Noise Between Stations

Category: Unfiled

Interesting article on site redesign focusing on QuickLoans. Summary:
- As usual, user testing is the best source of design improvements
- Don’t listen to users say they want – it’s often not what really satisfies them. Instead, watch what they do and satisfy their demonstrated need.
- Add meaning to functionality and context to content by associating content and functionality (in this case, linking to mortgage term definitions from mortgage calculators)
- Time of task completion is more important than page download time.
I feel justified in telling the last point to my clients now. Summed up by Jared Spool:

Just how subjective a medium is the Web? Extremely. In another test, Spool found that users rated Amazon.com Inc.’s site faster than About.com Inc.’s — a major reason why they liked the Amazon.com site better. Paradoxically, Amazon.com’s pages took an average of 36 seconds to download over a 56K-bit modem, while About.com’s pages loaded in only 8 seconds. Spool’s conclusion, from watching how users traversed the site: Speed equals ease of information retrieval. “If you want to improve the perception of how fast your site loads,” says Spool, “get users more quickly to the information they’re looking for.”
3/22/2000
Funny how non-techies like my family will plunk down 50 bucks now and then to buy a funny looking electronic toy that does funny things when you interact with it, and yet would not think of plunking down $200 for a truly useful PDA. Of course there’s the usual reason of learning curves and not wanting to look like a geek, but if PDAs had characteristics that were unabashadly fun I bet they’d reach a whole silent majority that won’t go near them yet.

3/21/2000
On my company’s global intranet home page, we have an area called “Soupcan” which is essentially a multi-user blog. Today someone posted a link to this article with the caption, “China to U.S. & Taiwan: Let’s NUKE it out!”

Now I’ve been known to laugh at some sick stuff when meant in jest, and appreciate satire, but making fun of our suicide as a planet bothers me. Everyone has their point at which you must take something serious serious, and if nuclear war doesn’t do it for you, what does?

3/21/2000
Iridium asks court to let satellites burn. Ridiculous. This is the reason, as Matt Groening says, we don’t yet have amusement parks on the moon. Fucking capitalism.

3/20/2000
Neat reason for a publicity web site! The KingDome Implosion. I like the game, wonder if it’s based in real physics or game physics?

3/20/2000
Somewhat interesting article about pinball machines in this month’s Wired. Calling it “warm entertainment” because you still have your hands on a partially mechanical object. I bet at some point the trend in computers to become convergent and small will reverse and find a niche for warmer computer interaction. We like that tactile/auditory feeling of physical stuff just like we need to chew and taste when we eat.

Presently physical interaction is designed as a necessary evil; for example a Bang & Olufsen stereo. We take something that must be a certain size and try to make it beautiful. Instead in the future we’ll take something that’s too small (a camera the size of a keyring could actually be awkward to point, interact with, and view movies on), and make it bigger, and have so much freedom when we do so. It won’t be an exercise in molding the device, it will be about building a human-centered experience, almost devoid of technological constraints.

3/19/2000
Reading The Making of the Atom Bomb, and one of the over-riding issues during the development was the importance of considering several techniques in parallel in order to speed production.

In so many situations I notice a huge tendency to try and find the one right answer, instead of coming up with a few great possibilities and prototyping and finding the best implementation. There’s less guessing involved this way.

3/18/2000
I was going to vent, aka bitch, about a particular client and our working relationship, but I’ve decided to be positive and instead think of ways of diplomatically improving the situation. But I had to write something here just to feel relieved. Ahhhhhh, that’s better.

3/17/2000
Neat, someone combined two of my favorite research topics, Auditory Interfaces and Information design, in Auditory Information Design.

3/17/2000
I was actually in church last Sunday worrying about some work I had to get done for a big presentation the following Tuesday when I heard this great quote preceeding the sermon:

Therefore, do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.

3/17/2000
Anyone reading this going to CHI 2000? Lemme know.

3/14/2000
Give ya one guess which one’s my comp day off:

3/14/2000
Interesting white paper on “Experience Architecture(TM)” from Viant. They’re passing it off as something new, but it’s really what the rest of us are doing, just from a different angle. We don’t do information architecture instead of experience architecture, rather, we do the experience architecture first and then create information architecture for each portion of the experience.

3/13/2000
A month or two ago BICYCLING magazine published a story about a one-legged bicycle messenger in New York City. They talked about him like he was a household name, though I’d never heard of him or seen him.

Last week, traveling in a cab, I saw him down near Wall St. It boggles my mind to see someone like that who elegantly adapted to a machine made for people with two legs. So inspiring; you think about the troubles that are causing you so much anxiety and realize how petty they are.

3/12/2000
Pope in Historic Plea to Pardon Church Sins. ‘Bout time. A good first step. Perhaps this step needed to be taken before they could be more specific, such as apologizing for not condemning the Nazi holocaust during WWII.

3/12/2000