Noise Between Stations

Month: June 2002

  • girlwonder

    girlwonder is looking fabulous with her new minimalist boxes-on-white design like, well, like me. Is white the new gray?

  • Audi Case Study

    Jim Kalbach published his case study of the Audi.com and Audi.de sites. Highlights: GoLive for schematics, dynamic layout changing with browser width, and heavy usability testing of the non-conventional navigation.

  • Mozilla Help to the Rescue

    Clicking a Link

    Most web pages contain links you can click to move to other pages.

    1. Move the pointer until it changes to a pointing finger. This happens whenever the pointer is over a link. Most links are underlined text, but buttons and pictures can also be links.


    2. Click the link once. While the network locates the page that the link points to, status messages appear at the bottom of the window.


  • Reedy Site Summary

    I’m following the RSS auto-this and aggregate-that discussions, and it’s all fascinating and sure to lead to some good blog browsing. But I’m not so sure what’s so rich about rich site summary. RSS is essentially headlines, links, and text. It’s ain’t rich media. Heck, it’s not even layout or visual design (don’t get me started about auditory design). But as a standard it’s taking off, and maybe we have to start somewhere.

    When it comes to syndicating blogs, presentation might not make much difference for most. But for some it does. How much do we lose when we strip a blog down to RSS? I submit for your approval:

    1. Webseitz, who can intersperse weblog and wiki entries like nobody’s business
    2. Harrumph, whose design is part of the story
    3. Textism, whose small caps and text figures would be trampled underfoot by insensitive, unthinking aggregators everywhere

    And that’s just layout, there’s functionality lost as well: email php thingies and open-links-in-a-new-window javascript thingies. All lovingly handcrafted and left behind in the rush.

    Why must Victor whine endlessly you ask? Why can’t he just get back to [ insert favorite topic ]? I see a lot of momentum here I can’t ignore. I think we’re seeing the challenges of designing for web services, which I pondered recently. RSS might be the relatively tame and simple predecessor to Web Services Experience Language (WXSL) or its equivalent. For designers this could be another hump like 1994 with a long learning curve but also a wide horizon of possibilities.

  • Attention Amazon Shoppers…

    oh my, Amazon is trying their version of Blue Light Specials (communicating artificial exclusivity to generate demand). But just as with Kmart’s merchandise, it’s all crap. A George Foreman Rotisserie? Ugh.

  • Width

    It’s a portrait design in a landscape world

  • Puerto Rican Day

    It’s Puerto Rican Day in New York, complete with parade. I’m listening to West Side Story…

    ROSALIA: When I will go back to San Juan.
    ANITA: When you will shut up and get gone?
    ROSALIA: Everyone there will give big cheer!
    ANITA: Everyone there will have moved here!

  • Library Science + Computer Science

    The current social networks thinking is fascinating, and will only get better once more people dig into web services, and then the semantic web. It’s a little disconcerting, embarrasing even, that no IAs are at the forefront of these discussions. Isn’t that what we do, find interesting patterns in information and present them to people? It’s high time we start balancing our focus on library science with some attention to computer science. Or better yet combining the two to result in information architecture designs that haven’t been imagined yet.

    When it comes to taxonomies/thesauri vs. ontologies as the organization scheme of the future, ontologies will win out because that’s what the computer science people are using. They control the implementation and therefore innovation on the Internet. IAs will just keep using what software is offered to us, unless we reduce our navel gazing and get into the programmer’s clubs. At least we can take encouragement in the fact that their interfaces still suck.

    Kudos to Eric for outlining an implementation of social networks.

    Update: Michael takes notice, and I hit on what Matt’s been thinking.

  • Web Design Books, Summer 2002

    I just strolled through my local gigantic Barnes & Noble. I think I saw more computer books in one place than ever before. Some observations:

    There are a surprising number of books on designing with usability in mind, which is reasuring.

    There are plenty of general web design books, so many it must be hard for novices to choose among them.

    The polar bear book was the only IA book on the shelves :( .

    There are intermediate topics that aren’t addressed well. For example, Web Navigation was probably great when it came out, addressing a need of early web designers. But it’s out of print and, frankly (despite all the good things it has to say about my employer :), outdated. It sprung from a pre-Flash, pre-DHTML world and doesn’t do interaction design, much less all the innovations of Amazon, Google, and social networks. I’ve seen navigation done from a tech perspective, but I haven’t seen the ‘Interaction Design for the Web’ book, with a Shneiderman-like attention to human factors combined with a balanced look at navigation on the web.

    I finally paged though Don’t Make Me Think. It’s awesome. Great thinking, great book design. I think I already know most of the lessons, but I might buy it anyway.

    An aside: I keep expecting B&N to bridge their website and their stores by offering some sort of in-store kiosks. If I’m looking for a specific book, I’d like to do a quick search and find out if they have it and what section it’s in.

  • The Future of the Mobile Phone

    Nils Rydbeck, former Ericsson phone designer and inventor of GSM outlines four different scenarios for the future of the mobile phone:

    1. The phone contains everything that you have at home in your computer.

    2. The phone becomes an entertainment and gaming device for youth, possibly with a display showing the person you’re talking to.

    3. The phone carries everything that you have in your pocket.

    4. The phone is just a phone.

    He’s more inclined towards number 3.

  • 1 + 1

    Here’s a Philip Glass composition you can play yourself, as printed in Score: An Anthology of New Music (out of print I assume but probably findable in a university’s library):



    Any table top is amplified by means of a contact mike, amplifier and speaker.

    The player perfoms 1 + 1 by tapping the table top with his fingers or knuckles.

    The following two rhythmic units are the building blocks of 1 + 1:

    a) sixteenth note – sixteenth note – eighth note

    b) eighth note

    1+1 is realized by combining the above two units in continuous, regular arithmetic progressions.

    The tempo is fast. The length is determined by the player.


  • Book Fair

    Wow, so many great books being published. Peter stopped by the other night with an actual hardcopy prototype of his user-centered design book. Owen and other luminaries lay down the CSS goods. Wert and company cough up a tome on Usability. And Rebecca’s Blog book is out. Don’t go crying that you’re bored this summer.

  • Trees and Minor Amounts of Intertwingling

    PeterV’s story of automated phone system vs. web (why is the phone system, which forces one to navigate a tree, easier to use?) reminded me of a story from Chris Fahey of Behavior. Chris was designing an interface for a mobile screen, I forget whether it was a PDA or a mobile phone. Of course he was forced to reduce the interface to its fundamental elements. He subsequently would keep designing for a screen that small even when working on websites, pretending he had only that much space and concentrating on the fundamentals of the interface.

    I think that’s why the automated phone interface is easier, there’s no auditory ‘room’ to introduce clutter, indirectly leveraging Hick’s Law.

    Whereas websites are like our homes: the clutter expands to fill the available space.

  • Design Patterns for Capturing Knowledge

    John Thomas and his colleagues at IBM are working on a design pattern language for Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Of it, he emails:

    My colleagues and I are working on a different but related topic: a socio-technical pattern language…we don’t expect every software developer to familiarize themselves with a couple decades of CSCW and social science literature before building a system. So, the socio-technical pattern language is meant to encapsulate what “works” in terms of social systems and help the developer build something that makes sense pragmatically and semantically as well as syntactically.

    I like that he isn’t selling the pattern language as a design solution. Instead, it’s a documentation solution. Unfortunately design patterns became oversold before they could be used to design anything, and ideas like John’s get me excited about their potential again, if only for documenting knowledge well.

  • Mozilla

    Mozilla reaches 1.0. It looks like it was four years in the making. That says something about the speed of open source development, or the project management, or the scope.

    Maybe scope. I like Bill’s description: The OpenSource version of the NetScape Navigator browser. Or, a RichClient development platform.

    So far I’ve tried the Windows version and I’m pretty happy. The default theme, or whatever the skin is called, resembles good ol’ Netscape 4. Pages load fast and, my biggest problem with IE/Win, it knows that when I type Google into the URL box that I want to go to www.google.com. The page up and down keys don’t work like I expect (read: like they’re supposed to), but that’s a small price to pay. It’s a good first impression.