Usability: September 2007 Archive Page

The marketers and programmers at Google's Blogger.com are not speaking with each other much, or so it would seem.

The folks in charge of the home page love verbs. 

Here's a thumbnail I cropped from the blogger.com home page.








Verbs, verbs, everywhere verbs!  Create! Publish! Go! Post! Interact!  Take a tour! Name your blog!  Okay, well "Get" as they use it in "Get Feedback" is a bit lame, but it's better than "Feed!"

Bear in mind I'm analyzing just one tiny sliver of the site, but the designers know that every square inch on a home page is precious, and look at how much effort they put into using verbs.  For crying out loud, if you type the URL www.blogger.com, you're forwarded to a page named "start," and the inline title of that page is "Blogger: Create your Blog Now -- FREE"   

But have you tried leaving a comment on a Blogger site lately? Here's the message you get:

Your comment has been saved and will be visible after blog owner approval.

Oh! The pain!

Most academic slide shows are dreary affairs. Our students might as well be writing "I will not think outside the box" on the blackboard 100 times.

Imagine a conference in which every presenter spoke for exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Is it heaven, or is it a pecha-kucha night? That would leave a lot of room for conference attendees to, you know, confer. (Wired offers a good intro to pecha-kucha, and an example.)

The inventors of the concept have trademarked it, which I confess is a bit of a downer for me; nevertheless, the slideshow genre needs this kind of creativity. The inventors are architects, so it makes sense that their style emphasizes quality images that are worth looking at for 20 seconds. Larry Lessig, a lawyer, has a very different presentation style, which can involve a hundred slides or more, but each slide might only contain a few words; he cycles through them rapidly as he's talking.

Then, of course, there's comedian Don McMillan's spoof of over-designed slideshows.