RIA has blurred the line between the web and the desktop, it is doing the same to the line between designers and developers
Whither Slashdot’s Tagging Beta?
I’ve been keeping half an eye on Slashdot’s tagging beta since they gave me access to it a few months ago. Despite reading the explanation, I’m rather unsure as to where it’s going to go:
(Good opportunity for me to try this new image-popping Wordpress plugin…)
A Problem With Search Forms
Golly – it’s about time I wrote down something about user experience design, seeing as this is what this blog is suppose to be about.
I’ve been doing some work for a site re-design, starting with user testing 24 people over two weeks. We asked them (a wide demographic) to use some currently live sites to see how they got on with them. Some people tested the client’s current site, others one of their competitors. There was only one task in the half hour or so we gave them to do this: order a product. We also showed them a couple of Web 2.0-style funky Ajax interfaces to see how they got on with things like dynamic search and asynchronous interactions – for that is what is what we are planning to do for the redesign.
Continue reading this entry »
Proof, If Proof Be Needed
Microsoft’s “fastest patch ever” is interesting:
If you really want to see Microsoft scramble to patch a hole in its software, don’t look to vulnerabilities that impact countless Internet Explorer users or give intruders control of thousands of Windows machines. Just crack Redmond’s DRM.
One of the more stunning conversations I’ve ever had with a work colleague about the software we use went along the following lines once:
Me: “Aaargh! Word’s so buggy, either that or so complex, this feels like a bug…! I hate Microsoft software!”
Them: “Well, if they weren’t the best, they wouldn’t be top of the heap, now would they?”
Me: “What? Are you nuts??”
Them: “No – I’m serious. Microsoft make the best software because that’s what everyone uses.”
Me: “Aaargh!”
It’s The Spammers – They’re In It With The Aliens!
The recent Sunday Times report(s) on keylogging got me thinking about why journos never examine the other dimension of the problem of keyloggers and security compromise: spam.
The Times basically took the start of the problem to be a mysterious process of “inadvertently downloading a Trojan” which then installs a keylogger, which then reports all your passwords and other interesting data to black hats in some faraway exotic place (like Swindon). After that, all hell breaks loose, and the journos in question (notably one Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas, more about whom later) had obviously had great fun finding numerous stories of innocent victims (including – shock – “IT professionals” who had taken “all precautions” to prevent it) having their savings stolen, computers crashed, etc. etc, ohmylordthisisterrible! You got the idea after about paragraph three of five thousand. The message was clear: we are all sitting ducks – you heard it here first!
Goodbye Drupal – Hello Wordpress
Welcome to a new Webtorque – now running Wordpress. Drupal had fallen victim to the vagaries of software versions. For the geeks: I was running Webtorque on Drupal 4.4.2 (the current version is 4.7.3). This web server runs Red Hat Enterprse v3.2, which has PHP 4.2.2. Red Hat will not move RHEL 3 to a higher version of PHP, and versions of Drupal later than 4.5.8 won’t run on anything lower than PHP 4.2.3. So – clang! I’d hit the upgrade buffers. Drupal had to go.
I must say Wordpress is – so far – much, much easier to configure than Drupal. It’s been a couple of years since I looked at blogging software, so things have progressed a bit, obviously.
Anyway, I need to remove lots of comment spam that got exported over into the database, and I’ll be sending people their new logins shortly.
Holiday Shorts & Godlike Pyjamas
We’ve been on holiday in Scotland for a bit of Edinburgh Festival, visiting relatives and – amazingly – very good weather while it threw it down in London.
I’ve had a cold, but am now better, and am thinking seriously about buying some Armor of God Pyjamas – not that the two are connected. Or are they? As an aside, there can’t be many ecommerce sites “salvation” as a link on the main navigation, and while greed is sin there seems to be nothing wrong with attempting to spamdex your title tags.
Being Rude About Alan Cooper
Alan Cooper: feted genius, father of Visual Basic and giant of user-centred design. Jonathan Baker-Bates: pitiful, microscopic nobody. But at least I’ve designed a few websites…
OpenOffice – Wasted Opportunity
One of Microsoft Word’s biggest time-wasting functions is auto-numbering. This feature is actually an option which (of course!) is turned on by default. Hardly anyone knows this though, so most people struggle needlessly as auto-numbering rudely kicks in when they start a paragraph with “1.” It then usually refuses to actually number the other lines properly according to what the user wants, or to stop numbering when they want it to; or re-starts not from 1, but from 5 next time, or whatever. The behaviour of auto-numbering is not in fact the bugfest that it appears to be. It’s just follows a logic too complex to actually understand.
So you’d think that the OpenOffice developers would see this, laugh, and either avoid it or implement something better. But no. This is a visual bug report (3.1Mb MPEG) of why the OpenOffice designers should not attempt to follow Microsoft’s “lead” here.
Weird World of Appraisals
One of the less wonderful things about working as a permanent employee for a company larger than a certain size, is that you have appraisals every six months. And every six months both you, your line manager, and anyone you care to talk to about the appraisal system agree wholeheartedly that the experience is awful. Having passed through several companies, each with their own interpretation of what makes a good appraisal, I have the somewhat dubious pleasure of being able to compare and contrast different systems. Having had my first appraisal at my new company today, here are my findings.
Technorati
After years of trying to remember to give Technorati a go, I’ve finally now remembered. They make you put a link to them on your blog in order to get your blog listed. And so, while trying to ignore the snobbishness of all this, I hereby post my Technorati Profile.
Question 1: A Search Engine Is…?
I’ve been attending a few of the many think-ins that the publishing industry, pressure groups and various other institutions have been having recently around the subject of The Internet and What Is Means For Us.
Sadly, these have been largely unnoteworthy, although my attendance at the IPPR event last night “The Long Tail: Opportunities in a New Marketplace?” threw up an example of what I hope is not a very wide misconception about Google and search engines in general.
‘Blogging “Pointless” Shocker
“I don’t think I’ve ranted here about what a pointless occupation ‘blogging is, nor why all ‘bloggers should be shot through the back of the head with a small bore rifle.”
And so it is with rich irony and customary pointlessness, on a blog that nobody reads (and I have the Google Analytics stats to prove it!), that I link to the indefatigable Richard Lockwood’s, er, ‘blog!
And thanks for the abbreviating apostrophe, if that’s what it is.
Stovepiping The Future
Any normal person will of course have heard nothing about the recent merger between LBIcon (business consulting, branding, communication and technology services) with Framfab (web marketing, design and production) into the largest digital design, marcomms, branding and technology firm in Europe. Indeed, the newly-merged entity will rival that of the super giants of Digitas, Omincom and others that currently graze among the lush forests of digital media in the States and Asia. This is surely a tectonic event.
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Handing Out Speeding Tickets At The Indie 500
I’m thinking of adding a new category of “copyfight” to this blog. There’s so much to write about!
Hot on the heels of the AllofMP3.com news comes more news that the BPI wants to sue them! This after Tiscali is made to take down its juke box service.
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What Price Pop (and classical)?
I made some online music purchases today from AllofMP3.com. This was mainly because if the USA has its way, then the site may be taken down in preparation for Russia’s entry into the WTO. If you’ve not been there before, AllofMP3 is everything you ever wanted from Internet age commerce: dirt cheap goods sold legally (according to Russian jurisdiction), massive choice and as a finishing touch, stunning typos. Not surprisingly, a whole album for a dollar (or any combination of tracks you like) has been making the RIAA and its international puppet organisation the IFPI see red. Ha!
Like The War On Terror, the copyfight claims the vast majority of its victims innocently, and those victims are predominantly overseas. Last week, it was the turn of a large number of perfectly legitimate Swedish small businesses to be taken off line in the name of copyright as the Pirate Bay’s servers were confiscated along with a number of totally unrelated ones. The site’s back up now (well, the tracker at least, the website seems to been somewhat patchy since) but the damage has been done – to the publishing industry. Even if the raid turns out not to have been illegal, which it seems to have been, then the number of registered users of the Bay are going to go through the roof as the oxygen of publicity fills its sails even more. We could be seeing the resignation of a Swedish minister or two perhaps.
Bush of Ghosts CC Reprise
As previously observed here, David Byrne and Brian Eno have not only recently re-released their My Life In the Bush of Ghosts album, but have also made all of the multitracks of two of the songs on the album free for re-mixing under a Creative Commons licence.
Things are getting really interesting in this area. Eno and Byrne are the first artists of significant stature to do this as far as I know. This is what I think it might lead to at some point.
Adminstrivia
An announcement from the management: I’m getting so much comment spam now I’m going to have to turn off the anonymous posting or I’ll start missing the real posts. If you want to post, please create an account.
I’m pretty sure this won’t matter since so few people read this blog anyway, and for those lovely people who have accounts – let me take this opportunity to say thanks.
AJAX and Use
No blog is complete without some stultifying post about AJAX or some other generally asynchronous thing. As a user of the damn stuff it’s beginning to get me riled, but at the risk of adding more guff to the pile, two points occurred to me with some clarity the other day. Firstly, that whenever somebody mentions AJAX out of any context not bound strictly to discussions of the DOM and that godforsaken XMLHttpRequest object etc. etc. they are really talking about rich Internet applications. Secondly, geeks like me that talk from either side of the end-user divide have their glasses steamed up too much to notice that what I think I’d like to call “non-paged interaction” has in fact been known and loved on the web for years.
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Even in Texas
I was in Dallas last week. It’s a big place – it has the second largest airport in the world in terms of square mileage. Even the city is so big it gives you a feeling that hardly anyone’s there. We went there to observe some user testing of a prototype I’d created, and to conduct some marathon meetings with the client. We discussed, amongst other things, the juicy subject of how we’re to engage with the build team, etc.
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Going to the Dogs
I love a good bit of historical perspective, and this Wired article is a good ‘un.
I must admit to being a bit worried about people playing sudoku though. All that mental effort… why?
New Essay Now On!
I commend you today to the “articles” section in the top right nav, where I humbly offer for your most worthy attention a treatise entitled “When the Internet is Gone.”
It’s a load of rubbish, obviously, but it was fun to write. I’ll tighten up the bit about fall of the Rupee a bit later maybe.
When the Internet is Gone
Recent events toward something collectively dubbed the “two-tier Internet” by journos have got me thinking about the future of the Internet again. Bear in mind Clay Shirky’s adage that whenever he thinks about what should happen, it prevents him from thinking about what will. The following is therefore not particularly considered against anything and is doubtless rooted in too many pre-conceptions, but what the hell. See what you think.
Thirst for Truth in Card Sorting
I know the phrase “card sorting” either baffles, bores or does something else beginning with ‘b’ to almost everyone that hears it. Perhaps the most vocal source of information and critique of card sorting techniques recently has been the force that is Maadmob’s Donna Maurer. I recently caught her attention on this subject via comments on the blog of another Australian IA, Leisa Reichelt.
Moving On
After two years at Framfab UK, my clutch engages on another gear shift in the cross-contry rally of life on Monday, when I start work at Wheel.
A few months ago, I decided I needed a change from Framfab, the company I joined (then called Oyster Partners) in 2004. This decision coincided with a phone call which led to a meeting, which led to a “dentist appointment” and then a job offer. Such is the pattern when you’re under permanent contract.
And so, after working a somewhat hectic notice period, I had a very nice sendoff last Friday. I was touched by the turnout for my little leaving do, my present and my very thoughtful card (masterminded by Miles Sampson, I’ve just found out) complete with ASCII art photo of myself, grinning. My boss, Vanessa Wolfe-Coote, had the great idea of asking everyone to send in a word or phrase they thought summed me up, which I’ve arranged as a spoof tag cloud for posterity and ego-massage (the text sizes are based on actual frequencies, and are not my own!)
Thanks again all, particularly those who have supported me in my work and my time at Framfab – it’s been very much appreciated. I’m sad to be leaving, but I needed a shake-up. Let’s just hope it doesn’t shake me down.
The Pleasure Principle
Music is like drugs – if you have a relationship with it at all it tends to be at its most intense when you’re young. But in common with most people of my age, I suppose I’ve drifted away from music as a passion to it being merely an occasional pastime. A CD on a Sunday afternoon, some backing music to a kids party… I feel this does most of what I like a huge injustice (and Axel’s friends must be amongst very few toddlers who have played pass the parcel to Killing Joke’s Democracy). I certainly don’t play music any more (well, I was a drummer that couldn’t drive and didn’t own a van – my days in bands were numbered). And in the past five years, it’s all fallen victim to the Three Hour Tyranny.
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Now That’s What I Call Art
I have a rather sixth-form attitude to art. Something is art if a) I could not have thought of it myself (a standard that gets lower as I get older) b) it works on numerous levels and c) it says something to me or asks me questions I can’t answer, but I try to anyway, and fail. Crucifix NG gets a perfect ten on those things. If I had to pick out one aspect of this that fascinates me most: it’s made by a faith-based based organisation, yet has clearly aethiest implications. Like John Peel used to say – I’m glad I lived long enough to have seen it.
UK Government Copyright Must End
The absurdity of UK government agencies having to sell data back the very tax payers that paid for it has been going on ever since I was a lad. I’ve always regarded it as another one of the breathtakingly stupid things the Thatcher government did that, once done, could not be un-done. Like football hooliganism, chaotic public transport and the poll (now council) tax.
But the Grauniad’s now come up with an interesting angle – and a campaign no less – that holds out the possibility of change.
(By the way, I love that Guardian Technology masthead with the picture of Admiral Tojo wearing 3D glasses on it. It’s a classic.)
Social Software, Politics and Getting it Right
About once every six months or so, somebody on the otherwise excellent SIGIA mailing list posts to say they think there are too many “off topic” posts. This is invariably couched in some painfully lame justification – in this case appealing to us to “respect others” – but more usually assuming the mantle of “the silent majority” or some other hogwash. Naturally, I reminded them in my customarily restrained manner that they were idiots. Nobody took any notice.
Vanity Tracking
Somebody must be reading this blog. At least, I’ve now had postings and email on subjects as diverse as copyright, software and public speaking. I’ve even had to remove a posting after somebody complained! Surely it can’t get much better than that.
I’m also particularly impressed that not one but two staggeringly famous multi-millionaire media and marketing liminaries have swung in from the ether in the last few months to ask my opinion on things (OK that’s not exactly true, but I’ve been flattered that I caught their attention). Hooray for the Internet! It does wonders for the ego.
But how much traffic am I actually getting? The fact that after well over a year on line, Webtorque has yet to receive its first Adsense cheque leads me to suspect not much. So it’s time to deploy Google Analytics I think. In fact, why didn’t I think of that in the first place?
Seth Godin to Google
I don’t write much about marketing, because I usually regard myself as somebody who designs systems for people, not profit. But lately I’ve been re-examining this because it’s hard to ignore Seth Godin.
I watched Godin’s talk to Google this evening. In the past I’ve always regarded him as a bit of a marketing smoothie: how can the writer of Permission Marketing be anything else? But his talk has me thinking about that in a different way.
You probably won’t have the time to watch it. He’s an average speaker; par for the course in an age of lacklustre oratory, but he puts his points well.
Bearing in mind he’s talking about Google, the main thing that struck me was his propostion that Google’s morass of “beta” ideas can be knitted together by obtaining permission from users already familiar with the brand to seek out and market those ideas to others as long as they solve somebody’s problem. It’s not a new idea per se (and I note he makes no use of the word “viral”), but put it into the context of a large and creatively explosive corporation like Google and it takes on a different hue. Port that to Apple (yes, that works too…), then why not IBM, or even (gasp) Microsoft?
Certainly harder to work out off line, which makes me glad I’ve never been interested in DM…
i-mode in the UK?
I suddenly recalled some billboard ads for O2’s i-mode launch last year and wondered: where’s the beef? I’ve been shopping around for a new handset and contract recently and don’t recall a single mention of i-mode on any of the spec sheets I’ve been reading. Maybe I’m not looking in the right price-bracket?
i-mode has been massive in Japan, thanks largely to the near monopoly that NTT DoCoMo enjoys out there. Coincidentally, as I write this I read that Vodafone has decided to pull out of Japan completely – although it’s no surprise after reports of them apparently just importing their European approach unmodified.
i-mode has also been a flexible enough platform to accomodate some pretty amazing social trends in mobile comms use out there. Examples of this being nearly ubiquitous email and personal i-Mode sites, the latter next to impossible here with WAP and most networks’ stupid walled garden policies. The former is crippled by per-kilobyte charging. So it’s not surprising that somebody has tried to push i-mode here in little ol’ Europe. But you’d think they would have tried a little harder. A prize to the first person to spot significant upsell on i-Mode in a CarPhone Warehouse near you.
Slightly Ironic Burroughs Quotation Farce
At the beginning of the month, I posted a comment on one of Framfab’s public blog postings. It was, as usual, rather spur of the moment, in between coffee and the next round of application testing we’re doing. In it, I clipped some text I found around a quote from Naked Lunch that I was looking for. I originally just wanted the quote, but the text I found around it served my point rather well. I should have attributed it, but what happened next was interesting.
Barnes Tilney
I heard today that somebody I knew at Oyster Partners died a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t really know him, but I’d like to write something about him. I don’t know if this is the done thing or not – I hope his family and friends will excuse me. His name was Barnes Tilney.
I spoke to Barns a number of times, and was present when he spoke to others. He struck me as an amusing, sharp and thoughtful person. I don’t know how long he had had lukemia, but you wouldn’t have noticed that anything was wrong before he went on extended leave early last year to do battle with the disease that defeated him.
After he left, I inherited his documentation for the first iteration of the project I am now working. It may sound somewhat odd, but when you read detailed documentation on something in order fully to understand it, you also come to understand something about the writer’s mind. It’s not as rich as a novel, or a poem, but it has elements of those. You come to know what they think is important, and how they choose to express things. I was impressed by Barnes’s expressive ability, and his courage in taking approaches that I would have shrunk from.
I don’t want this to read like an obituary, because it can’t be one. I hope that somebody who knew him will write that. But death reminds me that I have yet to accept death for myself, and that, selfishly, is why I want to remember him because I hope others might remember me in a similar way.
Barnes did a good job. I hope I will too.
The Biggest Threat is Obscurity
I went to see Cory Doctorow and others on a panel organised by Free Culture UK last night. The subject was “Open Content” – a moniker given to the concept of digitisable works of either art or craft distributed under an alternative copyright licence (such as Creative Commons). Inevitably, a lot of ground was covered by the speakers, and one of the hottest topics of the evening was the recently-launched BBC’s Open Archive project. I wasn’t actually aware that they’d launched, but it sounds evil.
6 Seconds in 1969
I’d been only dimly aware of the “Amen Break” drum sample until now, although the sound, if not the rhythm itself is instantly recognisable. However, this video (34Mb MOV) puts the use of the sample into its fascinating social context. Anyone interested in music, popular culture and particularly the effects of recent copyright legislation, should see this. I get spammed by Zero-G every now and again as well. Bastards. Makes me want to download some Squarepusher to up the ante.
Shamisen Trouble
Somebody at work was asking what they might be able to buy in Japan for £100-200 as a birthday gift. Gagetry of various types was suggested, but I chipped in the idea that for that money they could get a reasonable shamisen. At least, that’s what some friends bought me for my birthday once and I’ve always counted it as one of my prized possessions. It’s a wonder of wooden engineering: collapsible into a small case a bit bigger than a shoebox, and wonderfully made. Kumi doesn’t like Japanese stuff lying about, so the days when it was propped up casually next to the Bang & Olufsen are long gone.
A Month is a Long Time
Blimey. You take your eye of your blog and what happens? More than a month goes by and you’ve not done a thing with it. I had an excuse: a pathetic new year’s resolution to only blog about positive things. And lo, I could think of nothing.
But I’m not going to completely throw that out with the Christmas tree, because one of the undoubtedly good things that’s happend recently is Framfab’s blog.
Framfab, you may recall, is the company I work for. Yes, they have a stupid name. Their new site (launched at the same time as the blog) is, er, framfabulous, but their decision to incorporate an employee blog is outstanding.
Just in case you’re thinking “well heavily censored, obviously,” I can tell you that it isn’t. While employees have to ask for a login to post (but not comment – that’s completely open), anyone can get one. Once you’re in, you can post anything you want – there is no editorial process, and best of all, you can decide to make the post appear on the public web site if you want. There’s currently about a 5:1 ratio of public to private posts but I expect that to get better. While comments from outside are also turned on, I don’t think we’ve had any yet. Things are going to get interesting if punters start getting in on the act. Hell, we might even get Tom Cruise!
There have been some calls to impose an editorial gateway, if only for client confidentiality and the “Chinese wall” policy we have to adopt sometimes, but it looks like we’ll cross that bride when it comes to it. There’s also the knowledge that only a hard core of employees will post, while the rest will lurk and feel it’s not for them. Online “communities” are strange beasts, not much has changed since the days of Wildcat, fido and usenet on that score.
But for now though, I’m positive! The Cluetrain’s a-coming to Framfab!
2006 – A New Leaf, etc.
The holidays now over, and even the first week at work done, I can now return to some good ol’ blogging now that we’ve bought a new car, almost tidied up our files (well, my files anyway – Kumi still just chucks all her papers under her desk and mumbles shoganai…) and packed up the plastic Xmas tree.
My new year’s resolution (on my blog at any rate) is to think about more positive things. Too many of last year’s posts were cynical, negative rants. Writing about happy, nice things sure is going to be as dull as ditchwater but I’m going to make a fist of it. I’ve got a backlog of blog posts from the holidays, but they’ll almost all negative: AOL’s new ad campaign, the EU data retention directive, etc. etc. It’s going to be hard for me to resist writing about them at some point. But in a nice way. With an upbeat ending or something.
Impulse Blog!
It’s the new football! It’s the new rock and roll! It’s impulse blogging!
Impulse blogging (my italics, to increase the hype) is the new craze coming straight out of North Finchley’s finest blog. Like all great ideas, it starts off all complicated and difficult to grasp, then suddenly reveals itself to be so simple that even a five-year-old could blah blah blah, and probably has. Here’s how impulse blogging works:
I sit down at my computer with an intention to blog about something, but without any idea of what it’s actually going to be about. I fire up my trusty blog form, and purposefully ignore all the metadata fields that appear below the title (I don’t yet know what it’s going to be about, see). As the i-beam winks invitingly at row 0 col 0, I then go into a sort of new-media induced trance where the experience of the net wafts through my mind in a William Gibson-esque sort of way until something bumps into conciousness. In fact it’s a lot like being a Guild Navigator I suspect: looking for paths into and though the blogosphere, only in my case it’s fuelled by a combination of coffee and lack of proper sleep.
So what gems has this technique produced? Well, er, none so far, but I’m sure you’ll know when it does.
Gray Day Protest Download
I’m always late in on things, and this is no exception. But I’ve just put up a Shoutcast stream of the American Edit mashup tracks. First time I’ve done this, so hope it works. For a day or so anyway…
Ubuntu Linux for Me
Well I finally did it. I had no particular stimulus other than me being on holiday and saw a Slashdot post about a recent review of Linux distros for the desktop. They’d rated Ubuntu highest, so I went along to distrowatch.com and did some reading up. After downloading and burning the (single) ISO, I’m now running it. I always find descriptions of Windows to Linux migrations pretty boring, so I’ll lay off the details about how I got my printer working, etc. but after about 48 hours hacking about, I’ve now got almost everything I need and Windows seems long gone.
fool.co.uk
I’ve just posted a rant on www.fool.co.uk about their awful site design. Hm. Feel a bit guilty. A bit soiled to be honest… I actually think the site’s content is fantastic. But the form of that content really, really stinks. The last straw was their announcement of some forthcoming “layout changes” which (I assume) have now gone live. In classic 1995 style, they’ve just made things worse. The site needs major surgery.
I can imagine what it must be to work on the design of TMF though – assuming somebody does design it. Getting second-class treatment from their parent company in the States, probably. Lumbered with godawful in-house development (the site search! the forums!); tied up in knots by internal fiefdoms and big advertisers calling the shots – it’s all so obvious when you look at it. Poor bastards.
Still, I’ve got some great info there, and even bought some of the products their advertisers are selling (although I transferred my L&G ISA to Fidelity today). Let’s hope thing get better on the usability side. Getting much worse would be pretty much impossible. Hey – maybe they’ll gizzajob?
From Little Acorns
Of course it’s too early to say, but I’d like to think that this is the beginning of the end for the music publishing industry. The terrible signal: too weak to even recognise…
Unless you’re Madonna, Coldplay or U2, chances are that you’re not going to make money selling records.
So let’s try something different here.
Words and Pictures
I just spend my life specifying stuff. There’s just no time for anything else. Creativity, research, even design (always an afterthought…) is pretty much a covert activity when you’ve got the offshore crews to keep happy. But once in a while I feel I’ve made some headway somewhere, however microscopic.
When it comes to specifications, the adage that “a picture is worth a thousand words” will pretty much lead you to failure. For a long time I thought that wasn’t the case. Perhaps, I thought, the confusion that arises in creating and interpreting graphic “deliverables” is due to my inexperience. But after I while I began to suspect something was up…
On my current project I’m over that hill – indeed I’ve probably swung right over the top and down the other side, which will be just as bad. But while I’m in my fool’s paradise, here’s a couple of tales from my current coalface (screenshots cropped for confidentiality):
We’ve been worrying about workflow recently. What will the user be able to do when, and how do things get shunted back and forth within the system and by what rules? So we convene a workshop with the client. I spend some time (rather a lot of time) drawing a nice-looking “content lifecycle” wheel. A thing of beauty: the content starts in one state, then moves around the wheel as various events take place to change its state. I draw some arrows in one direction. I draw some others in another (to balance them out). What could be simpler? Some other arrows come in to the wheel… some others go out. We book our tech lead in on the workshop just to be safe though.
To cut a long story short, “the wheel” ends up crippling our analysis of the system. The tech lead half-seriously complains that it’s not a state-transition diagram, but we shout him down – the boring bastard. Four hours later, we all think we’ve thrashed out the details. A week later, we realise we haven’t. Had the wheel been a state-transition we might have got to that point sooner as it would have forced us to think straight rather than being distracted by geometric eye-candy. One of the guys in Poland freely admits he did not understand the wheel “at all.” A bit extreme, but I think he really meant it.
Then another reminder. The Mumbai Massive (never the most explicit communicators on the project) have been having problems with the specs we dusted off from last year regarding the way some tools in the application are supposed to work. The approach my predecessor took was rather graphically inclined. It seems, however, that this (in hindsight) grossly over-specified minute interactions at the expense of the stuff they really wanted to know. Worse, because it was 80% pictorial, there were no words or annotations to latch on to until I added some. No “… on line three it says…” hooks, or “… chapter 12 mentions…” starters. Just mute diagrams that I’d attempted to “fix” by slapping some apologetic text around them.
So I decided to turn it inside out. Relegate the graphics to a token, then write it down in words. Bingo, they go away and build it.
I’m not saying this was the best spec in the world (in fact all my specs are pretty awful), but it was better for the purpose to which it needed to be put. And it took me about ten minutes, which is about six times less then I think anyone armed with Freehand and a head full of pictures would have taken.
My moral for this is “When in doubt, use words.”
AIMBots to Miss
When you consider that IRC, chatbots, and whole instant messaging thing is now ten years old or more, then you’d think that AOL would at least get their new “AIMbot” adbot system out of the door without it being so utterly useless. But no.
Who am I kidding? AOL, the worst ISP that has ever been, and will ever be, in the history of the world: purveyors of the most frantically confusing user experiences I have ever had, on line or off (yes, worse than Compuserve before AOL bought them) – why would I even give them the time of day? I suppose it’s because they are inexplicably huge and for whatever reason, people I know use AIM. So I use Trillian.
So I, and presumably millions of others, got a little message up on my AIM channel inviting me add one of their AIMbots to my “buddy list” (shudder) the other day. Well, hey, I thought, it might be worth investigating. Well, in comically bad style – it wasn’t.
Sony Subverts Your PC, Then Lies About It, Then…
Wow. Sony BMG sure is having a bad, bad November. But this doesn’t really surprise me. Desperate times for music publishers will lead to increasingly desperate measures. It’s all part of the big flip. What did you do in the copyfight, Daddy?
Getting Users to Complain
As luck would have it, my Internet connection went down yesterday. That’s not exactly a disaster because the only thing I could muster for World Usability Day (yesterday) was this:
This is the password input screen for my online SIPP account. Part of me is glad it looks cheap, because it confirms that I’m not paying them to pay someone like me to design a fancy system. That said, I thought it was sufficiently novel example of a usecrime in progress to warrant a blog note.
I get my password wrong, and after the customary blurb, it then says:
“To hide these error messages, click on the Hide Errors button.”
This is an interesting innovation in forms design. Firstly, WHY would you want to hide the error messages (”these errors”)? If I click on the button to hide them, and get my password wrong again, does it mean that I won’t see any more errors? In fact, clicking the button does exactly what it says. It makes the error message (and the button) go away and nothing else is affected. I can then put my password in again as if nothing had happened. But what possible value is there is being able to hide the message first?
This goes to the heart of the whole “value in IA” debate. The user can’t do anything else on this screen apart from close the window or get the password wrong again, neither of which is catastrophic. So who cares about some weird thing about dismissing error messages?
The answer of course is that non-sensical, non-standard behaviour, no matter how easy it is for the user to recover afterwards, has a cumulatively negative effect. It sows the seeds of doubt: if they get this wrong, what else is going wrong that I *can’t* see? It frustrates: maybe it’s me getting it wrong, maybe it’s them, how do I know if this is significant? The cumulative effect of all this mental noise corrodes the experience of using the system (which in this case is depressingly clunky after you log in as well).
I wonder if the directors or shareholders of this company have ever used this system? If they have, they probably shrugged off the “hide error message” button as just some web flotsam. A bit like the “mono” button on an amplifier perhaps, or the “scroll lock” key on their keyboard. In any case, the problem is for users to recognise bad usability for what it is. Being confused by an interface, or worried about what to do with one, should be worth complaining about.
So it occurs to me that the organisers of World Usability Day have missed a trick. What we need is a campaign aimed at encouraging users to complain about bad usability. Make people confident enough to recognise it as being something they need to complain about – like potholes in the road, bad smells, or noisy neighbours.
The Pen Is Mightier Than The Mouse
I’ve always thought that everyone should nurse at least one heresy, and mine is that visual communications of complex ideas are almost always a load of cock. In the field of IA, this is most noticeable in the production of sitemaps, but it can be just as bankrupt for other artefacts as well.
Here’s an example that flashed by me on my current project recently. Part of the design of an application called for the description of a “select tool” – much the same as the tool you have in most graphics packages. The designer had chosen to communicate the tool’s behaviour graphically. Like this:
xxx
I could tell by the sheer amount of cognitive noise that page generated in my head that this was going to be a pretty confusing communication for the off-shore developers. Sure, they’d get it eventually, I thought, but it was hardly going to be easy.
In order not to offend the creator of the diagram, I let it pass. A few weeks later, when we saw the first release of the software, it was apparent they’d not got the whole message. So for the next iteration, I removed the offending page and replaced it with this:
xxx
This took me about ten minutes and in my opinion is pretty much unambiguous. The software works as intended as well. Which is nice.
FireWord!
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been trying to find a better way of documenting designs. I’ve posted about this before, and I still think that Axure looks promising, but most of my IA life’s been based around Visio, some occasional PowerPoint – and on joining Oyster/Framfab – FreehandMX. None of these tools has really baked my cake when it comes to combining text with annotated graphics though. This is a shame because that’s what I’ve been doing a hell of a lot of in the last couple of years. However, after a chance realisation abut MS Word a couple of months ago, the arrival of a Fireworks guru on my project and some good teamwork, things are looking up and I want to tell you about it.
Word can display PNGs. Fireworks’s native file format is PNG. This means that two great tastes can taste great together: use Fireworks to create your wireframes and other graphics (and turn ‘em into symbols and do other wonderful things); use Word to link to the Fireworks PNGs. Annotate them, cross-references them, index them, paginate them to your heart’s content – print them out as booklets and navigate around them with the document map (if you have Office XP). Your documents are instantly more usable, less error-prone and generally work better for both readers and writers.
How We Did It
Having inherited a bunch of Freehand wireframes for the first iteration of my current project, we had to convert the files to Fireworks first. Somewhat cheekily, we enlisted the help of a couple of interns for most of this while we worked on producing a Word template to wrap the resulting PNGs. Each Freehand page was converted to a single PNG file and named according to its wireframe reference. We also created another couple of files to store symbols to link to (for re-usable objects – one of the many things that Fireworks does so much better than Freehand).
After some experimentation with the Word template, we were keen to keep it as simple as possible. No larding up with tables, sectional formatting or auto-numbering. If you don’t play Word’s little games, it will complain.
Then we began, and it was good. The initial copy/paste fest from the annotations in Freehand was a pain, but gradually the daylight dawned. Putting each wireframe image in a table on a single page means we have plenty of room to design large pages (printing on A3 if needed). Numbered call-outs on the linked image are slightly klunky to position, but you get used to it. We then have the text for the annotations on the next page. Simple and easy. One of us said they thought Word’s “document map” feature alone was worth the price of conversion from Freehand. No more scroll/zoom hell to find the page you want! No more fretting about text positioning or annotations running over pages; you can re-order sections with a flip of the outliner… the list of joy compared to Freehand (or Visio for that matter) seems endless. ALT+Tab-ing between Fireworks and Word makes it feel almost like one application. An “update links” button the menu bar gives you the latest versions of your graphics to play with.
Fireworks, meanwhile, is better than Freehand for wireframe graphics in many ways. Better symbol handling, better control over things, pretty much better everything. Our only concern was that it being web-orientated, its 72dpi graphics look a bit fuzzy on the printed page. But that’s not turned out to be problem.
Problems So Far
- For a 30-year old piece of software, you’d think Word would have a lot fewer bugs than it has. Thank the flatulent monopoly that is Microsoft for that I suppose. As long as we eschew the more exotic features of Word, we should be OK. One of these bugs is that the links to the images (kept in subdirectories beneath the Word doc) sometimes mysteriously change their paths, but it’s not a big issue as they can be re-made quite easily.
- Making PDFs (with Acrobat 7) sometimes takes a couple of goes before all the images turn up. Not sure why. PDF Maker preserves the clickable cross-references (and table of contents links) though, which makes up for this.
- It’s tempting to break up the document into pieces (using Word’s “master document” feature) so as to make them more multi-user, but we’ve been warned that this will almost certainly lead to corruption. We’re using SourceSafe to keep things ship shape with three of us maintaining two Word documents which currently link to about sixty images between them.
- With wireframes on one page, and annotations on the other, the documents are getting rather long.
Despite these issues, I for one am hooked. There is no way I am going to go back to using Visio, let alone Freehand. Long live FireWord! Well, until Axure gets serious, anyway.
Business Methods Patents
Incredible, amazing and funny as hell! US business-methods patents (and the people who pay money to bring them to the USTPO) just took another leap further into surreality – with Cereality!
Cereality has patents pending to give them an exclusive right to six business methods, including "displaying and mixing competitively branded food products" and adding "a third portion of liquid." If these patents are approved by the U.S. Patent Office, Cereality would have a complete monopoly on cereal bar business.
Meanwhile, and playing for somewhat higher stakes, NTP and RIM are still slugging it out. I don’t know who’s the slimier, but I do know that if suits can’t use their Blackberries, things are gonna get ugly.
Licence Agreement Analyser!
When I was doing some user testing for A Very Large Company That Shall Remain Nameless, one of the questions we were asked to ask of the users was what, if anything, they thought about the fact that there was not one, but three terms of use links on the sign-up page to their service. Not surprisingly, just about all users said they wouldn’t even click on the links, let alone read the contents of them. One user was honest enough to say that even if they did try to read them, they would have neither the stamina nor the capacity to understand them.
End user licence agreements are one of the great blots on web and software user experience. They erode trust, engender suspicion and generally fart in the face of a good time. What’s even worse is that contrary to what most people hope is the case, most of these EULAs in fact completely unfair, and usually a lot worse than you might think. It’s only because nobody reads them that this isn’t commonly understood.
Hooray, then for the EULAlyzer, free software that auto-magically highlights the fine print that will get you in trouble. Here it is giving me the low-down on Sony Picture’s privacy policy.
The Twenty-Five Million Dollar Man
Having spent three days writing one of the most rigorous and boring five-page documents of my life this week (a “Summary of Business Rules”), I decided that nobody was going to read the thing unless I could promise it to contain hidden Jane Austen references. This, I thought, would endear me to my classically-minded colleagues while turning them on to the finest points of whether hiding a shared Page transfers medico-legal responsibility to the Pathway. So I spent another few hours working in references to Sense and Sensibility while pretending to work on wireframes.
Flush with having achieved my aim, but exhausted at all the covert effort, I sent out a triumphant email to the said colleagues before leaving my desk and walking into the night – only to realise I’d spelt the name of the most famous female English novelist “Jane Austin.”
So perhaps I meant a sister of Steve, the Six Million Dollar Man.
If I had, then it’s interesting to note that when the first episode of that TV series was broadcast in 1973, $6,000,000 was worth the following in 2003:
$24,865,988.70 using the Consumer Price Index
$20,026,833.11 using the GDP deflator
$24,171,043.39 using the unskilled wage
$34,768,273.33 using the GDP per capita
$47,607,724.02 using the relative share of GDP
(Source www.eh.net/hmit/compare)
This I think gives a better idea of the impact of the title at the time, and lends more weight my earlier point about the meaning of words.
“In spite of the answer, therefore, she ordered the carriage, and drove to Mrs Bates’s, in the hope that Jane would be induced to join her — but it would not do; — Miss Bates came to the carriage door, all gratitude, and agreeing with her most earnestly in thinking an airing might be of the greatest service — and every thing that message could do was tried — but all in vain.
Men In Black – The Conspiracy
Coming home from work seems to be a time when I can think slightly creatively. This is a pity, since I’m paid to do that while I’m at work, but the sheer cacophony and chaos of the office I work in kills that stone dead about 20 mins after the morning coffee. Today, for instance, somebody’s PC fan started running in emergency cooling mode. This, combined with the telephones, keyboard tapping, seemingly constant car alarms and the (yes) children’s’ playground outside, made it feel like we were all riding a Boeing 747 to hell. None of us did anything about it of course, and least of all IT. If I were managing a company that supposedly traded on creative thinking, I’d… oh, never mind.
Now I’ve got the griping over with, my theme today is conspiracy cookery. All good conspiracies have to start somewhere then obtain a life of their own. So, let’s get cracking.
It occurs to me that there is something strange surrounding the Hollywood blockbuster “The Men In Black.” As far back as 1947, a phenomenon known as the “men in black” has been reported as collateral evidence around UFO sightings, and in particular, landings and abductions. One of the most interesting accounts of these men is given in 1976 by Dr Herbert Hopkins, an American psychiatrist. Hokpins had no previous link with this field, except that he had been treating a youth who claimed to have been abducted by aliens.
I was alone in the house. The telephone rang and the voice on the other end identified itself
as a member of a New Jersey UFO research organization. I agreed that he could talk with me about
the abduction case. He said that he would be right over. I walked from the telephone in the hallway
to turn on a light and the man was already coming up the stairs. If he was as close as across the
street, or even next door, he couldn’t have possibly gotten here so soon. His attire struck me as
a little odd. He wore a neatly tailored black suit, black shoes, black socks, and a black tie.
He also wore a black Derby. I thought, ‘God, this man looks like an undertaker.’ We sat down and
I said to myself, ‘This character is as bald as an egg.’ He didn’t have any eyebrows or eyelashes
and his skin was a dead white colour. His nose was very small and it came down to just above the
upper lip. His lips were ruby red. He had the appearance of a clothing store dummy. His sump
looked as if it had never been worn before. … I got a little uneasy when he ordered me to destroy
the tapes and any other correspondence and anything to do with UFOs. He said that if I didn’t
do so I would suffer the same fate as Barney Hill” [a renowned 'contactee' who had died under
mysterious circumstances].
The Sony Pictures film is a trashy comedy that became very popular. But what better way to bury the truth about the Men than by getting Hollywood to make a comedy about them? Any subsequent reference to the real men in black will now only be met with laughter, and even serious examination will be tainted by the suspicion that the reporter is merely “projecting” ideas in the film. Has this particularly Orwellian technique been successfully applied?
Link Candy Mountain
In an effort to make a visual change around here, I thought I’d start a collection of links to stuff in my new “Links” section on the right hand side. In true 1995 style, I’ve just saved the images out of a couple of sites. So say konnichiwa to Magnatune (and while you’re at it Brad Sucks), as well as the blog of my mate Kaoru – without whom none of this would be possible (probably).
Update: I’m now being a little more sophisticated, having just discovered www.bannerart.org.
19 Professors and the Music Business
Canadian law professors have produced a 600-page book that is being made freely available under a creative commons license in which they make the point that “The public’s interest in copyright, something inconceivable even a few years ago, is the result of the remarkable confluence of computing power, the Internet, and a plethora of new software programs, all of which has not only enabled millions to create their own songs, movies, photos, art, and software but has also allowed them to efficiently distribute their creations electronically without the need for traditional distribution systems”
Apart from the use of the word “plethora” (can we stop using that word now, please?), that sums up the present situation nicely. A couple of weeks ago I posted on Slashdot about this. The “music business” today puts the publisher first before the producer. I’d like to see the musicians having the upper hand, and the listeners literally calling the tunes.
With the Internet performing the role of publisher via search, collaborative filtering and other mechanisms, close to 100% of the money from the purchase of music can go to the artist. Right now, the mechanisms for this (PayPal and, er, PayPal) are in their infancy, but when they mature, musicians will be able to pay accountants, employees, PR, caterers, drug dealers, etc. in the same way as other businesses pay their service providers (accountants, employees, PR, caterers, drug dealers, etc.). They might even like to try some DRM if they want, and see what that’s like ;-)
The record companies aren’t going to go without a fight, but the vast majority of artists earn tiny amounts from their contacts with publishers. How long now until the big flip? I think it’s pretty clear which way the wind’s blowing. Britney Spears: your days are numbered.
But just in case you thought this was a typically misty-eyed Webtorque post, I’m worried about the future after that. With the invisible hand in charge, what will happen? We’ve almost no historical precedent to go on, but what we have looks ominous
:
The one incoherent view is the belief that a free and diverse media will naturally tend towards equality. The development of weblogs in their first five years demonstrates that is not always true, and gives us reason to suspect it may never be true. Equality can only be guaranteed by limiting either diversity or freedom.
UK-Design: Another Cracker!
Not as cerebral as last time, but just as amusing: the UK’s oddest design-geek mailing list crackles back into life this week and sees me encountering one Neil Gibb: ex-Oyster honcho, CV-flinging new media giant and free-thinker. A little too free, in fact…
It’s a great pity Chinwag are too baffled by their own technology to work out how to archive their lists, so here are some edited highlights from last week:
It’s starts sleepily enough, with a thread called “Design” and the usual stuff about skills and cross-discipline.
> -----Original Message----- > From: Ven Ganeva > Sent: 18 September 2005 20:18 > To: Jonathan > Subject: Re: Design > > Should designers even try being techies? Good question and one I am trying to work out myself! Being quite young, I still have a lot to learn about the industry and I welcome people’s opinions on this. .... What I can’t understand is where you draw the line, who is responsible for what? I know that if I focused on just designing I could learn a lot more about css and maybe if I focused on developing I would know how to optimise my code. Some days I hear people telling me “you can’t be a jack of all trades - your either a designer or a develop”. Other days I hear “you have the potential to be earning millions as you can do a 2 man job”… so who do I believe? How exactly does it work?
I then reply in a suitably patronisingly-styled fatherly manner about how all this cross-disciplined stuff is a
red-herring. If you’re into design as a career, then don’t try to mix it beyond an overview of the basics.
But then, a man calling himself “Neil Gibb” top-posts himself into my consciousness with a puzzling reply:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brett Patterson
> Sent: 20 September 2005 10:11
> To: Jonathan
> Subject: Re: Design
>
{fixing his top-posting here}
>>On the role of the designer... Coming from product
>>and transportation design
>>I always get a bit confused when there's a
>>discussion about the role of the
>>designer and nobody is actually giving that role a
>>specific name.. such as
>>'web designer' or developer whatever. Isnt it a bit
>>vague?
Perhaps there are two things: How you classify
yourself, and what you are employed to do. Designer to
me is a mindset and it includes everyone from software
designers to set designers.
A good honest webdesigner in this day and age most
likely makes banners, microsites and upgrades to
existing websites.
If they are lucky and more imganative in mindset you
get to do rich media stuff which blurs movies with
interaction.
If they are more analytical and 'IA' in mindset then
the world of mobile beckons.
Having spent a lot of time on organisational change
projects surrounding Intranets and Content managed
websites rescently I can see what happens when design
isn't in a process (it is a disaster). Likewise I look
at a lot of the front end upgrades of large corpoare
websites and think: what you are doin' aint design.
It's maintenance.
His choice of language indicates he has some experience, but he says webdesigners make banners, microsites and
upgrades. He comes out with the Next Big Thing mantra, and after saying he’s worked on lots of
“organaisational change projects” then kicks himself in the nuts with a feeble observation about large
corporates. Who is this guy? I give him the benefit of the doubt: he’s a young, top-posting, rather delusioned, but
probably nice bloke.
So I say so:
> -----Original Message----- > From: Jonathan Baker-Bates > Sent: 20 September 2005 23:26 > To: Jonathan > Subject: Re: Design > >> Perhaps there are two things: How you classify >> yourself, and what you are employed to do. Designer to >> me is a mindset and it includes everyone from software >> designers to set designers. >> That's the first properly insightful thing anyone's said on this thread and I'd certainly agree with it. >> A good honest webdesigner in this day and age most >> likely makes banners, microsites and upgrades to >> existing websites. >> I don't wish to offend, but you're describing a role that's a hybrid, and its one that exists around the foothills of the industry. If you're interested in career progression, I think you need to adjust your view of what a "webdesigner" is or you'll wake up knocking 40 with a CV full of not much. I'm taking a guess that you're quite young. If I'm right, then you can afford to perform this role for a short while (and it's certainly good to get a general overview of the processes early on), but you need to decide what you are, and develop the skills that sell in the long term. As I said in my last post: these skills aren't mysterious, but they are *not* mixed. > If they are more analytical and 'IA' in mindset then > the world of mobile beckons. That's an interesting statement. Could you explain why you think that's the case? >> Likewise I look >> at a lot of the front end upgrades of large corpoare >> websites and think: what you are doin' aint design. >> It's maintenance. >> And you'd be right! But I'm can't tell whether you're being admirably idealistic here, or just hopelessly naive.
Kerching! Young? Me? CV? Cancel that shortbread – Ijustcantstanditanymore!
> -----Original Message----- > From: Neil Gibb > Sent: 21 September 2005 11:46 > To: Jonathan > Subject: Re: Design > I am 41, and tend to live in the present. But since you mention it: I set up the first formal IA function in the UK in the mid nineties (falling out of Siegel Gale's ground breaking 'Information Gesign Group'), won the DBA award for leading the design team that built best corporate website in 1999 (for shell.com - this was cited in 'No Logo'), was head hunted by Clement Mok's Studio Archetype, and among other things was one of three Directors who built Sapient's User Experience team in the UK (from 3 to 150 between 1999 and 2001). I have been a Director at Sapient and Scient and interim manager at Agency.com and Oyster. I also planned and created the user experience team that created OPODO.com among dozens of large design and builds. I have written on digital design for Creative Review, been profiled in Revolution, and invited by the likes of BBC, BT, Orange and Wannado to talk to their design teams about the future of digital design and communications. My last statement comes from working as a consultant with BT, Orange, Honda and a lot of government departments in the last few years - and have seen where the bulk (and that is the keyword here) of the work is. So my CV is OK, although still lots more I want to get on it. Not blowing my trumpet... it's just another thing about being a designer is to research the context. Otherwise you make assumptions about your audience. You might be 'right' about the foothills. But what I note is there aren't many unclimbed mountains out there at the moment, but lots of little bumps.
But that’s not all! In a separate pre-lunch mail, his ego starts to soar like an eagle:
> -----Original Message----- > From: Neil Gibb > Sent: 21 September 2005 12:03 > To: Jonathan > Subject: Re: Design > > "That's an interesting statement. Could you explain > why you think that's the case?" You are an IA/EA whatever you call yourself, so go figure. But if you haven't noticed that the edge of design innovation has moved away from 'websites' to iTV, intergrated experiences, gaming and most crucially mobile in the digital domain, and bigger societal issues elsewhere (eg. http://www.massivechange.com/) then you are falling behind the game. I was with some of Motorola's team who have designed the new iTunes phone recently, and trust me: THAT is where the action is; the real interaction challenges (and it is such a sweet solution they have come up with... buy one, they are really nice).
Capital! The man’s fair game! But first, start softly…
> -----Original Message----- > From: Jonathan Baker-Bates > Sent: 21 September 2005 22:49 > To: Jonathan > Subject: Re: Design > >> Funny! >> >> I am 41, and tend to live in the present. But since >> you mention it: I set up the first formal IA function >> in the UK in the mid nineties I said I thought you might be "quite young." Well, life begins at 40! But much as I'm interested in your background and views about where the action is, I'd like to pursue the topic of whether designers should be cross-disciplined or not, since that's where we came from before your CV flew in. I see you agreed with my assessment that expanding a creative skillset into PHP wrangling (or whatever) isn't a good career move. So, given your experience in the industry, what was your point in saying that "A good honest webdesigner... makes banners, microsites and upgrades to existing websites"? Do such people work with you at BT, Orange and Honda? Did you recruit such people for the team at Opodo? The reason why I'm asking is that I think some people on this list see a career to be made out of keeping feet in both camps. I think that's just going to hold them back. Would you agree? Jonathan PS: >>And you'd be right! But I'm can't tell whether >>you're being admirably >>idealistic here, or just hopelessly naive. I'm assuming the former is correct.
And reply to the ego soaring with a little more oomph:
> -----Original Message----- > From: Jonathan Baker-Bates > Sent: 21 September 2005 23:17 > To: Jonathan > Subject: Re: Design >>"That's an interesting statement. Could you explain >> why you think that's the case?" >> > You are an IA/EA whatever you call yourself, OK I should have re-phrased it - it was a *potentially* interesting statement, but that was a pretty boring answer. Don't get me wrong, I don't disagree with you at all on this. I was merely fishing for some good conversation. I'll move on. Jonathan
A long, but somewhat disappointingly boring reply to the first one comes in, but then THIS (at elevensies this time –
hard-grafting Neil its really fitting me in edge-ways) to the other:
> -----Original Message----- > From: Neil Gibb > Sent: 22 September 2005 11:11 > To: Jonathan > Subject: Re: Design Again no research, just your opinion based on your personal reaction. How do you know it is a boring answer? What you really mean is: you find it a boring answer. Others may not. And you did ask the question. Methinks you are stamping your feet because you didn't like the answer. Do move on. Why not go and see http://www.wearewhatwedo.org/ on Monday. It might make you think about the impact of your work and words as oppose you opinions. Does it make a difference if you work for an agency who have the luxury of being able to employ people in lots of roles as their main revenunes comes from promoting tobbaco - meaning Framfabs Philip Morris. I'd say yes. So maybe that is the issue. Not what role you do, but what impact you have.
I hope that by the time I’m 41 I’d know how to spell “tobacco”, and the naked irony of digging me about research, only to claim Framfab gets their “main revenunes” (whatever they are) from Philip Morris (which, oddly, he can spell correctly). But what an ego! What a guy! And now he’s even Googling me for dirt! So, sting like a bee:
> -----Original Message----- > From: Jonathan Baker-Bates > Sent: 22 September 2005 23:30 > To: Jonathan > Subject: Re: Design >Again no research, just your opinion based on your >> personal reaction. How do you know it is a boring >> answer? >> >> What you really mean is: you find it a boring answer. >> I don't recall using a collective noun about my *own* opinion. But again, you are right: I found your answer boring. Sorry about that. > Does it make a difference if you work for an agency > who have the luxury of being able to employ people in > lots of roles as their main revenunes comes from > promoting tobbaco - meaning Framfabs Philip Morris. > > I'd say yes. > > So maybe that is the issue. Not what role you do, but > what impact you have. What is it with your non-sequiturs? One minute we're talking about skillsets and roles, the next I'm being accused of moral turpitude! Mr Gibb, I'd rather this discussion was not forestalled by Godwin's Law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_Law Jonathan
Then silence. Not even a mention of Quirk’s Exception.
Running Vista
OK, slightly misleading title: I’m not actually running Vista, I’m thinking whether I’ll ever run it. The other day I tried to think of one thing that WindowsXP Home Edition (the on that came with my new Dell) gives me that Windows98 didn’t have. I don’t consider myself a computer geek, just an interested party – but I could not think of a single thing.
When I got my new Dell, I booted it up and winced at the slew of AOL, Tiscali Broadband, and other intrusive icons all over the desktop. After furiously clicking “no” to various half-understood exhortations to come and find out about Windows Media Player 10, and confronted by simply baffling system tray jostling between Norton Anti-Virus and XP’s built-in security gubbins, even I recognised it was all a ploy to get me to buy something. So I decided to re-install XP from scratch. This was in the hope I’d regain some control over the configuration, and it pretty much worked. Well, I had to download a clean install image from Dell to do it (no disks provided these days, you see) but I got there in the end: just the software I want on it, and with all the defaults ready for me, and me alone, to change.
I’m probably going to have this machine for about 4 or 5 years I would think. It’s a 2.6Ghz Pentium 4 with 2Gig RAM a 70Gig hard disk. Vista, it seems, will demand most of that straight away, and will probably stub its toe on my puny IntelExpress graphics card. It’ll be grateful for the CPU’s dual core though I suppose.
But the thing that really makes me wonder if I’ll ever run it is the news from Neil Page, a strategist with Microsoft Australia, that:
"The industry needed something much better to deal with the piracy problem. Studios said in a high-def world, we're going to have to have a very different way of viewing content. ... "The downside is that all your existing flat panel monitors and projectors aren't going to work with high-def videos in Vista. Bad news."
All this is beginning to sound distinctly like a sales pitch for Linux to me.
Visual Media “Not That Bad” Revelation
“Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people!”
Right on! I have a gun, I’m wearing a beret, and my daddy’s the richest man in America!
After having a dig at crap on TV in my last blog post, I found myself watching the box for “Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst” on Monday night. I’d been vaguely aware of the Patty Hearst story, but this documentary really pulled me in close to the details and I found it fascinating. It was a bit Michael Moore at times, but was an amazing documentary of an amazing episode in history. I didn’t know that it’s now acknowledged to have been the origin of the “media circus” phenomenon. Seeing live broadcasts of spokespeople feeding the circus the increasingly odd-ball demands of the SLA as well as Hurst’s sometimes hilarious public statements was wonderful. “I thought, is everyone stoned?” recalls one gang member of his recollection of the media’s behaviour at the time. It was intensely American in so many ways. Only, only in the USA.
Guardian ‘94 Tabloid Irony Mashup!
“At The Guardian,” writes today’s Sunday Times, “…they claim that they came up with the idea of a compact newspaper long before The Independent.” Well, I can confirm that it’s not just a claim, it’s a fact. What’s more, they even put out a prototype in 1994.
Went to tea yesterday with Ben House, a friend of mine from way back; the power behind The Wire magazine and an astute observer of popular culture. He’d been going through some old papers which included a prototype “personal newspaper” printed by TheGuardian MediaLaboratories {sic} in 1994. The Guardian of 11:31: Thursday December 1, 2004 (large scans) was a tongue-in-cheek bit of futurology as to how some dead-tree media might look a decade in the future. Perhaps it was the Y2K bug messing with their Apple Newtons, but that date was in fact a Wednesday.
With reasonably accurate prescience, it was a fold-out half-A4 sized sheet. Proof that even back then, mavericks within the empire were worrying about what the Indie eventually did something about in 2003. The rest is a fascinating mix of some good guesses, near misses and the utterly wrong, even allowing for the fact that it was supposed to be a bit of fun. Other than the ironic timing of Ben’s discovery with the launch of tomorrow’s full-colour “Berliner” edition, some rather eye-popping highlights include:
- A front page story about a devastating Los Angeles earthquake, after which appeals for calm are issued by “Governor Schwarzenegger” (counterbalanced by an outside bet on Newt Gingrich as president). “Although more than 1,500 square kilometres are little more than a ruined concrete jungle of looting, murder and terrorism, some communications are now getting through.”
- 2002 referenced as the year of “the third Gulf conflict” in which “Iraqi forces surrendered on live TV after being precision bombed from orbiting weapons platforms.”
- A rather quaint obsession with TV listings, which despite heavy references to “the net” and “email” pretty much proves that print journos have always been several steps behind the fact that British TV is awful, even as the online media revolution that allows me to type this was exploding in their custard. And now we know where Charlie Booker got his idea for TVGohome!
I’ve not had time to digest it all, it’s just too fascinating. I just want to blog it before Monday – but hope to dig out some more gems later.
Trying Tor Again
Earlier this year I took down the Tor server I was running, mainly because it was hoovering up rather a lot of bandwidth and throttling it down to the trickle that would have been necessary to keep under my bandwidth cap seemed a bit silly. I’ve now set it up again (nickname “Doormouse”) on one of our Hatters servers for the continuing good of all mankind (huzzah!). Wonder at the graph and bask in the glow of pure freedom – or something.
Windows Presentation Foundation: It’s Not Flash
I went to the Microsoft Campus yesterday to have an informal preview of some of the new Windows UI things to be announced next week (technically under NDA – so sue me).
In the lead-up to Longhorn (now “Vista” – the next version of Windows), one of Microsoft’s aims is to make the role of UI/UX design as important as that of coding in the overall development process. This will be done by the introduction of the “Windows Presentation Foundation” underpinned by XAML (pronounced “zamel”): a declarative language a bit like SVG or ActionScript. The capabilities of the Foundation are much like Flash (complete with animation, embedded video, 3D, alpha channel stuff, etc.). The similarity with Flash ends there though as it’s part of the underlying OS (via .NET) and not just a wimpy sandboxed runtime. Nobody asked The Security Question though…
While aspects of the Foundation will better under Vista, some of it will run under XP with .NET 2 when that ships later this/next year. A beta version of their vector/bitmap editor which runs XP SP2 will be called Microsoft Expression Designer is also available right now.
I was a little unclear what the future of this tool is (Photoshop competitor or just a replacement for MS Paint in Vista?), since they will also eventually ship Expression Interactive Designer and Expression Web Designer. We saw a quick demo of an application being built with the Interactive Designer and it was very Flash-like to look at. Data binding and other interesting stuff came out of the box as did time-lines and a nice zooming interface for the whole tool (which itself is written in XAML). The zooming will be a new feature in for Vista overall.
The idea they were pushing was that munchkins will be able to use the Expression tools to create XAML UI/applications and give them to developers running Visual Studio to integrate into proper apps. This in turn will mean applications can eschew boring old menus and dialogues for full-motion video wrapped around spinning bananas. The UX possibilities will explode: Expression will take over where Flash leaves off, websites will be gagging to develop Expression versions of their sites (Amazon, and, erm, Amazon). Oh, and accessibility is “built-in” (no demo of this yesterday though) and web deployment of the applications will assume clients run .NET (ie it’s Windows only).
Whether all this will be good for the actual user experience in the final analysis is an open question. What it means for the UX professionals of the future is also anyone’s guess, but having a UI development tool on a par with Visual Studio does sound rather nice.
As a final tidbit, a hot tip next week is to look out for an announcement from MS that has a drink in it’s name (but somehow I don’t think it’s going to be WINE) which will answer some possible questions around interoperability…
Her Heart’s In the Right Place
This blog post shows how chaotic the discipline of IA is (see the comments in particular). There’s not even a pretense of union, agreement or even polite tolerance of divergent views amongst the practitioners. I look at designs by other people and I feel almost bound by duty to pepper them with criticism. I even expect it in others: a senior colleague recently reviewed some work I’d done and drew large rings around some elements, writing the words “awful” in large red ink next to them. Two months later, and after much fruitless experiment, the same interaction he so abhorred has now been deployed. The belief that there’s a mythical “true way” promotes the idea that the one who puts their idea across with enough force wins. We’re no worse than cowboy builders or politicians. Oh, and Euro IA rejected my application to give a presentation. Bastards.
Britt Allcroft: I Am Angry
Laurence Lessig’s written a great short piece (I didn’t know Americans could do that!) for Foreign Policy on the death of the public domain. He’s great at hitting the nail on the head.
“There is no doubt that piracy is an important problem — it’s just not the only problem. Our leaders have lost this sense of balance. They have been seduced by a vision of culture that measures beauty in ticket sales. They are apparently untroubled by a world where cultivating the past requires the permission of the past. They can’t imagine that freedom could produce anything worthwhile at all.”
Proof, if it be needed of this, was given to me last weekend when we visited the Northampton & Lamport Railway on one of their Thomas The Tank Engine events. It was pretty much heaving with kiddies and other Thomas fans and was a good (half) day out. But it could have been better were it not for the state of copyright law.
As part of his banter while we rode the short distance of the restored track, Sir Toppham Hat (pictured in the above) went into some rather interesting detail about how much of the proceeds from our ticket prices, tea and Thomas merchandise went to the current copyright holders of Thomas The Thank Engine (and Friends): Britt Allcroft. It seemed to be a pretty large chunk.
I looked around me and saw the place in a new light. The railway is maintained by volunteers: rail enthusiasts who dedicate their spare time to keeping the rather rusty engines and dilapidated carriages working. We watched some of them working on rolling stock in the sidings, seemingly oblivious to the Thomas event around them. There’s been an immense amount of effort to restore the track and re-build a bride across the River Nene (which is barely more than a stream) with help from Leicester and Northampton councils. But in terms of return on this investment of labour and love, The Thomas The Thank Engine event instead gives a hugely disproportionate benefit to Britt Allcroft.
The writer of the Thomas The Thank Engine stories is dead. His work should be in the public domain. Instead, copyright holders are allowed to skim off profits from events like this at the Lamport Railway and give me and my kids a bum deal. In Thomas’s case, this may be the situation perhaps for another fifty years (if current EC legislation allows it). Our ticket money could have gone towards shiny brasswork, perhaps a restored ticket office and waiting room and many other things that needed care. Instead we had to ignore the fact that the waiting room is a portable home; the cafe is a carriage literally falling apart, and the Fat Controller’s spats are falling off his feet.
All this left me angry. The two councils and the volunteers at the railway have done a wonderful job and the place is truly magical because of it, but Britt Allcroft and HIT Entertainment are a blight. How many people at the event realised this I don’t know. Maybe it was just me and Sir Toppham.
Again, Lessig:
“And the cultivation of culture and creativity will then be dictated by those who claim to own it.”
A possibly ironic footnote, but I think it rather noble that the content of the Northampton and Lamport Railway’s website is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence.
It’s Difficult – So Let’s Leave the User Out of It.
For too long, login, registration and online point of sale processes have been designed either by IT business analysts who see users as UML symbols, or worse, by developers who don’t want to think about users at all. More often than not, information architects get frozen out. I’ve worked on loads of sites that had ecommerce or registration processes that for some reason were deemed out of scope for us. So we deliver a great experience up until the point the customer actually wants to engage with the site, whereupon it’s all “enter your 15 digit user name with no spaces or diacritical marks” in amongst idiotic placement of buttons, inappropriate use of screen elements, and various other usecrime.
Now, I know there are factors to consider here, like security policies and system limitations, but that doesn’t mean things shouldn’t start from a point of best user experience and go from there. When so many shopping carts and registration systems are confusing and broken, should it not be time for something to change?
To back up my thoughts on this a bit, here’s a real-world example. It’s not the worst I’ve seen, but certainly a mess. It’s for setting up a PAYG account with Orange. The diligent among you will know that yes, I work for a company that works for Orange, and no, we didn’t design the following and yes, I’m offering constructive criticism here, in case you’re confused.
(Note, the following may not be 100% correct as I was only making rough notes as I went along and relying on some memory)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Ring up, give name address, etc. and am asked to supply a 4-digit “security code” (no explanation given, but I just go with the flow). I decline the option to nominate a credit card as I’ve not got my wallet to hand.
Next I’m told I will get “a series” of SMS messages (they’re very explicit about the “series” bit for some reason) to activate the phone and that I should read, then delete them, then turn off the phone for a ten seconds.
I get one. So I do what I’m told. Now I’m just waiting for my old number to be ported over from BT Mobile – hooray. That’ll take a few days, apparently.
So later in the day I go to www.orange.co.uk as I have a vague notion that I can top up my phone on line or something. I see a “log in” button,
I enter my mobile number and “password” which I assume is my “security code” that I got when I called.
No dice (“not recognised” error). So I try the little “New users click here to register” link.
This starts off with “Before you begin the process of registering your mobile number…” hmm. I thought I did that on the phone just now, no?
Never mind – I may was well give it a go. I check the PAYG box and the “I know my 4-digit identity code” – sounds better.
Hit continue…. wait for ages (about 5mins?).
Agree to T&Cs, enter phone number, and get an SMS, which has my “Orange services security code” in it.
I use that to log in with. It doesn’t work (another “not recognised” error).
I try the process again. Get a second code, this time it works.
I choose a password and submit the form. I wait for ages (another 5 mins? I leave the room to make a coffee)
I am then told the account is ready and that I can log in. So I navigate to the home page and log in.
It takes ages, then I get “Sorry, the server is currently busy. Please try again later.”
So I try later. But it seems like I am logged in after all (I can see “your account” and various things like setting up email on the nav bar). But what’s this? I need to enter my phone number again. So I do and I get an error. “The mobile number should be in the standard UK format with no spaces” – I had a space.
Delete space, try again, success! Now I get “enter your 4-digit security code” and an “identity code.” I’m just about to put the number in that I was sent earlier when – ping – another SMS arrives with my “identity code” in it again. It’s the same one as before, so I enter that.
Success!
“Thank you for registering your phone. To start managing your account please click ‘ok’.”
So I do. But then I need to “add a new account” before I can see my balance, etc. Dear god! Did I not do that before? So I enter my phone number and it set it up.
Time to completion: almost three hours.
Nice. And now I’m done but I can’t be arsed to explore the may other links on the nav bar.
SphereXP
I bumped into SphereXP yesterday, which is one of the experiments in desktop management that’s been going on for a while (well, ever since Xerox PARC I suppose). Here it is running on my machine.
If you have an interest in this sort of thing, I can reccommend you have a look. Whether it’s the future of OS interfaces I doubt, but it does give you the illusion of a larger monitor, and in the process shows you that perhaps trackerballs are the way ahead after all. It’s just very hard to get past the novelty factor, which is always a problem with these things.
I’m also having a look at this as well
Golfers
My BoingBoing feed had a story today about the Foxhills Golf Tournament’s sponsors. Being the letter-writing nutter I am, I thought I’d send in my views:
Continue reading this entry »
Life is What Happens…
There is a (possibly apocriphal – I’ve not checked it) John Lennon quotation: “Life is what happens when you’re making plans for other things” which is rather apt for me recently. For instance, I noticed that I’ve been blogging for more than a year now and that the anniversary (July 11th) completely passed me by. Not that this is in itself a wonderfully interesting event, but I did imagine I would be marking the date with a fantastic post on world peace, the copyfight, or at least something on site maps. But no. Instead I’m worrying about my pension.
Pensions are scary things, to be sure, and particularly so if you think you might not have enough to see you through your old age. But then Axel had his 5th birthday last week and I’ve not written his birthday saga yet… An old friend from school days got in touch and I forgot to get back to him, and countless other little events that I should have been paying more attention to.
So to commemorate the event of me not writing anything of even the remotest interest, I have created a new meta data type for this blog called “Weak Filler,” evoking as it does some rather badly-mixed powdery grouting, or lame content. Enjoy.
Head-Smacker
Once in a while you get “one of those moments” on a project. This time, it was courtesy of the off-shore developers we’re working with. I’ve inherited the acceptance phase from the first iteration of an application that was specced up before I got on the project (I’m picking it up on the second iteration).
The requirements for iteration one are pretty simple, so I found it odd that while some aspects of the application were fine (the layout, menus etc.) others were just utterly wrong. It was almost as if they’d not even read the specs there were given.
And today it turns out I was right. After pressing the point about the non-implementation of some things that are pretty clear in the documents that I’ve been working from, their lead developer mentions in an email that they have not seen any documentation for those aspects of the application.
Smack! So all this time they’ve just been imagining how large parts of the application should behave? These things were referred to in the document they had, but expanded in the one that they didn’t have. But did they not think to ask us where the missing specs were before they started coding?
I know life is a crisis of communication, and specs and documentation is traditionally rather thin, but to regard no documentation as being acceptable certainly says something about the state of things.
Moat Construction Problem
WHY do I do it? Perhaps I’m being governed by the GIFT, but for no apparent reason this evening I posted the following to uk.d-i-y. Readers may recall my equally inexplicable posting on uk.legal a few months ago that produced a very witty set of responses far funnier than my original post. This is one is equally weak, but I hope it’ll both fish in some suckers and spark some funny replies. Lets see if it works…
For the past three years I have been building an Anglo-Saxon castle in the garden of my house, using only traditional tools and materials. Having laid the foundations and dug the moat, I would like to fill the moat so as to test its integrity (both of itself and against invaders) before progressing to erecting the walls. I understand the traditional way of doing this is to tap a river or a stream, and supplement this with ox-drawn carts filled with barrels of fresh water. However, being in Brockley, I'm too far from the Thames to do this (a distance of about 2 miles as the crow flies). There are also no tube stations near enough for me to tunnel the water from there. While I think I could construct the necessary carts, I would not have the space in the remainder of my garden to rear the oxen to draw them. My neighbours have made some comments on the fact that I have begun rearing goats and some chickens to produce the considerable tonnage of dung for wattle daub I will need later on in the construction. So I am considering using a Chinese technique from about the same historical era of using giant kites to lift Thames water into place above the moat and pour it in from there. Does anyone have any experience with this particular technique (which, I understand, will require considerable resources and manpower to implement), or indeed defensive Angle-Saxon moat building in general? Any advice much appreciated. And if you also have any tips for laying long-and-short quoins I would also be grateful as my initial attempts at this were not successful. Jonathan
Who Creates Music?
We had an email from HR on the company “fun” list today seemingly inviting all employees to listen to a popular music number called “Running Away’ by Roy Ayers.” Why, I don’t know. Out of lunchtime interest though, I was curious to find out whether we’d need a license to distribute music to employees. So I Googled about and got to PPL. Looks like we’d need to get one. Hmm. The phrase “screw you” came to mind.
But even more surprising was the home page blurb – rather revealing of their attitude I thought:
The license fees that PPL collects are then distributed to the rightful owner ... usually the record company responsible for creating the track - and also the performers who played that track.
If I were a musician, I’d like to associate the word “creating” somewhat closer to the phrase “rightful owner” there! I was actually rather shocked.
Reminds me of the Simpsons line:
I worked damn hard for this, and I'm not going to let you, or them, or the rightful owner take it away from me!
Going Postal
I’m selling a shower rail on eBay, and a bidder has asked me how much it might be send to Germany. That should be easy to find out (indeed, why don’t they look it up themselves the lazy buggers?) I’ve got a vision of a nice form to fill out: dimensions, weight, destination, insurance, etc. And with this in mind I go to the Royal Mail. I go to City Link. I Google.
The Royal Mail. One of those “stick a million links on every page” site. But “Send and Receive Mail” on the main nav looks promising. Click on “Sending mail overseas” … “Surface Mail” sounds good for starters (”Perfect for heavy and bulky items”). Click. Blah blah “Easy and affordable way to send anything around the world” … “Up to half the price of standard Airmail” Blah blah. What is this? A press release? What about the f*****g RATES?? “Pricing…click here” (so no accessibility audit then, best practice freaks). The pricing only goes up to 2Kg and seems limited to just “Small packets and printed papers.” Not exactly living up to that “heavy and bulky items” billing.
So I try again. This time with their “Postal calculator” (dunno where I found it – some link buried in a bunch of blah). No branding (apart from Sun Microsystems logo in TLHC, which means “Geeks Have Designed This”), no nav… sinking feeling… click on “sending mail overseas” and fill in *almost* the form I envisaged being on the home page before I started this journey almost 10mins ago. This time, it reveals that I can send it surface mail at that weight. But then I can’t get any confirmation as to whether it’ll be too big or what. No further information on the service. Dead end.
Next I Google and find www.parcelflight.co.uk. Looks good! Looks perfect, although the form on the home page (they’ve got the right idea!) assumes you’re sending to UK only. Never mind, click on the image next to it that says “Europe from £19.99″ – this’ll do me! They’ve got my money already! Yes? No. It takes me to another form. Another form that also assumes I’m sending to the UK.
But something in the back of my mind tells me they can’t be THAT stupid. After all, their graphic designers are streets ahead of the Royal Mail’s. No. Let’s just try… I thought so! It’s Internet Explorer they want, not Firefox! With MSIE I can see the “destination” drop-down.
So I close the loop and send them a link to this page.
Another Tack on the Docs
There’s been a great thread on SIGIA this last week or so on the good old subject of documentation. It’s incredible how diverse the approaches are. Some people are plugging away with ye olde Visio, while others are pioneering with things like Dreamweaver and even Together.
I, meanwhile, am in the midst of picking up some previous documentation done by somebody else (in fact two people, with two different approaches) and attempting to wrestle that down to meet some newer, and fortunately simpler, requirements, while preparing to allow the documents to get more complex with subsequent iterations. This has meant I’m thinking as much about how I’m doing things as what I’m doing.
Currently, the documents are mainly in Freehand for wireframes and other UI bits, and there’s a modules catalogue in Powerpoint. Of course, as the thread on SIGIA proves (if proof is even needed) – there are no good tools for doing what IAs need to do yet (but cue my now ritual keep-an-eye-on-this-one aside). Even so, I still think Freehand is an utter pain. And Powerpoint hardly seems a step forward.
Apropos of all this, I was introduced to Fireworks last week. It’s obviously trying to be a sort of webby Photoshop, not being page-based, but allowing you to create widgets with behaviours, etc. It can also do shared modules, and do them properly (not like Freehand – which can’t, and I don’t care what you say). And Fireworks’s native file format is layered PNGs.
Hmm. PNGs. Properly shared library elements (and localisable with it). What if I did my graphics in Fireworks, and linked them to an MS Word doc for the annotations? Seems to work nicely. I can also create clickable prototypes from the Freehand files on the side, without having to bother Word about it or re-create stuff.
An initial play about seems promising for this as an approach. With a quick Alt+TAB and a keystroke to refresh the links, it’s almost like using one application. I’m a bit suspicious of the layers in the PNG files though, and what Word might or might not do with them if I try sly things like adding layers that I don’t want to show with the annotations. Need to experiment more when I have some time (hopefully tomorrow) and get up to some kind of speed with Fireworks.
One day though, all this will seem like ludicrously clueless babbling. Actually, it is even now fairly ludicrous in the sense that there’s a whole industry out there that can’t even decide the basics of how to create their own paydirt. But that’s a good thing, and I’m glad I’m part of it just so I can tell my grandchildren that we once tried speccing websites with Powerpoint. “But that’s like trying to catch a rabbit with a broom!”
Couldn’t have put it better myself.
Video, Computers and Shocking Interaction Design
I’ve been fiddling with computers recently. It all started when my wife bought a video camera (Sony PC-110) with a DV output. Then I got a Firewire card. Then I tried to burn DVDs of my sister’s wedding. Then I f****ing tore my hair out and gave up.
That was over a year ago, but time heals all things, and I returned to the quest to burn a DVD that could play on our DVD player in the living room. This time with film of my sister’s daughter’s christening. After waiting for 48 hours for my old Dell P600 to render the AVI file, I concluded I needed a new machine. So I bought another one.
SWPAT Victory
I feel relieved that the European Parliament voted by 648 votes to 18 to reject the proposed directive on computer-implemented inventions this week. There was a heck of a lot of activity on both sides, and I did a bit with some letter and postcard writing, and trying (unsuccessfully) to ring MEPs in Strasbourg last week. It was also good to meet the goons from the DTI on the issue, even if there wasn’t enough time to table my question about interface development.
This is my favourite picture from the days leading up to the vote, and a BoingBoing post that talks about it.
The fact remains, however, that software patent legislation is still in the hands of individual EU countries. It just won’t be Europe wide. The UKPTO has the hots for patents. I’m not expecting this all to end very soon…
Why Are They Bombing London?
This post is political – no apologies. Look away now.
All my life the forces of evil have been embodied by “terrorists.” The IRA, Abu Nidal, Tigers, FARC, Al Quaida, the list is endless. All my life, the foreign policy of governments have been ranged around the war against terror, supported by the war against drugs and “organised crime.” It just goes round and round and round. It’s reached the status of a culture of our times and it’s making me sick.
Consuming the mainstream media to find answers to why people are committing acts of terror is a bit like trying to get a hearty meal out of candyfloss. The “analysis”, “commentary” and sheer weight of verbiage that pours forth about “policy” and “countermeasures” is completely disorientating. You can’t look into it for more than a few hours before you keel over with media-induced vertigo.
Like the BBC weather forecasts that tell you everything but the one thing you want to know (WILL IT RAIN!?), the subject of WHY terrorism is happening is mystifyingly avoided. Sometimes, as in the case of the IRA, it’s fairly well known, but that’s a rarity. Why are Al Quaida and large sections of the Middle East so angry?
So I looked around for some clues. After much searching, I found the answers I was looking for, and like some mystic revelation, I found I’d known them all along. They were in the words of a lecture given by Noam Chomsky at The Technology & Culture Forum at MIT 24th Oct 2001. In it, he describes the historical events and political mechanisms by which the current situation has been constructed, and that’s a good term for it: “constructed.” Not by some shadowy elite with it’s hand on the tiller, but by all of us and our willingness not to understand.
We certainly want to reduce the level of terror, certainly not escalate it. There is one easy way to do that and therefore it is never discussed. Namely stop participating in it. That would automatically reduce the level of terror enormously. But that you can’t discuss. Well, we ought to make it possible to discuss it. So that’s one easy way to reduce the level of terror. Beyond that, we should rethink the kinds of policies, and Afghanistan is not the only one, in which we organize and train terrorist armies. That has effects. We’re seeing some of these effects now. September 11th is one. Rethink it. Rethink the policies that are creating a reservoir of support. Exactly what the bankers, lawyers and so on are saying in places like Saudi Arabia. On the streets it’s much more bitter, as you can imagine. That’s possible. You know, those policies aren’t graven in stone.
Message
Functional Specifications
I’m three weeks into a brand new project, and my mind is on requirements and specifications. Like every project I’ve ever worked on, this is unique. This time, it’s unique because it was half documented and thought about, and was then mothballed. Now it’s back from the dead a year later, and I’m on the case trying to make sense of what was done. There’s one person in my department who worked on it before it was frozen, but the others (who wrote most of the docs) have gone.
The project is a complex one in terms of function. One half of it involves designing a fat client interface (a .NET application) that talks to a proprietary CMS to allow the editing of very specialised content types. The other half is a web-based management interface to the CMS for use mainly by reviewers and approvers of that content. After almost three solid weeks of reading, talking to people and firing off emails with questions, I still feel pretty shaky on the details, and even some of the broader concepts. The feeling of not knowing what I don’t know is also rather annoying.
So the one thing that I really, really wanted to find in all the proposals, presentations, use cases, wireframes, process flows, action matrices, prototypes and other wonderful artefacts that have been produced on the project over the past few years, was something that just gave me a general overview. This would preferably be in writing, describing what the system currently does. No such luck. The collective knowledge of the team is the best I can hope to fall back on.
I know that this issue of “the big picture” on projects has been taxing the minds of the great and the good, and I’ve been comparing two approaches on the last couple of days: that of the famous Joel Spolsky, and the less thorough, but admirable opinions of Jason Fried the head honcho of 37 Signals.
Both make good points. I tend to feel that Fried is playing to the gallery a bit in the sense that interaction designers and other “experience architect” types dislike words and prefer pictures to communicate things. That’s fair enough – pictures can and do convey a lot of stuff on most projects. But without some underpinning of clear context, and cross-reference to detail, it all falls apart as surely as 500 pages of dense Times Roman. It just does it in a different way. This issue came to me unvarnished when, after being assured by the handover document that wireframes had been “completed” for one half of the project, I opened the relevant file only to find 85 pages of expertly crafted pages almost completely unannotated. Just pictures of pages in space. At that point, I knew I had my work cut out.
The 37 Signals position is also coloured by the the fact they’re consultants, and don’t have to deal with history, politics or even much economics. Reading many case studies in which they and people like Adaptive Path have been involved, you can’t help thinking they just make up their own rules, go in, do a spectacular job, and leave. Spolsky’s view is more pragmatic. He insists on writing at least some things down because he comes from an in-house tradition of dealing with the political backdrop to software development. Written documents can have a certain corporate symbolism that commands respect. That can of course be used to hide behind (and lord knows the “use cases” I’ve been reading today – written by a third party in this case – are utter sand bags). But their main utility is positively to deal with a set of problems. some of which might not have anything to do with the project directly.
When I suggest I write a short functional spec to “set up” the other artefacts (primarily wireframes, process flows and things like data dictionaries) along the lines of a Spolskly example, the first reaction is that nobody will read it, and the implication is that we don’t need to do it as long as our other artefacts are detailed enough. That may be true, and in this case I’m a latecomer to the project willing to take a back seat unless things get really messy. But what’s interesting is that conversations about terminology and vocabulary come around regularly on the project, and this usually ends with somebody wishing we had a “project glossary” to pin down the definition of something. Yet I know from experience that if you attempt to write such a document, you realise that in fact you need to write a spec because once you’re on that path, you can see the light that a little context provides. No matter how detailed a wireframe or a site map or a business rules document is – if the reader doesn’t understand the context, it’s pretty much worthless. There is no substitute for words when supplying that context. It just takes a bit of faith.
Science Does Not Remove the Terror of the Gods
StumbleUpon is a nice idea and I’ve been using it a bit recently. Its categorisations are a bit too broad to be really useful, but if they hooked it up with some sort of folksonomy system that you could use to refine your profile, then it might get really interesting. Like del.icio.us/ only less… flat.
I was impressed when the “random stumble” button took me to one of my favourite pages on the web, hence the title of this post.
Should I Blog It?
I’ve been having to edit my urges recently. There have been various little things happening to which my almost instant (and in my view unhealthy) reaction is that “I should blog that.”
For instance, I was returning home after work last night, and as I waited at the lights at the crossing of Pentonville Road and Amwell Street, who should wonder across but Gilbert and George! It’s the second time I’ve seen them out on the streets of London. Last time I spotted them in Soho and my wife and I followed them at a discreet distance to see where they were going (they went into a side street and were let in to a small door and disappeared). But this time, to my surprise, almost my first reaction was that this was great blog material and that because they were walking along my route, I should stop, get out my phone and snap a few pics.
But why? Isn’t just being able to tell your friends enough? I’m no great afficionado of their work: I just had a scaled-down reproduction of “Winter Pissing” on my wall when I was a student once. Something about their lives as “living art works” makes them more interesting than, say, Tracy Emin the Chapman Brothers though.
The more I think about it, the more I should have taken that bloody picture.
A Trouble with Folksonomies
Had an informal presentation today about folksonomies. A lot has been said about them recently, and I don’t think anyone’s thinking of them as really serious tools to rival more traditional systems or techniques, but some things that came to mind about the long term future started with that Killing Joke track.
“Requiem” contains the following lyric:*
And the meaning of words; When they cease to function; When there's nothing to say; When will it start worrying you?
I’ve always played the banjo, and would class my picking style as “frailing”, but many others would call it “clawhammer.” There’s no clear definition of either, and some think they are in fact the same thing, but there’s often disagreement.
It strikes me that that the utility of folksonomies depends a lot on the “received meaning” of terms, but it’s always been a mystery to me as to how we as humans actually come to that meaning individually. I can’t remember how or when I first learnt what “probity” meant, or what the difference is between the meaning of “accuracy” and “precision.” My grandfather understood the word “gay” as having a completely different meaning to what it does now. Indeed, it current has at least three separate meanings to my knowledge (”happy,” “homosexual,” and “disagreeable”).
To me, this is another reason why folksonomies as truly useful tools in their own right are doomed unless they act as supplements to existing classification systems.
Hmmm.
* Ironically, these lyrics are disputed, since Jaz Coleman usually just made up stuff on the fly during takes, and often quite radically changed the meaning of songs live or in later recordings.
The Grokster Ruling: Life, Death and the Bay City Rollers
The US Supreme Court’s ruling against Grokster came in today:
"We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties"
So, to quote a Slashdot poster on the subject this afternoon:
In the United States, it's legal to sell armour-piercing ammunition: bullets whose sole purpose is to go through bulletproof vests; obviously a device designed to kill or maim human beings. The manufacturers to do not even make the pretense of proposing other uses for said ammunition. This activity is all fine and legal. By comparison, a device that may or may not be designed for, but is certainly capable of, infringing copyright is deemed illegal. The manufacturers at least attempt the pretense of proposing legal uses for the technology and make a somewhat-better-than-marginal case for its legit use. This is not fine or legal. Question for the supreme court: do you really believe the copyright of the Bay City Rollers first album is more deserving of legal protection than a human life?
Video
I spent most of this afternoon (almost five hours, actually) trying to get 25mins of video footage from my Sony DCR-PC110 DV camera onto a DVD. What a palava. Nero is a sorry mess of an application – so bad you don’t even know what program to launch, let alone how to use what you think you need to use.
Do the manufacturers seriously expect me to understand their program menu items? Here’s what I’ve got:
Nero
Nero OEM
Nero Cover Designer
Nero Express
Nero Toolkit
Nero CD-DVD Speed
Nero DriveSpeed
User's Guides
Nero Smartstart
Nero Digital
When I eventually got it on a DVD, I triumphantly went downstairs to play it on the TV, but the player said “Cannot read disk.” Bugger. Something in the back of my mind said something about “book type,” but by then I couldn’t be arsed. I can play it on my PC, but that’s not the point.
I suppose getting video to DVD just has to be incredibly complicated (after all, just burning CDs can be hard) but I can’t help feeling that having a supposedly mainstream piece of software that’s so obvioulsy created by geeks for geeks doesn’t help.
One good thing that did come out of this was that it was that it finally convinced me that my 5-year-old P600 really is too old now. The Dell website beckons…
MIT Weblog Survey
This is apparently helping to finish somebody’s PhD, but it was mainly out of curiosity that I filled it in. He doesn’t give you the option of listing Trillian as your IM client, so he’s obviously a bit stuck up in his ivory tower. The results page is down at the time of writing, but it promises to be quite interesting.
More Greasemonkey Mayhem
Just as I’ve found a Greasemonkey script that fixes up Odeon’s site and provides a link to IMDB for all their films, I’ve now found a script that puts a link to a torrent for films listed in IMDB! So now I can see what’s on at the Odeon, and if I don’t think it’s worth the money to go and see after reading IMBD, I have the option to burn it to DVD and watch it the next evening.
Sure, this is piracy, but at least it’s discriminating.
Silver Didn’t Tarnish Before the Industrial Age?
This article about making silver bullets is interesting, and mentions in passing that silver tarnishing is a relatively modern phenomenon brought about by sulfur pollution from power plants. Wow.
Odeon website accessibility now a reality
You may or may not have been following the Odeon cinema website usability/accessibility saga over the last year or so.
I installed a Greasemonkey script written to improve the site, and it’s pretty interesting. It completely changes the interaction design of the site, and throws in a new feature – a link to the IMDB page for each film – which the original site doesn’t have! This is all completely without the say-so of the site designers. Of course, you can probably count the number of people using this script on the fingers of one hand, but the principle is interesting nonetheless.
Where has all the speed lust gone?
When I was in Japan, I set my father-in-law up with an Internet connection. He’d been given some brochures about NTT broadband from his local electrical store. The pricing was just jaw-dropping: a 100Mbit (yes, one hundred megabit) connection, with no usage capping, is £24 a month. Holy cow!
This got me thinking. Here in the UK, ADSL users have been getting letters from their ISPs to tell them that they’ll be getting a free (or free-with-string-attached) speed hike following BT’s announcement of capacity upgrades earlier this year. In about 10-12 months time, most users will be on 2Mbit connections or more, up to a maximum of 8Mbit on the newer exchanges. It also seems that most ISP’s will be doing capping deals rather than throttling, so in effect you can “burst” up to the maximum of your exchange capacity no matter what your cap is. At least I think that’s right, unless you’re with AOL, in which case… You’re just stupid.
So what’s missing here is the speed lust. A few years ago, hardly a day went by without somebody predicting a multi-media revolution just as soon as we all got out of the 14.4K (or 28.8K or 64K or 512K…) straightjacket. But I’ve not seen any pundits come out on this one yet, despite 2Mb being the generally-accepted point at which decent video is possible.
So wither the multi-media future? Maybe it’ll really happen this time now that nobody’s bothered?
Pirate Spotting
Avast! Brian Appleyaaard! The hammy Bible-bashing tech/culture journo we all love to hate came out on Sunday as a shameless raider of intellectual property in his article on the death of TV last weekend:
"...the internet has begun to work as it should. Thanks to broadband, students now routinely download the best television shows — at the moment, that means the US hospital comedy Scrubs — over the net and, happily, pass them on to me. Video is now at the same stage as audio was when Napster first started. Just as MP3 chipped away at the foundations of the record industry, so video downloading is subverting television and film.
In fact there are two things in the above quote that are notable as indicative of the state of the copyfight to date: the first is the fact that a mainstream hack writing for none other than the Sunday Times can happily admit to consuming bootleg TV shows (although oddly, not actually downloading them – a bit like not inhaling, eh Brian?). The second is the bald assumption that such activity undermines the visual media industry. This is pure Chomsky: repeat something often enough (”home taping is killing music, MP3 is killing music, BitTorrent is killing video…”) and it becomes an accepted fact.
My opinion of Appleyard has always been a pretty low one, but I’m glad he’s written this article as some of the wider issues are pretty well observed. I wonder how BT and the rest will fare? Personally, I think Appleyard is probably right about the fate of TV as we know it, but wrong in his assumption that it will be relegated to a media backwater. He’s really just attacking the schedules. The programme quality factor is irrelevant. Who cares what he thinks about Scrubs?
Japan Retro Blog
Ah, Japan: land of individually-wrapped bananas and toilets that squirt warm water up your bum.
Ten days in Nagano (Ena City) with the in-laws followed by visits to other relatives and friends. The food! The technology! Even the interminable shopping trips for kids clothes were interesting. Japan qualified for the world cup against North Korea in a match that nobody could attend (so they did the whole thing on video screens by proxy), Takanohana died (at 55) and there was some really weird stuff in the news for ages about roadside guard rails and the mysterious vicious spikes attached to them.
But first some listings:
- Best Janglish t-shirt spotted: “Trying to forget falling off that ladder” (as worn by chubby middle-aged man at flower festival). Although this made me chuckle for hours, I suspect it may not qualify as true Janglish as it’s both grammatically correct and shows signs of pre-meditated humour.
- Most innovative tech idea: Pedestrian crossing “count down” lights. As well as the standard green/red man thing, main zebra crossings have lights that tell you how soon you’ll be able to cross so you don’t have that “should I risk it?” feeling. Nice.
- Best meal: Kaiseki (by mistake in a hotel – 10,000 yen!) with umpteen courses including transcendental shabu shabu with soy milk, and zaru soba with flecks of gold leaf in the soba. I was too full by the end to appreciate the kama meshi though.
- Best fun tech: 3D sat nav with near photo-realistic imagery, voice control and insane local detail (”Nearest dry cleaners?” “Turn left at crossing in 700 metres, parking available at 800 yen per hour”).
I wish I’d had a laptop to blog stuff at the time as there’s too much to remember now. We did actually bring Kumi’s sub-A4 Loox T7 but for some reason her keyboard mapping was all screwy (we didn’t bring the external keyboard she normally uses with it). Amongst other notable things was the fact that 100Mbit broadband connections are now about £25 a month (with a setup cost of over £200 to get the fibre from the exchange into your house). Despite this, I found myself setting up Kumi’s 80-year old dad with an analogue dial-up on his Windows Me box, which crashed and crashed and crashed. Having to explain (well, failing to explain) what the hell was happening, and spending about 4 hours downloading as much as I could from Windows Update in an attempt to stabilise the damn thing, was to say that least a challenge. Nobody should run Windows Me Japanese if they can possible help it, least of all an 80 year-old man, but hey.
The jet lag hasn’t quite worn off yet, so I’m not thinking very clearly about it all yet, but hope to expand on a few things later.
Japan!
A holiday for three weeks in Japan, starting tomorrow! It’s been a while since I last went – the sushi, the traffic, the in-laws and the partial lack of understanding of what’s going on. I’m looking forward to all these things and more, starting with airline food (Korean Airlines! A kimchi wagon in the sky!).
The First Thing To Go Under Pressure
Observers of the date stamp will note that I’ve not posted for… weeks!
This is not for lack of subject matter, of which I hope to expand at some point, but due to the fact that I’ve been working on a project with deadlines which anyone would be excused for thinking were some kind of Guinness Book attempt: two people writing a 200-page specification in three days and nine (nine!) other deliverables over three further, not to mention numerous updates of issue logs and all the attendant noise around that has left little room for sleep, let along blogging.
Hope to provide something worth reading soon, but we’re off to Japan for three weeks come the 25th May, so it might have to wait a bit.
Firefox at 50,000,000 and Rising
Firefox is fast becoming the Apache of the desktop. One day we’re going to see graphs looking like this, and it’s going to be good for web user experience all round. It’s not just about the tabs, the plugins, the skins, the goodness – it’s the phenomenon that I like most.
Get firefox and do some good!
Experience Design Chapter 2: Paradise Lost
Our weekly Monday-9am-with-buns department meetings usually consists of discussions about projects people are working on, techniques we have applied or are thinking of applying, department housekeeping issues etc. All good inward-looking stuff. But last week was a little different.
We had a presentation by the head of the new Client Services division. For me this was a reminder that for an agency such as ours, no matter how far we get into information foraging theory, contextual inquiry, Fitts’s Law or UCD, it will always be marketing in some form or other that keeps the paychecks rolling in. Until now, working at Oyster has been luxuriously free of planners and account managers, but that is to change. As if to emphasise the point, we were also introduced to a new member of our department, described as a “marketing experience designer.” Perhaps the term “account exec” would have been a little too alien for us. Hmm.
We started with a summary of recent trends in the online universe. Advertising spend is now on a level with that of radio in the UK, and it’s growing at a much faster rate than other media; online revenues are getting serious and SEO specialists are worth their weight in gold (so Mike Rogers will now be putting down payments on a yacht pretty soon I should think), etc. It’s all deja vue of course, but this time I feel it’s got its reality goggles tied on. I admit that sometimes dead-tree media can be good, and this article in The Sunday Murdoch is a decent summary of what’s going on right now.
The reason why I love the Internet (and spend roughly 10-12 hours a day consuming it) is that it’s nothing if not a boiling cauldron of possibilities. Now some of those seem to be turning into what might be certainties, and in some ways I feel vindication coming on. Time to digress into a self-serving anecdote…
In 1997, shortly after I joined IPC Magazines to work on their yachting and boating web properties, I attended one of the then IT director’s quarterly company presentations. This was traditionally populated by loyal geeks and IS&T beanpole climbers while being utterly ignored by the rest of the organisation who were mainly journalists or graphic designers by trade. IPC was (and still is?) the largest Quark site in Europe and the largest single AppleTalk network. It was also a famously early adopter of desktop publishing at the expense of typesetting jobs in the 1980’s. So it was for exactly this reason that I was quite giddy with excitement about the company’s future and the Internet. IPC had content – mountains of it, and content was king. IPC was therefore the sleeping giant of the UK new media revolution and I was perched on its shoulders ready to fly to the moooon!
So it was with utter disappointment that Il Duce made no significant mention of the Internet or the company’s plans in that area. If you’ve ever attended a talk by the head of the Global Leadership Village you’ll know that he leaves little room for questions from the floor. Nevertheless I broke with tradition and put my hand up to tell him that I’d just joined to ride the rocket to the stars and what did he think about that. I don’t recall his exact response but it started with the words “Well I’m sorry to disappoint you…” and went downhill from there. IPC wasn’t a software house; Argos’s website had sold nothing; the net was a probably just a fad and while IPC did have websites it was a purely defensive measure against teenagers, the house bound and their modems.
Two years later, the dot.com boom was in full swing, IPC had bought out from Reed Elsevier and the company was up for sale. Websites were all the IT department could talk about. But by that time I had them down as the muppets they turned out to be. And particularly after they axed Melody Maker.
Whu? Sorry… where was I? Oh yes, marketing.
So now I feel it’s going full circle. The end of the dot.com era seems to have given us time to get back to first principles of web user experience as the broadband connections stepped up and our parents got their email accounts. We were designing websites for users not consumers, and didn’t have to worry any more about the damn banner ads, targets, measurements and KPIs. But that was on time borrowed from disappointed VCs. Today I read about Marc Andreessen’s latest wheeze. Two weeks ago I would have treated this with the unvarnished enthusiasm it deserves were it not that Marc was Netscape, Netscape was IPO, and the web was born to us from the fires of public offerings. That history is repeating itself but in slow motion, at a deeper level, and now experience design is going to change.
Language, Chiasmus and Communication
It’s been a while since I had a foray in the genre that I call “half-formed ideas,” but here’s a good one that I’ve been brewing for a while.
For no good reason I can recall, I was reading this essay about spontaneous use of chiasmus in contemporary English and it got me thinking. Not so much about chiasmus, which is of course fascinating in its own right, but about language and communication in general.
Life has always been a crisis of communication. But I get the impression it’s becoming more of a problem. Language seems to be increasingly incapable of communicating ideas we have, and this seems to show quite dramatic evidence at times. Whether this is because concepts are becoming harder to describe, or language itself becoming more diversified and so less able to cope with particular concepts for many people, I’m not sure. It does seem that in the far future we may need to use some other form of communication. The trouble is that I can’t imagine what that might be. It would need to be a system of communication that had less ambiguity, more accuracy and more standardisation than that currently employed. Hmmm.
Letter Writing
My uncle Julian, Bagpipe Maker to the Stars (Warning: sound samples are not work safe) wrote me a letter the other day. It struck me that people writing to me by hand is now an immensely rare event, and that I myself have not written a letter to anyone in about fifteen years. The last may have been during my gap year in Japan.
So, I’ve decided to write back to him. I have an old letter pad I found in the attic (”Elco of Switzerland”, green, 50 sheets, A5) and will use the envelopes and stamps usually reserved for communication with government departments, insurance companies or life insurers.
This will be a great event. Now I just have to think of what to write, although my biggest fear will be the lack of a backspace key and spellcheck.
Stultifying
The content mapping monster has started its onslaught, and mother I can feel the soil falling over my head.
This week, I have been doing what must rank as (I hope) the most uninteresting task of my career ever. Well, there have been others like it but I’ve erased them from memory leaving only some familiar brain patterns behind: an urge to read Das Kapital, clock watching, tea-making fixations and suicidal thoughts. For almost three days solid, save for a meeting to review the results of user testing today, this is what my screen has looked like. Like a slow train wreak, we saw it coming, but were powerless to stop it. What’s worse, despite the fact that it’s only due to last until Friday, I fear The Monster will return at regular intervals during the rest of the project to satisfy its lust for power. May the Lord have mercy on our souls.
Surely, what is a “content management system” if wretches like me have to do this work? One day, people will see that they’ve been duped and rise up against the perpetrators of such systems who will rightly burn in hell for all eternity.
Exploding Cow Problem
For some reason last night I decided to post a rather late April fool to uk.legal. It was a bit rough around the edges, but only took about fifteen minutes to do (and spookily time-stamped at exactly 00:00hrs). I’m quite proud that it seems to have at least partially hooked one person in, while producing some pretty good replies from others. Nobody picked up on the the first line about “giving me a steer” though. (The better replies are on the “next 10″ page at the bottom of the listing).
Rasin A Family
Ah he ha ha.
Enough of the April Fools!
It’s obviously a by-product of collaborative websites like Slashdot and Kuro5hin that April 1st generates so many fake stories. One or two might be funny, but there were about ten on Slashdot yesterday: EU to ban Macs, UN to outlaw Internet, Opera inventing a new P2P system called “SoundWave” etc. etc.
The best one this year for my money was BoingBoing’s. It got me fished in for a while… but I got it in the end. I’m still not sure if this is a fool or not though.
Amateur Support – The Only Kind There Is
I was reading this article on the BBC about people providing IT support on the side and it struck me that there’s a bigger thing going on here than simply offering a bit of help to a clueless neighbour.
I have a love/hate relationship with helping people with their computers. I imagine that in the same way as specialists in fields of medicine (neuroscience, or plastic surgery, say) probably get pestered by friends asking them what to do about their piles and whatnot, so I get regular requests to mend desktop PCs. I’m neither qualified, nor even very able to do this, but most times I lend a hand. True, my time as a sysadmin was fairly close to IT support, but setting up slapd or editing zone files is rather different from working out how to get Word to stop crashing.
What I found interesting about the BBC article was that the writer made a point of putting his actions in the context of a lack of manufacturer support for home, and even business, computing. When I look back on how I found out (and still find out) about things, I’m struck by how infrequently I’ve relied on commercial support for products. In fact, I’m also struck by the fact that when I have relied on commercial support, it’s been really awfully bad, or simply non-existent.
The vast majority of my education about computing in the general has been from loose online support communities: bulletin boards, websites and Usenet. When I was doing sysadmin stuff, and much to my surprise a the time, the efficacy of big, expensive helpdesks for systems like iPlanet Server, Oracle and WebLogic (for which we had big, expensive “support contracts” to access) were usually slower and less helpful for most things than a simple couple of posts on Usenet.
So when I read the article about “unofficial” support, it struck a chord. If effective support for commercial software cannot be sold to consumers then that’s yet another good reason to use FLOSS. What a pity the writer missed that angle. And what a pity we can’t point that out.
Back On Line
After almost two days off line while we made the changeover from Plusnet, we’re now with Homechoice. It’s TV, phone and broadband down your phone line, so no dishes or cable laying. You get a nice brushed aluminum STB which looks very much like a Mac Mini only it has a large soft blue light on the front – very large. A bit too large. There’s also a disconcerting lag between hitting a button on the remote and the interface responding, which makes you unconsciously puuush the buttons really hard. I find it remarkably difficult to stop doing that as well.
Otherwise, it’s nice. Well, nice and cheap at £35 a month and has so far done what it was intended to do: give us a decent TV picture while not making us pay lots more for the privilege.We just don’t watch enough telly for Sky. The TV signal is about DivX quality. The STB has crashed once (something about not being able to find the file system) and the EPG takes a bit of getting used to.
Broadband works fine with my IPCop router, but not having a static IP address means I’ve had to say goodbye to my Tor server. Having a 2Mbit connection is a bit of an anti-climax though. Large files take less time to download, but (unsurprisingly) the experience of email and web surfing is indistinguishable from that of the 512K we had with Plusnet. Not only that, but there’s some strange psychological effect taking place: I see higher download rates on files, but I somehow don’t perceive this as bing any faster – the difference between waiting five minutes and two minutes is, well, the length of a grey bar. And that grey bar’s in the background most times. I might even consider downgrading to their 1Mbit service and save a fiver a month…
Web of Letters
Nice – somebody using the Yahoo API with their image search to generate random images in the shape of letters.
Content Mapping
Sometimes I think I’m the only person who lies awake at night worrying about content. Well, I don’t literally do that, but it feels like I might be sometimes. I’m certainly gaining broken record status on the issue and thinking crying-in-the-wilderness thoughts at times.
Part of the problem is that it’s hard to articulate what the problem exactly is (well, I find it hard at least). It’s certainly made harder by the fact that according to the content management software industry it’s not a problem that exists if you use a CMS. How could it, since such software “manages” content! And who indeed could possibly have a problem with managing content after they’d spent half a million bucks on the latest enterprise XML format-agnostic end-to-end solution?
Not surprisingly, the project I’m on has just such a “solution” in place and it’s bringing the subject I love to hate back on the map for me again. To save me the bother of explaining why this is, read this piece on the subject (WARNING: shield your eyes from the photo). It hits the nail(s) on the head pretty much perfectly as far as I’m concerned.
But some problems on my current project are only indirectly related to a CMS. In the recent past I’ve been involved in some reasonably good solutions (up to a point) for getting around the more basic issues of dealing with “modular” builds, but that’s not going to be an option here. So we’re up against it again. The brief is to construct a better IA for the site, and migrate the existing content to that, culling, merging and re-writing as we go. An initial card sort has given us a good candidate structure that the client seems to be running with, even though it’s radically different from the current one. An initial audit indicates the site may have about 10,000 items of content, most of which is highly technical or at least assumes industry knowledge that we don’t have. It would be a big job even if we understood it all, but we’re going to have read, understand, and if we don’t understand, ask specialists about it. We have, erm, one day of two IAs in the project plan for this. Can you guess I wasn’t involved when they put that plan together? Moan, moan, moan (there, got that off my chest).
Let’s assume for a moment that we can get a better structure. That’s not hard – just time consuming. The problem we then have is how we communicate that new structure to a) those responsible for the content re-work, and b) those responsible for the content load using the CMS. The more gung-ho among you may say “Tough – it’s their site, they just asked you to re-design it.” But if the client can’t actually deploy the work you’ve done for them, who they gonna call? The gas board?
My first thought was to construct a huge spreadsheet. Each row is a “page” on the new (re-designed) site. I can then group existing content with each row (using Excel outlines) a bit like this:
Page Name X
Intro text (to be written)
Document 1
Document 2
Page Name Y
Intro text
Body text (to be written)
Other text
Page Name Z
Summary (to be shortened)
Document 3
That would then be the “bible” when it comes to the new architecture. But how do I make sure that when I say “Page Name X” it’s the page to do with X on the current site? I could use its URL, but that’s very long (I note it’s even too long to be rendered by Excel as a clickable link) and they don’t all relate to the content in a one-to-one manner (long story, half understood). This is a CMS, remember?
So how can I expect somebody who doesn’t know the content intimately, nor much about my new architecture, to migrate the current stuff from one structure to another? Bear in mind the current structure is a really, really big mess as well, so it’s not the case that we can do things in chunks either. I’m currently looking at a unique “node ID” that the CMS generates for each content type, so that may help. But boy is it laborious to track down each existing node ID and associate it with a row in the above sheet. This is going to take weeks.
Perhaps I should just accept that just as in ten tousand projects before, it will all come down to the clipboard and a thousand monkeys. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, CTRL+V without end. Amen.
Moving to Homechoice
We’ve decided to move from our current ADSL provider (PlusNet) to Homechoice, the London-only provider of broadband, TV and telephone packages. They do all this via the little copper wire that runs from the BT telephone exchange to your house – impressive.
The main reason for switching to them is not the tech though (oh no, read on about that), but the fact that out TV reception has been awful since the Arts Depot was built up the road from us. Thanks to the precedent set by Hunter v. Canary Wharf in 1996, you can’t complain about TV signal disruption if a building project causes it, so we needed to look for alternatives. Satellite or cable would be the obvious choice, but we just don’t watch that much TV these days to justify the cost. The basic Homechoice package would give us what we wanted, give or take about a fiver per month, based on our current phone usage.
So, we’re due for installation on the 17th March. It poses a couple of annoying issues though. The first is that the Internet connection, like cable, will emerge from the set top box, which is in our living room. The computers, however, are two floors above that. So, I’ve had to lay a cable from the top of the house to the bottom – which has been an adventure in Ethernet (I can now wire a CAT6 terminal…). The second issue is that the STB will have a plain RJ11 socket to attach the home network to. That’s fine, but it means the ADSL router we have will be redundant. We’ll need a router/firewall, but since I’m determined to get this done on the cheap, I’m attempting to make one out of an old computer using IPCop.
Several nights into the small hours later, and my “spare” PC appears to work OK, but it’s so old it’s not Y2K compliant and keeps thinking the year is 2001. This means that every time I boot it up, the firewall goes nuts thinking it’s five years out of date, etc.
So, like any tight-fisted geek, I went to eBay. Last week I took delivery of what was described as a 650MHz machine with no hard disk and 32Mb RAM. It was £15.00 including postage. However, it turns out to be 90MHz with a hard disk, a SCSI CDROM that doesn’t work, and 64Mb RAM. Hmm. Never mind, at least I can install IPCop with floppies. Now, however, the box mysteriously hangs at random intervals. The installation date is approaching, and I’m thinking the fates are against me…
End of an Era
I sold my old bike on eBay this evening – £320. That’s more than I thought I’d get. I can’t help feeling a little sad to see it go. 45 people had it in their watch lists, which was a bit like having a crowd of anonymous mourners at a funeral: a mark of some respect I hope. It’s been a part of me for almost a third of my life; longer than I’ve known my wife and many of my friends, and I’ve ridden every single one of those 30,619 miles. It may have only been a CB250, but for me it always flies sideways through time.
Sunday Observer Goes Collaborative
Having worked for a print publisher for two years and developed a negative impression of that industry (and journalists) when it comes to all things on line, imagine my surprise when I saw the Sunday Observer Blog this morning! I can honestly say that if I were in charge of a serious redesign of any newspaper’s online presence this would be it, and more.
I saw a link to it on BoingBoing: “The weekend paper is now supplemented by a daily blog, with podcasts and moblogs. The RSS is fulltext. Trackbacks and comments are on and unmoderated. Keywords are tracked and displayed in a “folksonomic zeitgeist.” Headlines from competing papers and Technorati link cosmoses are pulled in and displayed on the front page. No paywall. No adwall. No wall.”
This is definitely one for my bookmarks. Just as I’d given up any real hope of a significant dead tree publication doing it “right” – this happens! Well done The Observer! Now BBC – get your finger out and justify my license fee!
Remote Card Sorting
Back at the grindstone this week with an interesting foray into card sorting, but this time using a web application while facilitating users (one to one) over conference calls. It’s thrown up some issues, and almost fallen apart at the seams at one point, but I think it’s going to be helpful in the next stage of working out the site’s taxonomy.
It seems that IAs are beginning to polarise on the merits of card sorting. Right now it seems to be a reasonably mainstream technique, but we’re beginning to find flaws in it along the way. Best practice is that if you’re going to do it, it’s the qualitative aspect of what goes on that’s most important during the sort (although the stats analysis is fun).
However, we’re having a really hard time getting users to research on this project, and when only one (one!) actual customer turned up to our first group card sorting session a couple of weeks ago, we had to think of a new direction. So it was that we decided to try remote sessions. After some quick research into online card sorting systems we narrowed down the options to three:
WebCAT: a free web application written mainly in PHP, but it didn’t work on my WinXP machine (didn’t seem to save the results of the sorts) so we had to pass on that. I’d like to try it on a *NIX box at some point though.
WebSort: a commercial, hosted Flash application. The best UI of the ones we found.
CardSword: a free Java application – nice if rather clunky (and very “beta”).
We decided on WebSort ($99 for a one study license), using IBM’s eZCalc to do the cluster analysis from the data it spits out via email after each session. I’d used the latter tool before and am fairly familiar with it now. We then used CardSword as a fall-back in case WebSort went down. Lucky we did, since that’s exactly what WebSort did 48 hours after we paid our money. The fall-back worked using NetMeeting – I shared the application running on my workstation with the participant on each call – but it was only just fast enough for users to operate. Three days into the testing, WebSort came back on line (they’d been hacked).
In retrospect, it was good that we used two systems since each have their strengths and weaknesses. CardSword over NetMeeting had the distinct advantage of me being able to see what the user was doing. Once the user’s session has been saved, however, you can’t go back to see what they’ve done. The data can also only be analysed by CardSword’s analysis, so I had to screen-scrape each session into a spreadsheet for conversion to eZCalc format later (at the time, we assumed NetSort was dead). NetMeeting also caused the usual ActiveX permissions problems, etc. for some users, and was generally slow and flaky – putting an extra 15 minutes onto what were otherwise 45-min sessions for most people using NetSort. In one case we had a user with a Linux desktop (”It says it doesn’t support my browser.” “What browser do you have?” “I’m using Konquerer…”). Apart from some slowness to send us the data for each session, NetSort worked fine for the most part once it was running for us.
At first, we decided that the best way to run the sessions was to stay on the line with the user. While this was feasible with the NetMeeting method as we could watch the session progress, it wasn’t with WebSort, and in any case it was clear that most users wanted to be left alone for a while once they understood what to do. We typically gave them 20 mins in solitude, then came back in to finish up and handle any problems and probe a bit about the groups they’d made. Qualitative data was pretty hard to pick though and we didn’t get much of it.
Some things I’d do differently if we did it again:
- Don’t use conference calling. It’s over complicated for a one to one session.
- Leave a clear hour between sessions to wrap up, take notes and prep for the next one. We had back-to-back clumps one day, and they threatened to overlap leaving no time of any downtime. Booking spare conferences (and NetMeeting sessions!) for overflow is also hard to juggle.
- Assume users won’t read any introductory literature you give them beforehand, however brief, and include a full verbal introduction into the session. Not a single user had read the preparation document we sent them properly, so I had to put them in the picture from scratch each time.
- Turn off your screensaver while sharing apps under NetMeeting! My screensaver locks my workstation, which then also stops the NetMeeting session. We lost one user that way.
- Construct a custom application for ourselves. WebSort is nice, but it’s not reliable. I’d not want to use them again if I didn’t have to.
Protect The Rights of Bloggers
As a blogger, I call on the Iranian government to free Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad, both in prison in Iran for expressing opinions on their blogs about the government. February 22nd, 2005 is Free Mojtaba and Arash Day – this blog is dedicated to them and their protection.
Away with it!
At last I’ve got round to doing something about that lame home page with the spinning pipes on it. It is now no more – and the blog page is king of the castle. Well, as far as I can tell, anyway. It was actually quite tricky to do in the end (I had to learn what ^ and $ mean) and pedants will note that things that link to “home” now link here. Hmm.
Fans!
I’ve just looked at my Slashdot profile and I have three fans! Maybe I should move my blog there. Better for the ego at least.
Now I’m Really Wearing My Tin Foil Hat
Just when it looked like things had got back to reality….
I’m getting sick of this, and worried too. Here’s a letter I’ve just penned to Robert Evans
MEP:
Dear Robert Evans, I read today that the European Patent Directive is not likely to return to the first reading as previously demanded by Parliament, and that the Commission may ignore the Parliament's vote on restarting the legislative process for this bill. While in the past I have contacted my parliamentary and other representatives about software patents, and concentrated on the fact that software patents cannot be anything other than deeply corrosive to innovation, consumer choice and the health of the UK software industry, I want now to turn to something that has made me even more worried: the overwhelming evidence I am starting to see of democracy being simply ignored in Europe. How can it be that obviously bad legislation is being railroaded through by the Commission when nobody other than corporate lobbyists support it? - The elected European Parliament are 100% AGAINST (this version of directive) - The majority of the The European Council of Ministers are AGAINST (with new countries joining the against all the time) - European citizens/software users (who know about it) are all AGAINST - European software-industry alliances/coalitions are all AGAINST - European software companies are nearly all AGAINST - European