(Comments added for week ending Sun 02 Jun 2002) | View Other Weeks
| last updated:16 Aug 2002 13: 31 Webword time, or 16 Aug 2002 18:31 UK time |
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| Webword Statistics - Recent Comments (Comments added for week ending Sun 02 Jun 2002) | View Other Weeks |
| WebWord Comment | Thu 30 May |
| More experimentation. I decided to (gulp!) set up an auction for advertising space for the WebWord Addiction. So, if you have been looking for a place to show your ad about usability, information architecture, web design, hosting, human factors, and other such stuff, this is your chance. Visit the auction and let me know what you think. |
| Fri 31 May 10:47 | christina | I think your math is bad 'Your text advertisement will be placed near the top of five WebWord Addiction newsletter mailings. There are currently over 2,100 subscribers. Therefore, if you win this auction, you will reach over 10,000 WebWord Addiction readers in the next week or two. ' Actually you are reaching roughly two thousand subscribers five times, not ten thousand readers. You might want to look into whether multiple impresions results in better reach or not. |
| Fri 31 May 11:10 | John S. Rhodes | Christina, I think I am correct but I think that you are more correct. I am correct because the advertisement will indeed lead to 10,000 reader impressions. I admit that I sometimes think of impressions as being equivalent to readers. Perhaps that is silly and I should not equate the two. You are more correct because, let's face it, I am only reaching 2,100+ readers five times (which I am upfront about). Given your constructive feedback, I now have a question for the marketing types out there. Is it better to reach 10,000 people one time or is it better to reach 2,000 people five times? My knowledge of marketing makes me think that reaching 2,000 people five times is superior. If I remember correctly it takes 5-7 impressions of an advertisement before it sticks. (Can someone verify this with research? My netcheck didn't reveal any good references.) Are you thinking of placing an advertisement for Carbon IQ? ;-) |
| Fri 31 May 16:22 | MadMan | Christina doesn't work at CarbonIQ any more, it seems. As for your assertion that impressions *sometimes* equal to readers, you *know* that's not true. And as for how many impressions it takes to stick, well... that just depends on how well the ad is written. |
| Fri 31 May 16:27 | John S. Rhodes | Ooops. MadMan, you are right. I missed this. |
| Fri 31 May 22:31 | Frank Lynch | RE advert frequency: my recollection from grad school readings is that there is memory decay following each exposure, and that it is better to -space- five exposures than to have them follow quickly... As for the actual count of readers, this is difficult to estimate from the information provided. On the downside, do you know what your open rate is? And on the upside, you may have people who forward your email newsletter on to others. |
| Sat 01 Jun 06:25 | MadMan | Hmmm... don't seem to be too many bidders for this auction. ;) |
| Sat 01 Jun 08:56 | John S. Rhodes | Frank, I had never heard of the open rate before. Thanks for pointing that out to me. Unfortunately, I do not know what the open rate is for the WebWord Addiction. |
| Sun 02 Jun 09:05 | Frank Lynch | Open rates are difficult to know accurately, but they are important conceptually. To start, let's set the upper and lower limits. The upper limit is obviously 100%, and I assure you your open rate is not that high. The lower limit would be the click-throughs on an embedded link, divided by the number of emails you send out (assuming no one forwards your email). I assure you, your open rate is higher than that, because practically no link achieves 100% click through among those who see it. And unfortunately, these two bounds probably leave you with a wide (practically useless) range. What can you do to measure it? Well, you might try sending the email out return receipt requested (I don't know if that works on all systems). You might also consider just including a friendly note with a link in one of your regular mailings and say you just want to estimate how many people actually open the email, just please harmlessly click. Ways you can -influence- (improve) your open-rate might be: 1. Decrease the frequency (5 times a week might be too much!) 2. Make sure that every email includes something valuable that's not up on your web site 3. Make sure you -communicate- that the content is different from the web site. Point it out on the web site, and perhaps also in the subject header of your email (I know, not a lot of characters there...) 4. Make sure that special content is towards the top of the email, so that the reader is immediately reinforced for having opened the email As an example of human behavior (I know, let's all generalize from me!) I unlisted myself from Tomalak when I realized I was going to the web site daily -anyway-. |
| Sun 02 Jun 23:12 | John S. Rhodes | Good information, Frank. Thanks. |
| BREW | Sun 02 Jun |
| Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless™ |
| Sun 02 Jun 22:24 | John S. Rhodes | Some people seem jacked up about it. |
| this | Sun 02 Jun |
| because of this. |
| Sun 02 Jun 13:47 | John S. Rhodes | I finally figured out why this is a good idea. This was the key for me. 'The whole hoo-ha with the HTML element is making RSS feeds easier for your aggregator software to discover without your manual intervention. “This is a cool site,” you say, and rather than searching the page for a link to an RSS feed so you can copy the feed’s URL into your news aggregator, you just give the aggregator the URL you’re reading, and it can look for an appropriate element all by itself. Mark’s bookmarklets accomplish this for several existing news aggregators.' If you are still confused as to why this is cool, don't worry. It took me about an hour to figure it out and I know a bunch about XML, RSS feeds, news aggregators, and bookmarklets. |
| Sun 02 Jun 20:29 | Mark Pilgrim | Congratulations on being an early adopter; the standard has changed already. ;-) http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/06/02.html#important_change_to_the_link_tag Cheers. -Mark |
| Sun 02 Jun 21:00 | John S. Rhodes | I change has been made... |
| WebWord Comment | Sat 01 Jun |
| Sat 01 Jun 16:01 | John S. Rhodes | I didn't realize that RSS 0.91 and RSS 1.0 feeds were already baked into Movable Type. I should have done this a long time ago. Shame on me. |
| Sun 02 Jun 12:36 | PeterV | Thanks, finally! Check this out, it will take seconds to add: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/05/31.html |
| Sun 02 Jun 13:28 | John S. Rhodes | Peter, I set it up. Hopefully it works. |
| Sun 02 Jun 15:16 | John S. Rhodes | Seems like it works. Excellent. It also looks I'm driving people to the article on Dive Into Mark. |
| Hiding behind the user | Thu 30 May |
| (Spiked) And when the most powerful vision for the web comes from Jakob Nielsen - a man who criticises Microsofts homepage because the Freedom to innovate link is wrongly categorised under Resources - one wonders whether things are moving forwards or backwards. |
| Fri 31 May 00:40 | MadMan | Trivia: Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt, authors of Contextual Design : A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs (an interesting but dry - and very overpriced - book) and partners of InContext Enterprises (a site whose home page and main links are all images without ALT tags), worked with Microsoft on their IA. |
| Fri 31 May 11:02 | Anonymous | I enjoyed this article. Eliot is a good writer and a thoughtful one too. A couple of problems with this article though (and this includes some of the other 'usability backlash' articles posted today). The theme seems to be that we're all taking usability too far, which seems crazy from where I sit. For example, consider this quote: 'Steve Krug's book Don't Make Me Think exemplifies the diminished view of the user, who is characterised in the book as being an impatient, harassed imbecile unable to cope with the slightest cognitive stress. The book is full of passages such as: '[the user] should be able to 'get it' - what it is and how to use it - without expending any effort thinking about it' (7). This is fair enough, from a web design perspective, except when it is used to justify reducing interface design to the lowest common denominator.' Deciding the lowest common denominator is a business decision. And I've seen very few managers or web designers that give more than a passing thought to what the LCD should be. And a patronizing view toward end users STILL seems commonplace among technologists, though they're more private about their now-unPC opinions. And then this quote (which Rhodes seems to like) paints a disingenuous picture of what Nielsen stands for, IMO: 'And when the most powerful vision for the web comes from Jakob Nielsen - a man who criticises Microsoft's homepage because the 'Freedom to innovate' link is wrongly categorised under 'Resources' - one wonders whether things are moving forwards or backwards.' First, I don't think Jakob claims that he has 'the most powerful vision for the web'. Usability is just one very important ingredient for success, along with many others--Nielsen reacts to the near total neglect of usability in the mix. Second, to reduce a high-impact, decades-long career down to one nit-picky little quote is unfair. IMO, the usability profession has barely scratched the surface. We've been fighting hard to convince the technologists that technology should stay out of users' way when performing simple tasks. Imagine how much further we must go to make technology serve as 'decision support', to actually make us smarter? This is where the future lies. |
| Fri 31 May 11:22 | John S. Rhodes | Anonymous Poster, I enjoyed your comment and appreciate your point of view. I think you are right that usability has a long way to go, both in terms of what it can do for companies and in terms of becoming more accepted in companies. Usability is still new, in my opinion, and there is a ton of research that still needs to be done. We're still building the foundation. I think the second issue of being better accepted in companies is related to the marketing of usability. Listen folks, unless we do a better job of selling usability to our companies, we're going to play a small role in projects. I also feel that unless we understand how to fit better into the overall business process, particularly how usability can help the marketing and sales folks, we're going to continue to squabble. Here are some things to think about... A Business Case for Usability Trouble in Paradise: Problems Facing the Usability Community |
| Fri 31 May 13:33 | Eric Grose | I'm trying to figure out why my comment went out anonymous. Must have pressed the wrong button. (Nope! I see that I didn't check the 'personal info' box.) Also, a note to Rhodes. I get tremendous value out of this website. I am amazed that you are able to do this much each day. I suspect there are a ton of people like me who benefit in the same way. I've found many nuggets here that have immediately helped me in my work and my thinking. The impact of your efforts, sir, are hard to measure but are huge. I also wouldn't get too frustrated by the lack of posting responses (though it frustrates me sometimes). People just seem to be so much on the go, but that doesn't mean your efforts are in vain. For example, I REALLY enjoyed the 'What I have learned' article by Milton Glazer. It may change the course of my working career. But my reaction is profound, quiet, and personal. But I wouldn't have found it had you not posted it. So, all I can do is say thank you, and try and close the circle by posting helpful information of my own. So, step one: Thank you, thank you. |
| Fri 31 May 14:38 | JB | I have just come back for HFI's annual usability research review and being on the business side (not a usability expert)found the most enlightening tid-bit. Usability is not a science...it is not even close. Empirical research shows that usability experts can't agree on what are the problems with a site, plus, up to 50% of the problems they point to are actually not problems at all. Worst part about is they cannot tell you which 50% are the real problems. John you are indeed correct usability is still in its infancy and has a long way to go. I also found their candor most refreshing. |
| Fri 31 May 14:44 | John S. Rhodes | Eric, You are being too kind. Here is some information for people to think about; here is why I post news: 1. It satisfies my ego. I would very much like to have the #1 usability resource on the web. I want people to come here. I want to have my traffic increase. I want people to link to WebWord. I want people to think of this site as the place to go for usability and related topics. 2. Right now, at this point in my life, I am willing to expend energy on this web site. WebWord is a labor of love. This topic is fun even after posting news for nearly 4 years. We still have a lot to learn and I like being in the middle of it. 3. I can learn from other people through WebWord. When I share, others share. Everyone wins. It is funny that I tag along with the WebWord crowd just like the other readers. 4. I like the historical aspect of the site. I can go back in time and find out what I was thinking about usability. It is my external memory for usability topics. 5. WebWord generates consulting opportunities for me and my colleagues. It is my place to say -- 'Look, I am an expert in this stuff!' WebWord.com helps WebWord the organization grow. There are other more subtle reasons, but this list pretty much summarizes the major points. Hopefully you think it is interesting. |
| Fri 31 May 14:52 | John S. Rhodes | My personal experience with usability testing clearly tells me that there are very few core usability principles. Guidelines hardly make sense if you plan on being strict. Following guidelines to the letter will simply not work. However, treating guidelines as heuristics is useful. Almost any bit of research can be countered with other research. Research is a human endeavor. There are strong social aspects to the scienfitic method. Usability plays this game too and is quite guilty of trying to fall back on hard data. However, the major caveat is that data is better than assumptions and guesses. The point is, use data but take it with a grain of salt. There is more to the pie than the incredients alone. I think it is also important to realize that research on very specific topics can be excellent. The problem is running a few research projects and drawing big conclusions. Creating theories from little research pebbles is a horrible idea. Yet, that is exactly what happens. |
| Fri 31 May 16:14 | JB | John I can understand you point of view and the argument is valid. But as a business I am accountable for a ROI on all the money I spend on the web site. If usability is to be a important part of my budget, I need some personal reassurance that if I go to you or anyone else that there is some level of agreement on what is wrong on my site...not 2, 10, 100 different ideas - especially when the research is telling me that 50% of these are false truths and there can be no agreement amongst experts on what is wrong. It's almost like planned obsolesce.... here are the things you need to fix, you make the fixes thinking it is OK and then in reality many of the fixes have made it, if not worse, but little or no overall improvement. Please, don't get me wrong, I am a strong believe in usability and I defer to the experts, but here needs to be an industry-wide push for uniformity or a change in mind set where the changes can be translated into ROI where there are meant to be some tangible results...for exmaple by making these changes you will see a 15% increase in sales and here is why.... I am accountable so usability recommendations and experts need to be to. |
| Sat 01 Jun 05:45 | Matt Round | Do you demand such 'hard evidence' from your graphic designers? That would seem silly, right? I know this may sound naive or ridiculous, but sometimes you need to stop thinking about covering your back with dubious ROI calculations. Don't isolate individual aspects (including usability), integrate them and focus on building a better product. You seem to be thinking of usability as a bolt-on component that may or may not make you money, when it's no more separate than design, IA, programming or marketing. |
| Sat 01 Jun 09:19 | (the other) JS | Even the proponents of 'branding' test things such as recognition and likeability, even though these get criticized as worthless. These factors are more wholistic of the entire design experience. One quickly gets the impression from the critics of usability that what's being pushed for is not innovation, but the unquestioned creative freedom of times past. You don't for example see an organized refutation -- just Jakob is raining on the parade. Got five or fifty sites, or products, or services that break all the rules? Fine. May I go so far as to say great, even. Post them. ...Do a side-by-side refutation, between one philosophy of design and another. Or throw out a different, wholistic, methodology or concept or whatever you want to call it. Forget Jakob. Many people are tired of meaningless, emperor has no clothes, rampant creativity where the only basis for success is that the designer feel unfettered by pesky client concerns. |
| WebWord Comment | Tue 28 May |
| I decided that I like Movable Type so I made a donation. |
| Wed 29 May 10:23 | Anonymous | Donation? You haven't paid for Moveable Type? This sure looks like a commercial application. It supports your consulting business. |
| Wed 29 May 13:17 | John S. Rhodes | From the Movable Type donation page: 'Before you pay, though, make sure you're actually going to use the product. Give yourself some time to get used to the new system.' I gave it some time and I made sure it worked for me. I'm happy so I decided to donate. End of story. |
| Wed 29 May 22:44 | Anonymous | Uh, no. From the FAQ page: 'If you represent a business or a for-profit site which would like to use Movable Type 2.0 or higher as its weblogging/content management system, the cost is $150 for a commercial license.' I hope you donated $150. |
| Fri 31 May 20:35 | Anonymous | The guilt. Oh, the guilt. |
| WebWord Comment | Thu 30 May |
| It looks like Amazon has found another way to capitalize on knowing my name. |
| Thu 30 May 12:44 | Anonymous | big deal simple cookie recognition |
| Thu 30 May 13:26 | PeterV | It's not about techie, it's about being clever sales people. Amazon really get their stuff right - I wonder if they are keeping all their research results in a huge database and will one day start selling that? |
| Thu 30 May 13:45 | John S. Rhodes | I wasn't trying to say that Amazon is wonderful or that Amazon is using some amazing technology. I was merely indicating that they are finding new ways to use the information they have about me. Nothing profound; move along now. |
| Fri 31 May 00:29 | MadMan | Peter, that research and data is part of Amazon's competitive advantage. For example, if you ran a supermarket and found that twice as many people bought cereal if it was placed on the lower shelves, would you then share that data so your competitor supermarket could increase *their* sales? I think not. |
| Fri 31 May 03:53 | LKM | What really scares me is if I visit some random other site with an amazon ad, and they display my name. It happens on sites I've never been to, it just says 'Hello, [name]'. That always almost gives me a heart attack before I notice that it's just amazon who knows my name, not the site itself. |
| Fri 31 May 06:04 | MadMan | LKM, if you're using IE6.0, it blocks cookies from other sites by default. So you'll never see that. |
| Fri 31 May 09:56 | Anonymous | useless |
| Fri 31 May 13:46 | LKM | that won't work. I think they include stuff directly from the amazon site using javascript. the site you visit doesn't know your name or your cookie, only amazon does. all browsers only give cookies to the domain who set them. |
| Fri 31 May 16:27 | MadMan | Yes, but IE6 will block cookies from Amazon.com that recognise you. |
| Fri 31 May 16:48 | Adam Kalsey | The point MadMan is trying to make is that IE 6 blocks third party cookies. So if you are viewing a site at www.site.com that contains an image or JavaScript from Amazon and Amazon tries to set a cookie, IE 6 will block it. IE can be configured to only accept cookies from sites that have a document loaded in the browser window and ignore cookies that come from page elements in other domains. Other browsers have this capability as well. |
| Fri 31 May 19:29 | MadMan | Thanks for clarifying that, Adam. :) Yeah, I meant 'third party' when I said 'other sites'. |
| AmphetaDesk | Wed 29 May |
| AmphetaDesk is a news aggregator - it sits on your desktop, downloads the latest news that interests you, and displays them in a quick and easy to use (and customizable!) webpage. With thousands of channels for selection, AmphetaDesk can shave hours off your day - and youll look smart to all your friends! Egotism never had it better! |
| Wed 29 May 12:10 | Rupert | I wish MT had better instructions for installation on Windows 2000. |
| Thu 30 May 09:04 | Morbus Iff | Good day. I'm the creator of AmphetaDesk. Mysterious? Could you be more indepth? I'm always willing to make things easier for the end-user. AmphetaDesk is aimed toward the non-techy folks - I have no desire to make another Radio Userland. |
| Thu 30 May 12:05 | John S. Rhodes | Morbus, I was not clear at all in my comments. I meant to say that the installation was painless but the actual underlying idea of RSS, newsfeeds, and that sort of thing probably won't make sense to non-technical people. In other words, my grandmother wouldn't 'get it' even after she installed AmphetaDesk. She wouldn't really understand the power of the application nor would she be able to understand how and why she might look for feeds. The program works well for me and I understand what you doing with it, but I am not sure others will understand it. By the way, that's fine since I think since my grandmother is not your audience. And, perhaps more importantly, I might be wrong. Maybe my grandmother would install it and love it and use it and tell other people about it. That is an empirical question. On a different topic, please let me know if you would like to be interviewed. I have a few questions in mind already... |
| Thu 30 May 12:26 | Morbus Iff | Ah. Gotcha. Your point is pretty solid - RSS and the underlying technology is pretty out there (since you'd need some basis in XML) to the normal user. That's why I try never to mention those terms (save for the XML button) in the AmphetaDesk GUI - I instead refer to 'channels', and about 'providing news in a syndicated format'. I'm always on the lookout for how to make things easier for the end user. I hope that the user doesn't NEED to understand the technology, much like a user doesn't need to know much about Usenet to hook into groups via OE, for example. And yeah, an interview is fine ;) |
| Thu 30 May 12:58 | MadMan | Whoa Kevin, you seem to be all in the spotlight these days, dude. John Rhodes wants to interview *you*. :) |
| Thu 30 May 16:14 | Morbus Iff | Madman! Fancy meeting you here :) |
| Thu 30 May 17:08 | MadMan | John will tell you that I'm a regular poster here. Hey, this is a usability site, after all, and that's part of what I do for a living. |
| Thu 30 May 17:53 | John S. Rhodes | MadMan is here often and has many interesting things to say. WebWord wouldn't be WebWord without the MadMan. |
| Thu 30 May 19:52 | Morris Cox | The problem I have is that I want to add a lot of channels, but I don't know if I'll lose what I have selected if I go to the next page without subscribing. I also don't research seeing a search function. |
| Thu 30 May 19:53 | Morris Cox | Oops. I meant 'I also don't recall seeing a search function.' |
| Thu 30 May 21:27 | Morris Cox | Morris, yeah, currently there is no Search function. And the 'forgetting what I've checked off' makes a decent amount of sense. At this point, yes, if you click off to another page without 'subscribing to the checked channels', you'll lose those selections. Besides the obvious 'subscribe as I move around' (which requires some extra coding), what can I do to alleviate the confusion until I add that feature? |
| Thu 30 May 21:28 | Morbus Iff | Uh. Obviously, the comment above this one should be signed 'Morbus Iff', not Morris Cox. I got confused. Too... many... windows! |
| Thu 30 May 23:10 | Morris Cox | Too many windows? Another usability concern? :) How about making it possible to list more channels on a single page? Being able to list 50 or 100 or all channels on a single page would be nice, especially if I could just check off the ones I want and do a single subscribe. |
| Fri 31 May 08:39 | Morbus Iff | Morris, this would be very easily possible in the next version of AmphetaDesk (which, from a tweaker standpoint, is immensely powerful), and I hope to release soon (June 15th is the planned date). By default, I still show entries by alphabetics, but a few tweaks here and there to one of the templates would give you an 'every 150 feeds' sort of display. |
| WebWord Comment | Thu 30 May |
| As most Amazon associates know, when you try to link to a book directly Amazon forces people to look at a Similar Items page. For example, follow this link to Son of Web Pages That Suck. See what I mean? OK. Now, follow this link to Son of Web Pages That Suck. You go directly to the page. Boom! The answer is a little bit of information ref=nosim that needs to be added to your URL. Of course, this increases the chances of getting a 15% referral but it might decrease the possibility of the person buying other items. By the way, after I figured this out, I did a Google search for ref=nosim and found this useful page (which says what I just said, but better). |
| Fri 31 May 00:44 | MadMan | You're far better off with a direct link (i.e, 'ref=nosim') link than the 'similar' link. A bit of math and psychology gives you the reason. Want me to elaborate? |
| Fri 31 May 00:48 | MadMan | You're far better off with a direct link (i.e, 'ref=nosim') link than the 'similar' link. A bit of math and psychology gives you the reason. Want me to elaborate? |
| Blogosphere: the emerging Media Ecosystem | Thu 30 May |
| But its important to note that for the first time, everyday people have a way to correct misinformation and circulate the correct information back into the Media Ecosystem. And once that information enters the Blogosphere, it has a chance to spread just as quickly as the original information. Compare that the difficult in getting a Correction printed in the newspaper... and then, the chances of anyone seeing that Correction buried deep inside the next days paper. (Comment: Many blogs are pointing to this. A few things struck me about it. First, the article is long. If you are interested in blogs, writing, reporting, and journalism, print it out and read it. Second, there isnt much that is actually new in this article. However, it brings several ideas together and that is valuable. Third, there is a lot of hot air that could be removed. Much of it sounds very dot com and overly important. Look folks, you can read and you can write on the web. Thats important, it really is, but it wont cure cancer or bring world peace.) |
| Thu 30 May 15:27 | (the other) JS | Over fondness for self congratulation and counting your new economies before they're hatched are key traits online. That's the defining characteristic, not a facility for grasping any hard truth or sophisticated new concept like collaborative innovation. |
| Usability for Senior Citizens | Sun 28 Apr |
| (useit.com) Websites tend to be produced by young designers, who often assume that all users have perfect vision and motor control, and know everything about the Web. These assumptions rarely hold, even when the users are not seniors. However, as indicated by our usability metrics, seniors are hurt more by usability problems than younger users. Among the obvious physical attributes often affected by the human aging process are eyesight, precision of movement, and memory. |
| Thu 30 May 13:20 | Andrew Lyons | Re the Jakob Nielsen article. If you are wondering if web designers are really young (compared to seniors), try this simple test: Ask youself how many people working in the web industry today have already retired. That should give you the answer you seek. As usual, Jakob's article has *some* useful and interesting points in it, but he comes across as such an annoying, patronising old fart that most people prefer to disregard the research. Sigh. |
| Amazon's Secret Sauce | Wed 29 May |
| (Business 2.0) First and foremost, e-commerce survivors are still with us because they have great software. They perfected ways to put vast inventories at customers fingertips, they make it easy and safe to pay, and they make regular patrons feel valued. |
| Wed 29 May 12:08 | MadMan | Hmmm... now, this gets my goat a little. Amazon has sales volumes, but it doesn't have profit beyond one quarter. All the bloody usability in the world hasn't prevented the losses due to bad (IMHO) business strategy. So where's the 'success'? Sales without (eventual) profits are meaningless. If I sold widgets for $10, I could probably double sales by cutting the price to $3. Would that make it a successful business? Do you think that without its excellent logistics network, Amazon could have the sales it does? What's the point in having an extremely usable site if you can't ship to your customers in time? Usability *is* important, but it isn't everything. (And when I read articles like this, it makes my blood boil. Such ignorance cannot be forgiven.) Don't believe me? Let me ask you this: in 1984, which had the superior interface - the command line DOS-based PC or the Apple Macintosh? Apple had a good GUI nearly two decades ago. Yet, did it storm the market? No! People actually stuck to a crappy command prompt till Microsoft Windows 3.0 went mainstream - about 9 years later. Did usability help Apple recover from its stupid business decision to retain all control over its hardware? Why on earth would customers prefer the pathetic usability of 'C:\>' to the slick GUI of the Mac? Patricia Seybold (of the Customers.com book fame) actually wrote that companies should spend more on customer-centred practices and *less* on marketing/ advertising. I'm all for customer-centric design, etc., but if you honestly think that marketing isn't essential to the success of a product, you need a nut tightened in your head. This is a space for comments, so I won't write an article here. It just bugs me that some people refuse to acknowledge ALL the factors that make a product and company successful. |
| Wed 29 May 12:50 | Frank Lynch | The reason Milo Minderbender can sell his eggs at below his cost is because he deals in volume! I think that's pretty much the Bezos model: lose money like crazy, early, to achieve critical mass. But as you properly point out, a profitable quarter was a very long time in coming. I think that we could fairly describe usability as necessary for success, but not sufficient. I just spent considerable time at hotels.com before I realized that they were offering me hotels with insufficient numbers of beds (which couldn't be determined until 2-3 clicks deeper into the process, one hotel at a time). Orbitz wasn't better - - offering hotels where rooms either weren't available or the data wasn't in their system. (I eventually cut bait and went directly to calling a hotel chain on the phone.) In each case, the site was unuseable because it wanted me to sift through the VOLUMES of irrelevant information. Hotels (and books/whatever in the case of Amazon) should be areas where the internet excels, not fails miserably. Profitability and useability are both -necessary-, but neither is sufficient for success. |
| Wed 29 May 13:29 | Berna | MadMan, as usual, I think you're right.. Unfortunately though I don't think the majority of people are going to realize the importance of usability/marketing/sales/programming/support etc. as a combined 'force' any time soon... As far as I've seen, people tend to think that whatever it is they're doing is the answer to solving all the problems in the world. Sales and Marketing people dont really care about usability, but then again, we usability professionals dont always point out how marketing will fit into the approach we suggest. Marketing thinks that if they do their job good enough nobody's going to think twice about the usability of whatever they're marketing. Usability people tend to think that if the product is usable enough it will market itself. hmm.. I would love for somebody to come out and tell me that I'm just observing the wrong instances and that usually it's not like that at all... or that there is absolutely nothing wrong with 'my job will end world hunger' approach... anyone? my two cents. |
| Wed 29 May 14:52 | Lydia | Berna, I tend to agree with you. The two practices of usability and marketing are more effective when the other component is involved. Good usability doesn't mean squat if the marketing is wrong (or missing), and slick marketing might get initial users, but won't save a poorly designed product in the end. What I want to know is whether others think the two are separate practices or not. I tend to think they are, aside from influence on branding, but I have been at companies where Marketing had a stranglehold on everything that a customer saw, resulting in a rigid, gridlocked design. Has blending the two ever worked for anyone? |
| Wed 29 May 15:29 | Berna | Lydia, I have also worked in such a company. I do believe that Marketing and Usability are seperate practices, but however, I don't agree that one should have control over the other, or that they shouldnt be able to work together. It would be VERY interesting to know if anybody can provide us with a case of blending the two. Who knows, maybe we're being idealistic, maybe it's been tried and the company ended up with the loss of both departments who, at the end, just killed eachother. heh! John, do you have any comments on this issue? |
| Wed 29 May 16:25 | Frank Lynch | Berna, my experience has been different from yours, when you wrote, 'Usability people tend to think that if the product is usable enough it will market itself.' The usability people I dealt with were frequently asking questions regarding genuine customer needs - - not necessarily with respect whether a web site should even exist or not, but more along the lines of what to offer & emphasize on a web site, with an interest in minimizing extraneous features. |
| Wed 29 May 18:51 | G. Kart Mozart | Madman What bugs you about the Cooper.com article 'Three Traps'? Ok, it's not a very broad perspective-- the author cites only 3 pitfalls. Seemed reasonable to me, though. If anything, that article seems to support your argument... maybe I've misunderstood. // G |
| Thu 30 May 09:47 | Berna | What you stated is partly my point. If all marketing people thought of marketing as only 'asking questions regarding genuine customer needs' and also that what to offer on the site could be answered by customer questions, I dont think that marketing and usability would have any problems getting along... In most marketing departments I've seen, we actually had to convince them that asking customers what they want would be a good practice, rather then telling customers what they want. |
| Thu 30 May 13:03 | MadMan | Providing 'what the customer needs' is the old definition of marketing. Sometimes, customers are not even aware of what they need. How many people asked for a product like the Jeep, you think? May I recommend a reading of Marketing Warfare? |
| Why DHTML Will Win | Mon 27 May |
| (New Architect) You might object to this perspective on the grounds that we do, in fact, need client-side processing, personalization, reliable client/ server communication, and a way to save state without disrupting the page display. But DHTML lets you do all of that. And it doesnt require your customers to sit through needless delay while your plugins or virtual machines load. |
| Tue 28 May 04:23 | Matt Round | Don't forget one of the biggest advantages of DHTML over Flash, one that Steve doesn't cover - search engine friendliness. It doesn't matter how great looking a Flash site is if noone can find it. With DHTML you can have interactivity and animation yet still keep pages accessible to search engines. Being linking-friendly is another big advantage. If you're pitching for a site which is currently built entirely in Flash don't just go on about Web Standards, accessibility and the evil of plugins, show the client how little of their content appears in search engines. Many will sit up and take notice quite sharply. |
| Thu 30 May 12:55 | Anonymous | Yawn. Anyone else sick of these holy wars? Flash vs. DHTML... pixels vs. percentages... designers vs. programmers... Use the right tool for the job. Bottom line. I need a nap. |
| Why Your New Car Doesn't Have a Built-in PC | Tue 28 May |
| (Cringely) Telematics hasnt worked so far because we dont have hard disk drives that will reliably run in automobiles, and telematics hasnt worked so far because it takes four years to design a car. |
| Wed 29 May 07:58 | (the other) JS | If Cringely had put as much effort into scenarios for use as he did describing the technology, there would be a telematics revolution. Instead we get iDrive. A little over-fondness with the solution before there's a problem to focus on. ...Always a recipe for disaster. |
| Wed 29 May 11:49 | jl | Having watched drivers weaving in and out of their lanes on the highway as they talk on their cell phones, I am shuddering at the thought of drivers web surfing as they drive. |
| Wed 29 May 12:13 | MadMan | For the sake of all our lives, I hope they don't put computers into our cars. |
| Wed 29 May 16:06 | Berna | I agree with all.. I've been tried to be victimized (or run over, or thrown off a cliff) by enough 'cellphone drivers' and/or people using their GPS monitors etc. Please don't do this to humanity! No browsing or surfing in cars please. I'll make sure to develop a sign for that soon... |
| Google and Psychological Reality | Mon 27 May |
| (Zen Haiku) Google does not find the most authoritative source. It finds what people believe to be the most authoritative source. |
| Wed 29 May 10:07 | Frank Lynch | This is -close- to what I've felt since I searched for 'windex' at Google, and finding that the first listings related to a computer program, not a brand of window cleaning products. But it is sufficiently off of what happens to merit clarification. Google doesn't 'find what people believe to be the most authoritative source.' It finds what other web page writers choose to link to. If Google really sorted out what -people- believe are the most valuable, then it would be immensely better. But its resource is not a representative group of people, but a group of those who write web pages. I think we all recognize the importance of that difference. I'm not sure whether I prefer Direct Hit (now morphed into Teoma, IIRC) or about.com's directories... But I find myself checking all three. |
| Wed 29 May 14:04 | Chad Lundgren | Frank: Good point. Psychological reality is also partially a function of what subculture(s) you belong to. On the Internet, many tend toward the geeky. The Jargon File has an excellent definition of evil that explains evil as meaning someone or something whose operating assumptions are too different to be worth dealing with. Usually someone in a different subculture. Thus you have scientists, who insist above all else on careful logic,accuracy, and narrow claims, describing politicans as evil because of their broad pronouncements. But good scientific talking is not good public speaking: all the qualifications and references neccesary slow down the rhetoric too much. Politicians hate uncertainty: science is, in some sense, founded on it. |
| Handspring Treo 180: Two Months Later | Tue 28 May |
| (Dan Bricklin) Im quite happy that I purchased my Treo 180 and recommend it. It is usually the only phone I carry outside of the home or office, and the one I forward other phones to, etc. |
| Wed 29 May 12:13 | JB | The new Sony/Ericsson collaboration blows this thing out of the water....bye, bye Handspring. |
| Wed 29 May 13:13 | John S. Rhodes | Good news for Palm... (Salon, 1998) How Palm Beat Microsoft ...bad news... (Industry Standard, 2001) Palm Losing Grip on Market Share ...and now. (Pocket PC, 2002) Palm Losing Market Share, Others Making Up Ground (CommWeb, 2002) Palm, Handspring Fighting a Losing Battle Against Microsoft? |
| Paper-thin phone could replace letters | Tue 28 May |
| (Economist) Designer Stephen Forshaw has developed a wafer-thin phone stuck on to paper that can be used to make one call. |
| Wed 29 May 10:22 | Anonymous | Yeah, I'm sure what I hear about overflowing landfills is hogwash. Let's produce more wasteful products! RAH! RAH! RAH! |
| Wed 29 May 11:40 | MadMan | OK, John, I'm wondering why you didn't find this funny. I quote: 'The design has already won first prize in a competition sponsored by Sony. ' Always be wary when something wins a design competition. I'm proud to announce that I possess far superior technology in my house. [infomercial voice] Yes, no longer do you have to wait for your voice messages to travel long distances using the postal system. No! Now, you can instantly connect with your loved ones and wish them a happy birthday. I call it... (drumroll please!) the... telephone! This little device actually connects you within seconds to your friends and family. Why risk losing your important voice messages or greetings in the mail or have it arrive late at its destination? With our easy-to-use Telephone PX101, you just have to press about 7 numbers, and your voice can reach your loved ones without the waiting that 'voice mail' devices put you through. And if you order now, we'll include a copy of 'Common Sense for Dummies' with your order of the Telephone PX101! Hurry! Only a few million left in stock! Want to call a friend? Pick up a Telephone PX101 now. [end infomercial voice] |
| TinyURL | Tue 28 May |
| (via Boing Boing) Are you sick of posting URLs in emails only to have it break when sent causing the recipient to have to cut and paste it back together? |
| Wed 29 May 00:21 | MadMan | Another such service is http://shorl.com The added feature (which I like very much) is that it allows you to track how many people used that link. Very cool. |
| Wed 29 May 02:48 | Matt Round | It'd be nice if more developers considered the URL to be part of the design of the site. A long, untidy URL gives the wrong impression and is offputting for users. There are also good technical reasons for use default documents throughout a site (no problems if a switch is made to a different scripting technology). There are techniques available allowing the use of user-/search-engine-'friendly' URLs for virtually all servers and scripting languages, yet many supposedly top-notch firms/CMSs are still showing off their innards in URLs. (note to self: switch own weblog to use better URLs for archive section. Pot,kettle,black,etc.) |
| Wed 29 May 06:05 | MadMan | Matt, you should see the URLs generated by BroadVision. ;) |
| Wed 29 May 11:24 | MadMan | Outpost.com is a site that uses Broadvision. Here's the URL for their 'Software (PC and Mac)' page: http://shop3.outpost.com/{PPTyo9seyaxfkJkIMAy271zVJC4GsA2bvCgVzs2oKX6IIkoXeulK|6385617801620374340/168694311/6/7001/7001/7002/7002/7001/-1|706101755662355146/168694309/6/7001/7001/7002/7002/7001/-1|1022685859594}/template/software/ Oooh, try sending *that* to a friend by email. ;) Go try it out for yourself at http://www.outpost.com |
| A Timleline Surrounding September 11th | Sun 26 May |
| (via Camworld) A more complete timeline listing crucial events both before and after the September 11th suicide attacks, which have been blamed on bin Laden, establishes CIA foreknowledge of them and strongly suggests that there was criminal complicity on the part of the U.S. government in their execution. |
| Wed 29 May 11:08 | Alan Fisher | John, the Hunt The Boeing site has been fairly comprehensively exposed as an urban myth (albeit of quite horrendous proportions). I hope you're not suggesting we should believe that rubbish. |
| Managing Incoming E-mail: What Every User Needs to Know | Mon 27 May |
| (Mark Hurst) This report - available as a PDF download - describes a simple method that will allow any user to cope with increasing amounts of incoming e-mail. |
| Mon 27 May 10:55 | Anonymous | this white paper is worthless... |
| Mon 27 May 12:49 | Rikard Linde | Indeed |
| Mon 27 May 13:27 | Ron Zeno | Agreed. Don't waste your time. Awaiting an apology from John Rhodes... |
| Mon 27 May 13:59 | Anonymous | If you have time to read a 35 page report, you don't have the problem of receiving too much e-mail. |
| Mon 27 May 14:19 | John S. Rhodes | 1. Sometimes I just post news. In general, I don't agree or disagree with it unless I explicitly say so. In this case, I read the report and was not moved in any direction. I liked the idea of filters (but that is old news) and I liked the idea of keeping your inbox empty (also old news). 2. Reader reaction is interesting so far. People seem to think that the paper is worth less because Mark Hurst is asking for $10 for it and because it is over 30 pages long. Is that true? If not, why do you think the paper is worthless? |
| Mon 27 May 18:39 | Anonymous | I'm not going to bother giving some guy my e-mail address just to read a long report that presents no promise for telling me something I don't already know. If the guy has something groundbreaking, shocking or unusual to say, he should say it up front. Take a page from Jakob Marketing 101. Title the report, 'E-mail: 99% Bad.' |
| Tue 28 May 01:37 | MadMan | 'It may be controversial, but this report boldly asserts that users can and should be ultimately responsible for managing their own e-mail.' Oh my! Guess I'll have to stop paying that college kid $5.12 per hour to do it for me, eh? More gems: 'The correct way to measure e-mail load is by the message count, or the number of e-mails currently sitting in the Inbox.' Who would've guessed? I was counting the number of bananas growing in my backyard! Actually, number by itself is not a complete measure. For example, I'm subscribed to 13 e-mail discussion lists, some of them in digest mode. One digest can be 50K+, which is about 5-10 minutes of reading. A 'Hi, how are you?' message from my brother is about 1K, which is about 30 seconds of reading. A newsletter from a news site is also different. 'Keep the inbox empty'. This does absolutely nothing to solve the problem. The real problem with many people (I get several hundred messages in a day) is finding the *time* to clear out the inbox. So I do a triage, and read personally addressed mail first (one of my filters highlights any message with my name in it), then evolt.org admin stuff, then mailing list mail, then newsletters, then spam. Usually, some newsletters have to get the axe. 'Especially large inboxes are more likely to crash, losing all contents.' I've been using Eudora for 8 years, and this has never happened to me. Depends on the mail client. One of my friends, Rudy, a SQL god, has over 400 MB of email in his Outlook Express client. 'One might correctly argue that Microsoft Outlook’s calendar, todo list, and address book are inadequate tools.' And why would one argue that? I've found them to be quite adequate. Unsubstantiated claim. 'Open each message, from top to bottom of the inbox, engage it — that is, take some action — then delete it from the inbox.' Unfortunately, this is not always possible. Some messages can have short replies, but others might need more research. If I'm short on time at that moment, I probably can't reply to it until later. 'Use the “two-minute rule” for to-dos: if it takes two minutes or less to complete, do it immediately (even if it means physically getting up from your chair), and then delete the e-mail.' And if you're a programmer trying to get a program module working right, interrupting yourself for even one minute can throw you out of the 'zone' completely, and cause several minutes of wasted productivity. Or if you're writing a business report, an article, or hacking HTML markup, or... any of several tasks that require concentration. And lastly, we have a long tutorial on creating spam filters, which is useful. Some enterprising spammers have caught on to this, and instead use more innocent subject lines like 'hi', and 'about your message', 'Can we meet?', 'that info you wanted', etc. Next, we move on to... Danger, Will Robinson! We have altered course. We are no longer talking about managing email. Instead, we're going to spend two pages bashing Microsoft Outlook for its flaws. What does it have to do with spending less time on email? Who knows? Mind you, I'm not saying Outlook is without flaws, but doing an interface critique in a PDF file about managing email effectively, aimed at average users (who don't understand interface design), is a misdirected effort. There, I'm done. :) |
| Tue 28 May 11:02 | jl | Now that I have read MadMan's summary and comments, I don't have to read the report. Thank you, MadMan! |
| Tue 28 May 14:20 | MadMan | I donate my time so you don't have to waste yours. :) You're quite welcome. Who in his right mind would ask for $10 for that? |
| Tue 28 May 14:45 | Berna | I was going to say alot but looks like MadMan has said it all! ;o)) |
| Spielberg in the Twilight Zone | Mon 27 May |
| (Wired) There are certain technologies that scare me because I dont think Im very good at them. For instance, programming a computer. I can get on AOL, and thats about it. |
| Mon 27 May 23:34 | Neil | I think it's interesting that you linked to the printer page, instead of the page Wired would've probably preferred to link to. I also think it's interesting the article made me want to go out and rent A.I., where previously no inclination to do so existed. |
| Tue 28 May 11:55 | Anonymous | Skip Minority Report and rent Logan's Run... Same underlying premise, but greater originality. Plus, it will prime you for the upcoming remake of Logan's Run, so you'll know how much better a movie can be when it doesn't use computer animation as a crutch (which I'm sure the remake will). |
| Eight resume tips for the experienced IT pro | Sun 26 May |
| What I learned in this process is that building a resume for experienced IT professionals who want to land higher-level IT jobs is quite different from building the average resume to land entry-level administrator jobs. |
| Mon 27 May 03:38 | sherlock_yoda | This article appears to require membership to be viewed. Perhaps you should warn of this next to the URL. Sherlock |
| Mon 27 May 09:06 | John S. Rhodes | Are other people experiencing the same problem? Does it really require registration? While it is good that I might be registered but not remember, it means that when I link, I forget that others will need to be registered. I wonder how often this happens? It is a usability problem. |
| Mon 27 May 10:06 | Anonymous | I'm able to view this article it w/o registration. |
| Mon 27 May 23:19 | Neil | 'You have attempted to access Membership-level content' ... That's what I got. I don't know whether this affected it at all, but I blocked the cookie they tried to send me. |
| Tue 28 May 00:57 | MadMan | That's a short article without much content. Instead, let me toot my own horn here and point you to my article, Top 10 Resume Dos and Don'ts (which I wrote over 3 years ago). But I prefer marketing yourself through contacts rather than submitting your resume to some HR puke who doesn't know jack. If you want to check out a good site on job hunting, visit Ask the HeadHunter. (Apologies for not properly accenting 'resume'. Too much work ;) |
| Exploring content filters | Mon 27 May |
| (Boxes and Arrows) What if I suggested a new way of navigating an online information space? What if it was something we’ve all seen before but just never thought to use? I’m talking about subtracting away information the user doesn’t want. |
| Mon 27 May 23:16 | Bill | i can't read that site without forcing the text and background colors. no thanks. |