Design: June 2003 Archive Page

"While visiting my local health food store, I noticed how many non-food products are labeled "All-Natural." Toothpaste. Dog biscuits. Deodorants. Some of them, like those Carrot-Honey-Ginger soaps, sound good enough to eat. Is it a soap, I found myself asking, or a salad? Recently, I decided to find out....|Grandma's Old-Fashioned Oatmeal Soap. Oatmeal adds a nice texture to oatmeal cookies and oatmeal bars -- would it do the same for oatmeal soap? To find out, I took a giant bite of this crunchy beige bar, chewing thoughtfully. The taste was not entirely unpleasant, with a mild creaminess delicately balanced atop the solid earthy flavor of oatmeal. As the soap interacted with my saliva, however, my mouth began to fill with suds..." John Hargrave --The All-Natural Prank: Eating All-Natural Soap Cat Food and Aphrodisiacs

"The easier it is to find places with good information, the less time users will spend visiting any individual website. This is one of many conclusions that follow from analyzing how people optimize their behavior in online information systems." Jakob Nielsen --Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster (Alertbox)

I'm guessing Nielsen has noticed that lots of people have been writing and thinking critically about Google lately. This article isn't really about Google at all -- it's an introduction to information foraging, and uses "cute" subheadings that extend the metaphor.

I think it's great that Nielsen has provided such a useful introduction to the concept, but people who clicked on the link in order to read what Jakob the Usability Guru has to say about Google will probably be a disappointed. Maybe he should have written two articles instead -- one that offers the introduction to information foraging, and another that begins with the assumption that reader already knows about information foraging, and thus is able to appreciate the following (which is buried deep in the article):

Information foraging predicts that the easier it is to find good patches, the quicker users will leave a patch. Thus, the better search engines get at highlighting quality sites, the less time users will spend on any one site.

"We?re quite good at remembering when things happen. That has meaning for us. But imagine creating an individual document around every one of those individual blog entries and just having them there on your desktop or in a folder. It would be completely meaningless to you. And that's how we treat e-mail now. But imagine keeping e-mail a bit more like a blog. Then suddenly, you?ve got instant messaging qualities and e-mail qualities happening at the same time. So I'm guessing that we?ll start to see that sort of timeline become more and more important." Tim Brown --Master of Design  (Technology Review)

"The fun, simple and safer way to turn ordinary hotdogs into exciting to cook and super fun to eat... OCTODOGS!" --Frankfurter ConverterOctodog)

You know it's a slo-o-o-w weekend when this site reaches #21 on Blogdex, with only 4 links.

Note the weasel word "safer". Safer than what?

"Google Inc., want to know how to compete with Microsoft? Endear yourself to us all. Listen to the likes of us the little people of the Internet. Make the toolbar cross-platform and you will endear yourself to all of us. Change the 'BlogThis!' to enable us to blog to whatever blog tools we use. When Microsoft pushes us all into using a Microsoft Operating System, the Microsoft Search Engine, the Microsoft Word Processor, the Microsoft Weblog Tool, the Microsoft Password System, and the Microsoft Telephone through which we blog to our Microsoft Blogging site, we (all us bloggers, the 3 million of us and the other 10 million who are taking up blogging in the near future) will use the Google Search Engine that has cross-platform support to all the blogging companies." Elwyn Jenkins --Google Toolbar 'BlogThis!' Disappoints Fans (Microdoc News)

"But although multidisciplinary study of the media is now commonplace, it is striking how little effort has gone into examining the role the media play in the public understanding of science, which is itself, by definition, a multidisciplinary activity, though one very much still dominated by natural scientists themselves. All of this tends to reinforce the perception that, so far as scientists are concerned, the problem about science and the public is largely the latter's ignorance of the former - what academics call the 'deficit model'." --Who's Misunderstanding Whom? (Economic and Social Research Council (UK))

This is good content, but the website design doesn't do it justice.

The page has no out-of-context title (it's posted as "Untitled Document"), it uses frames (which means I can't actually send you to the page from which I got the above quote -- if I did, you'd be on an orphaned page and you'd have to hack the URL to navigate), and each chunk of text is a long string of paragraphs set in tiny, tiny type -- no bold keywords or bulleted lists. There's even a button that is labeled "click here", that takes you to a page that lets you click again to download a PDF document.

Looks like the job of putting this text online was given to a talented brochure designer. While I applaud the publisher's decision to make the full text of the PDF document available in HTML, the design of the website could use some improvement.

"From Bouffant Hairdos to Platform Shoes, these are the fashion trends which were the style of the day, and the nightmare of the next decade." --Bad Fads Museum -- Fashion (Bad Fads)

The site also includes pages categorized under "Collectibles," "Activities" and "Events". I've seen similar nostalgia sites that are sorted according to decades... this one just sort of lumps everything together. And while the site claims to cover the last 100 years, it seems to focus mostly on the 70s.

The site also doesn't have a good entry page... badfads.com is a pointless splash page, and the page you get when you click the "enter" button rather lamely offers links to the 4 categories.

Via Distracted.

"In the light of Microsoft rumblings about creating its own search services, we need to ask just where Google is going with a toolbar built only for a Microsoft product. Microsoft are shaping up to take Google out!" --Microsoft and the New Google Toolbar (Microdoc News)

Elwyn offers his usual thoughtful critique of all things Google. Lots of contextualized links to relevant info elsewhere on the Internet.

A package from Amazon invokes this lustful passage regarding the New Media Reader:

"I have been leafing through the book, and I already know it solved the problem of texts and examples for the little course I have promised to plan and teach in Media Theory this fall. But most important, it promises to sate for a while my hunger, my insatiable desire for more, more answers, more thoughts, more ideas. Sometimes, I think this hunger comes from a childhood of poverty, intellectual as well as material: starved for books I would spend what little money I could get on bus-tickets to the library and return with huge bags full, and then hide in all kind of inventive places in order to read in peace, without guidance but also without restrictions, anything that caught my fancy. My reading is still like this, driven by desire, and while Noah and Nick have organised their book neatly, chronologically and with nice links and suggestions to further reading, that book is dominated by the random nature of the writing. And as such it is chaos contained in one volume, a writing driven as much by desire as is my reading, and on topics as whimsical and complicated to harness and control as my own reading habits."

Toril Mortensen --Treasure Box (Thinking with My Fingers)

I ordered my copy a few months ago, and gave Seton Hill as the address, since at that time I was too busy to take on a reading project. I imagine it's somewhere on campus, waiting for me.

Rosemary Frezza writes:

I can run this program and have a "virtual commute" on those days when I work from home.

--Microsimulation of Road TrafficWWW)

It's not really a "game," but it comes close. See also my own "York Corpus Christi Pageant Simulator".

Old Country Wisdom: Secret of the Soup BowlLiteracy Weblog)

Yesterday, my son Peter won a free dinner for participating in the library's summer reading program, so my parents took us to Old Country Buffet (an all-you-can-eat restaurant).

While I was making myself a small bowl of ice cream, the older gentleman in line behind me looked around conspiratorially and whispered, "Go get a soup bowl instead. They're much bigger!"

You may have noticed that in salad bars, the bacon bits and ham cubes are always in the back row... you have to reach over the crutons and other less expensive ingredients. I can only assume that the Old Country Buffet wants to save money on its ice cream, so it puts tiny bowls near the ice cream and hides the larger bowls far away.

And yes, I did get a few odd looks as I pulled out my digital camera and snapped these shots. But two of the people who glared at me were talking on their portable telephones.

Maybe they were talking to each other. "This is Old Country Special Agent Zebra," one of them was probably saying. "We've got another one who's on to us."

"the new google toolbar not only blocks popup ads, it comes with a 'blog this!' button for blogger integration." mecran01 --Google *is* the OS (KairosNews)

Is this the first sign of what happens now that Google has purchased Blogger? I don't use Blogger, so I won't be able to experiment with that feature. Anyone want to share their experiences? Until I get my comments feature activated on this home-grown website, you can post your comments on KairosNews (free registration required). Or, you can post on WebWord (no registration required.)

"The world in which clothing, paint, lighting, rugs, and curtains all change colors to match (or influence) our mood is coming, but it's some time away -- a lot of technology has to be made affordable and durable before then. In the meantime, IFM and other companies are working on ways to weave touch sensors into fabrics. Orth built a musical jacket with a small keyboard woven into the sleeve." Rafe Needleman --Wearable Tech... Clothing that Changes Color (Business 2.0)

"People often throw around the terms “objective” and “subjective” when talking about the results of a usability test. These terms are frequently equated with the statistical terms “quantitative” and “qualitative”. The analogy is false, and this misunderstanding can have consequences for the interpretations and conclusions of usability tests." Philip Hodgson --Usability Test Data (User Focus)

"Take the Quiz now and find out where you fit on the political map!" --World's Smallest Political Quiz (Advocates for Self-Government)

I enjoyed taking this little quiz, then I played with it a little to see how it works. My own score was centrist with libertarian leanings, but I can see too many weaknesses in the design of this quiz to consider its results as accurate. This survey is a persuasive tool, not a measurement instrument. The poll would be more fair if it had several different versions of each question and served them up randomly. Of course, I'm glad that self-gov.org has the right to put up on its website any kind of survey or persuasive document it wants. But this survey raises a lot of interesting questions about the power hidden in an interface.

If you answer "Y" to all 10 of the "Smallest Political Quiz" survey the questions, you get the highest "libertarian" score, and you are told:

Libertarians are self-governors in both personal and economic matters. They believe government's only purpose is to protect people from coercion and violence. They value individual responsibility, and tolerate economic and social diversity.

You are also provided a link to "free information about libertarian ideas". Note that the logo on the site is an arrow pointing towards a red dot indicating the highest possible libertarian score.

If you answer "no" to all questions, this is what you get:

Authoritarians want government to advance society and individuals through expert central planning. They often doubt whether self-government is practical. Left-authoritarians are also called socialists, while fascists are right-authoritarians.

And guess what... not only is there not a parallel link to "free information about authoritarian ideas," but the authoritarians are not invited to partake of the "free information about authoritarian ides" (that line is missing in the results).

I remind my students that when they do usabilty testing, they shouldn't ask loaded questions that encourage their subjects to praise them: "Is this website clear? Do you like the navigation?" Instead, they should ask neutral questions, "What strikes you most about this website?" or at least ask an equal number of questions that seem to be fishing for negative answers: "Is the website confusing?"

"WatchBlog is a multiple-editor weblog broken up into three major political affiliations, each with its own blog: the Democrats, the Republicans and the Third Party (covering everything outside the two major parties)." --WatchBlog: 2004 Election News, Opinion and Commentary (WatchBlog)

This looks interesting -- a three-column blog -- Democrat on the left side, Republican on the right. So far, so good. But covering third-party issues in the center column? I can't really think of any third-party issues that are centrist. Some will be far left, some will be far right; and some times the extremes share a totalitarian vision of enforcement of their ideals, and sometimes the extremes share a libertarian vision of minimal government interference in the lives of its citizens. The one-dimensional layout of the perspectives on this page doesn't match my vision of the political landscape, since it gives so much recognition to third-party voices (compared to the effect the third-party voices actually have on governance).

Of course, that's probably the point of the website, to encourage people to challenge their own perspective, and that is of course a good thing. And, untill we have three-dimensional computer interfaces, no I can't really think of a better way to dispay the ideas... unless you have four columns, but then the fringe views would get even more attention.

Hmm... that reminds me of a political quiz that ranks you on a left-right-libertarian-authoritarian scale.

Update: I found and blogged the political quiz.

"I'm looking for people who support people who use weblogs, in a context that is not about weblogs, if possible. For example, a history class where each student keeps a weblog. Teachers who manage classes with a weblog. My goal of course is to learn from them, and then figure out what the next steps are. What do they need from other educators. What software is missing? We've already got some famous universities, I want to get connected with some not-so-famous universities. Who is leading in use of weblogs in education? Who do you look to for insight and inspiration? That's who I want for BloggerCon." Dave Winer --BloggerCon -- Harvard, October 2003Scripting News)

The response was a little snarky when I cross-posted this news to KairosNews, which is, of course, why blogging is so much fun.

"I nonetheless found the darknet command line calm and comforting. Not threatening at all. I suppose it had something to do with the rhythms of the interaction, for while I knew the machine was capable of unleashing unthinkable power, I also knew it would sit dormant forever, waiting for my fingers to hit the keys. There was a kind of deep, deep patience in that prompt and cursor, those courier incantations whose art I've now lost. And that deep patience--that sense of time, of scale, of sustainable rhythm--also seems lost now, bulldozed under by the broadband blast of streaming screaming everything." Matthew G. Kirschenbaum --Darknet Nostalgia (Kirschenbaum)

Reading Stephenson's "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" was almost a religious experience for me. Elsewhere, Matt acknowledges that using the term "nostalgia" to refer to the preservation and study of the cybertexts of just a few years ago trivializes this important cultural archaeology.

For some reason, the text of his permalink seems to be black on black -- hit CTRL-A to select all the text on the page.