Noise Between Stations

I sympathize with the folks that rail against the word user to mean the visitor, reader, etc. of a computer system, but it’s so widespread and useful a term it seems a lost battle at this point. Still, I had to laugh this morning when my wife — who had been using a system called [...]

What’s the essential difference between informational content and marketing content? I decided it was an objective tone vs. a subjective tone, respectively. I had to get that clear for myself as it can become very subtle when adjusting language and people can be rather passionate about wanting one or the other without actually knowing what [...]

I had a good laugh when I was looking at Jesse’s book site and came upon a section titled The obligatory fake FAQ. This touches on one of those seemingly innocent requests that drive me up the wall: people who want to ‘create’ frequently asked questions. The original format was a beautiful thing, a bottom-up [...]

The global navigation at Peter Morville’s Semantic Studios:Home, Consulting, Presentations, Publications, About The global navigation at Lou Rosenfeld’s LouisRosenfeld.com:Home, Consulting, Presentations, Publications, In the Media, Biography Later…Jess points out they, as well as the Nielsen Norman Group (Home, People, Services, Publications, Events, About NN/g) share the same design consultant, Studio Mobius.

An informal survey:Salon: ‘Print‘ icon + label, and the resulting page reads, ‘To print this page, select Print from the File menu of your browser‘ New York Times: ‘Printer-Friendly Format‘ icon +label (but, it’s the person we’re being friendly to, right?)CNET: ‘Printer-friendly format‘ text link SJ Mercury News: ‘print this‘ icon + label Yahoo News: [...]