Archives for July 2006
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…
I assume Alan Cooper hasn’t designed any significant web sites because Cooper Interaction Design only lists one in its case studies, and that is HP Shopping. Cooper (or more likely his acolytes) identified a needs-based persona and presumably designed for that and not any others, as per the methodology handed down by the great man. HP then ditched that design for a solidly features-based Endeca boilerplate a couple of years later. Oddly, the only thing Cooper says about the project in terms of results is that most users would have recommend the site to others. The lack of any reference to sales, or even traffic, speaks volumes to me about Cooper and their work for HP.
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.
