Author: Victor

Seeking a Promotion for the Virgin Mary

Half a world away, inside the Vatican, yet another enormous box arrived filled with petitions asking Pope John Paul II to exercise his absolute power to proclaim a new and highly debated dogma: that the Virgin Mary is a co-redeemer with Jesus and cooperates fully with her son in the redemption of mankind.

This cracks me up. As more and more challenges are issued to the Vatican, the traditional patriarchical structure of the Roman Catholic church could implode under it’s own weight (and become Episcopalian? ;-)

Rainbow over Bethlehem, Christmas Eve 2000

Amazing that analysts would expect to drive the long term structure and culture of an organization because they didn’t get the quarterly profits they wanted, ignoring the longer term benefits of low turnover. “How dare you not lay off your employees!”

Back when we had lots of cash in the bank they praised our security, and now when we use that money for its intended use (staying intact and afloat), they are pissed off. I, for one, am thankful to have a job this holiday season. In my book, they are the true Grinches.

Jakob Nielson look alike! Seriously, there’s some interesting usability-focused design articles there about navigation and search results in particular. Found via my favorite Irish information architect, Vin.

I continue to get excited about applying the ideas from the software development community to interface design. This excerpt, from an editorial in Open Magazine, gets interesting if we replace “Open source” and and “source code” with “user interface design process”:

“Open Source is the realization that building innovative software can be achieved only by standing on the shoulders of giants, that true reliability can be obtained only through substantial peer review, and that selling software without providing source code is akin to selling cars with the hood welded shut.”

For me this means not only creating an interface design, but also showing the client what my process consists of. So once they take the product in-house they can continue the work. Or encouraging my peers to share their process (not just the end product) with me so I can stand on their shoulders.

The Hewlett-Packard site is just gorgeous these days. I’m in love with the usefulness of their search.

“People leave managers, not companies”

“People can’t really change. Skills can be trained…but talents — such as empathy, strategic thinking, attention to detail, and creativity — cannot.

“The greatest sources of satisfaction in the workplace are internal and emotional.”

When looking for examples of forums, I should’ve checked Vault.com earlier. Since they’re notorius for their message boards, they better work well, and they do.

Brilliant analysis of how much Alex Rodriguez gets paid in real world dollars. I wonder if Rodriguez plans to give any of it away?

An interview with Andy Hertzfeld, an early Macintosh designer, talks about creating an user interface for Linux.

From my user experienced-biased perspective, I thought a standard/easy UI would keep Linux from becoming popular, or at least from threatening Windows. Hertzfeld’s Eazel could help mend that. Funny that I never thought of the UI itself also being open source, so people can change it. I wonder how they’ll let people make changes and not screw up each’s applications resources, or not lose the standardization that makes it easy for me to sit at any Mac or PC and get work done.

Crap forums. Are forums really hard to design? You would think so by looking around. The New York Times and Salon both have great sites but shite forum interfaces (perhaps because they both use the WebX system). Utne Cafe is just horrible (and requires registration before you can even read the posts). Feed’s new design of Loop claims to be “cutting edge”. With that crazy orange/blue/purple/lavender navigation thingy at the top I’m not sure about that, but they seem to be alone in actually presenting you with a posting form upon arrival in a topic – a nice touch.

Photo.net seems too simple, but it’s so usable. One of the big challenges seems to be understanding the hierarchy of categories (conferences -> topics -> posts). Photo.net solves it with simple breadcrumbs.

Our beloved Blogger does pretty well with their forums. Although it requires a lot of page views to get to the messages, everything is clear and easy to find.

“We are all novices when it comes to death,” someone said.

Charlie adds, “We are all novices when it comes to life.”

Imagine if our youth was dedicated to making us more than novices. It seems to me that education and preparation for life are not the same thing.

Coming upon the task of creating a sitemap, and as usual I have to question everything. Really necessary? How does it relate to the other navigation already on the site? Why doesn’t a big site like IBM have one? How should I lay it out? Just links, or metainfo too?

Surfing paid off:
An interesting rundown on evolt.org sums it up thusly: Overview = navigation. Table of contents = sitemap. Index = searchengine.

Evolt links to an article on Mappa Mundi about Dynamic Diagrams with this quote: “I think web site mapping is bouncing back and forth between two poles: it is absolutely necessary and it is impossible.” I’ve never been crazy about Dynamic’s “Z-Factor” 3-D representation of pages, they’re neat but not all that informative. However, they have a good outline of a site map seminar with more info, sources, and examples.

And I remembered I compared a few site maps in my August 1999 blog.

Via Elegant Hack I found weblog junior high, a hilarious look at the characters of the blog world.