Author: Victor

Career Change Justified

I went and spent all that money on a masters degree in music technology, and realized it wouldn’t be long before everyone would have the same skills as soon as the ease of use improved and PC processor speeds made dedicated hardware obsolete. Witness Apple’s GarageBand. Glad I’m a designer.

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The Effects of Menu Graphic Design on Navigation Research

I was psyched to find The effects of menu design on information-seeking performance and user’s attitude on the World Wide Web by Byeong-Min Yu and Seak-Zoon Roh (JASIST, Volume 53, Issue 11, Pages 923-933). It’s only a couple years old and fairly rigorous, but I can’t recommend it. It looks as if in the process of trying to control for the graphic design, they ended up simply creating bad graphic design. Below is a shot of a cascading menu from the study, which is so unusual looking I can’t respect the study’s findings. Granted we’re looking at this out of context, but something as familiar as a cascading menu – especially when used for a navigation – should look rather familiar. I would think when controlling for this, it would make more sense to use the very familiar, such as menus that resembled Windows menus. Oh well.

CSS and CMS

Designing a site now that has to push the envelope of how CSS must be able to tweak the layout, much like CSS Zen Garden but for an ecommerce application. We’re also using a content management system, so the interplay of CSS and CMS becomes interesting. I think I can simplify the CMS templates so they only have to reflect business logic, and all the differences in presentation are done in the CSS. Still, it changes how I think about content types. Normally I’d only think about how granular the content types need to be to work in every template. Now I’m also thinking about what I want to appear in separate DIVs too. Not sure if that will end up being more granular or not. Dave Shea posts related thoughts about the relationship between markup and CSS flexibility.

Besides all the usual advantages of CSS, it should be an easier implementation as CSS development is easier than CMS template development. I think.

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Categorized as Markup

Norman on Powerpoint

Don Norman says, PowerPoint is NOT the problem…. Any dense, detailed information that requires study to understand can NOT be presented in a talk ­ it can be summarized and described, but the study and concentration required for understanding should be done elsewhere. Talks are for summaries. Amen. Link courtesy PJB. Also see the Laurence Lessig slides for a bit o’ contrast to Tufte-ism.

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NYC Taxi Tips

My heart breaks when I see newbie tourists in Manhattan. The young woman the other day carrying armloads of luggage in the rain politely asking the cab driver if he drives to Queens. Here’s two tips to avoid the worst:

  • Taxis must drive you anywhere in the five boroughs of New York City, period. The trick is to get in the taxi, close the door, and then tell them where you’re going. Don’t get out until you are at your destination. If they give you grief because they don’t want to drive to a particular neighborhood, threaten to write down their name and license number and report them. Pretend you’re on Law and Order, it’s fun.
  • If you have anything in the trunk, upon arrival get out leaving the door open, remove your items from trunk, then close the door. This avoids the taxi accidentally speeding off with your stuff.

Bonus tip: on the subway, if you don’t get a seat, you’re gonna wanna hold on to the hand rail, really.

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Security update

We just noticed a fighter jet flying low over the Hudson River along Manhattan. Spooky.

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One-Question Survey

The One Number You Need to Grow by Frederick F. Reichheld is a great, short article on using one-question surveys that measure loyalty correlated with customer behavior. Highlights:


‘Every month, Enterprise polled its customers using just two simple questions, one about the quality of their rental experience and the other about the likelihood that they would rent from the company again. Because the process was so simple, it was fast. That allowed the company to publish ranked results for its 5,000 U.S. branches within days. …the company counted only the customers who gave the experience the highest possible rating…By concentrating solely on those most enthusiastic about their rental experience, the company could focus on a key driver of profitable growth: customers who not only return to rent again but also recommend Enterprise to their friends.’

‘In most of the industries that I studied, the percentage of customers who were enthusiastic enough to refer a friend or colleague — perhaps the strongest sign of customer loyalty — correlated directly with differences in growth rates among competitors.’

‘Companies have tended to focus on customer retention rates, but that measurement is merely the best of a mediocre lot…they basically track customer defections’

‘For a while, it seemed as though information technology would provide a means to accurately measure loyalty. Sophisticated customer-relationship-management systems promised to help firms track customer behavior in real time. But the successes thus far have been limited to select industries, such as credit cards or grocery stores, where purchases are so frequent that changes in customer loyalty can be quickly spotted and acted on. ‘ – Behavior is difficult to study and quantify, lots of data might help.

‘My personal bet for the top question (probably reflecting the focus of my research on employee loyalty in recent years) would have been "How strongly do you agree that [company X] deserves your loyalty?" Clearly, though, the abstract concept of loyalty was less compelling to customers than what may be the ultimate act of loyalty, a recommendation to a friend.’ – This question raises the same kind of emotion that occurs during real behavior, and might help explain why it’s a better indicator of behavior.


I like how he used a 10-point scale then clustered the results into three types of customers, avoiding “grade inflation.”

Also see the Loyalty Acid Test.

Store Front as Display

Bank of America tried using its store window as a web browser. It’s a great idea. I could imagine a few improvements: locating it where people are already standing, waiting, like in line at the ATM; use really useful content, like the locations of public restrooms; and try to develop the perceivable affordance so it’s not necessary to have giant type reading ‘Touch window to begin.’

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Recognizing Digital Genre

Recognizing Digital Genre, a short 2001 paper by Elaine Toms at the University of Toronto continues (for me, at least) Dillon’s work on the shape of information, although it strangely doesn’t reference Dillon. It does include one super neato experiment. Highlights:

  • ‘Creating Web documents is a cookie-cutter affair as documents of differing types are formatted with essentially the same structure, eliminating or disguising those visual cues that help people to make sense of the content and requiring additional effort to interpret the document.‘
  • An experiment asked people to recognize three versions of documents: an original, a ‘content version’ with all the formatting removed, and a ‘form version’ with formatting left intact but characters and numbers changed to X’s and 9’s respectively. Not surprisingly, the original and content versions were recognized more often, but the form version – when recognized – was recognized twice as fast as the other versions.
  • ‘As a final test…we mixed and matched content and form within a single document…. People focused on the form or structure of the document first and were more likely to call a bibliography-formatted-like-a-dictionary, a dictionary rather than a bibliography.‘
  • For Dillon the precise definition of information shape is elusive; Toms defines it as ‘the regular and logical pattern of elements (the shape of information) expressed by a discourse community.‘

The references lists related work by her and others. Thanks Elaine.