Usability: June 2008 Archive Page

I'm fairly proud of myself because last week I did something I've been wanting to do for years... I made little tiny icons, and put them in the right place on my two main websites.  Now you should see them in your browser bookmarks and tabs.



Incidentally, I love what Firefox 3 does to the address bar.  Whenever you start typing, the bar fills up with suggestions based on pages you've recently visited. What a wonderful, practical, invisible bit of brilliance.

The "blogs.setonhill.edu" icon is really too small to read, but the colors still brand the content fairly clearly. I'm pretty happy with the stark white J.  But what's the deal with the NBC logo next to my Seton Hill e-mail address? I dunno.

I'm not a big fan of SHU's content-management system, Jenzabar, but because the service was recently overhauled and upgraded, I thought I'd give it another chance.

How frustrating -- the site breaks the "go back" button.  Every time you try to go back, it dumps you into a general screen, and of course then you can't "go back" to where you were before.



If the site has to break the go back button, wouldn't it be kinder to completely block the action, so at the very least you stay where you are (a minor disappointment) rather than dumping you back into the main menu (a significant usability hit).

Jakob Nielsen:

Print publications -- from newspaper articles to marketing brochures -- contain linear content that's often consumed in a more relaxed setting and manner than the solution-hunting behavior that characterizes most high-value Web use.

In print, you can spice up linear narrative with anecdotes and individual examples that support a storytelling approach to exposition. On the Web, such content often feels like filler; it slows down users and stands in the way of their getting to the point.

For example, in print, discussing the tall-friendly rooms in the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas feels somewhat interesting. That's not the case online when a user is looking for tall-friendly rooms in Chicago (or wherever he or she is going next week).

Web content must be brief and get to the point quickly, because users are likely to be on a specific mission. In many cases, they've pulled up the page through search. Web users want actionable content; they don't want to fritter away their time on (otherwise enjoyable) stories that are tangential to their current goals.

This morning in my mail I found an attractive printing of the proceedings from a January summit on journalism. All in all, this is a good print document that suffered when it was shoveled online.

I have no idea what kind of time constraints or "it came to the boss in a dream so do it that way or else" loopiness might have been facing the webmaster at carnegie.org or whoever else was charged with putting this document online.

Nevertheless, the journalists who shared their experience and insights with the Carnegie Corporation deserve an online venue that avoids the n00b mistakes that I teach my college freshmen to recognize.

Here's an excerpt from the introduction, by Vartan Gregorian.

Perhaps now more than ever, in this "age of anxiety," of globalization, conflict, non-stop opinion and an overwhelming info-glut, we need objective observers and reporters to help us distill the onslaught of events, data and information into knowledge and wisdom. It is in that connection that we should be able to look to the press to assist us in answering the telling questions asked by T.S. Eliot: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

Eliot's query speaks to the "Home Depot-ization" of so much of the news that we interact with these days. The proliferation of online sources of news and opinion along with cable stations and an extraordinary, seemingly depthless supply of print and electronic sources of specialized, compartmentalized information means that one can pick and choose among the issues one wishes to be exposed to. That may be fine, up to a point and certainly, it is everyone's right to pursue their individual interests and concerns, but if all an individual chooses to know about or understand is tailored around his or her particular notions or points of view, such narrow vision may well leave them seriously under-informed about national and international affairs that deserve their attention in order to be a knowledgeable and active member of our participatory democracy.

I didn't attend the summit, but its focus -- on the relationship between journalism and democracy, on the value of journalism as a vocation that benefits society -- is one of my favorites.  I was very pleased last year when on the final exam, my journalism students were able to recite four of the five rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. (Yes, five out of five would have been better, but they only got an average of 3.5 of the five passengers on Gilligan's Island.)

The website that goes along with the printed report is a good example of what happens when the information in a print document is shoveled online, without appropriate consideration of how differently people approach knowledge acquisition online.

The website was obviously put together as an afterthought -- it's clear that the "real" document is, in the mind of the organizers, the print document.  As an institution, journalism -- and the knowledge it contains and the wisdom it hopes to impart -- won't last long if that mode of thinking prevails.

Nicholas Carr, in The Atlantic:

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.... Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it's a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking--perhaps even a new sense of the self.

The article includes an interesting anecdote about Nietzsche and his typewriter, and also offers a clever interpretation of the death of HAL from 2001.

An amusing post from Language Log, about the ill wind that blows for people who trust their spell checkers too much.

As you might have guessed, what Edwards actually said in the debate was "Highfalutin language is not enough." The word highfalutin should be in any decent spellchecker's wordlist, but if it is written as two words, high falutin, then the second element of the compound can go unrecognized.

From Inside Higher Ed, an article about a Facebook app designed for college recruiters:

The solution they came up with essentially offers a series of "challenges" to students interested in SUNY Plattsburgh. Each challenge requires them to upload video or photographic evidence that they fulfilled their mission, so to speak -- anything from attending a sporting event on campus, visiting Lake Champlain or wearing Plattsburgh gear in nearby Burlington, Vt. The idea is to get prospective students excited about Plattsburgh traditions long before they even think about applying -- say, ages 14 or 15 -- and to pass on the application to friends who also might be interested.

Here's a great idea to annoy your online readers while generating ad impressions.  Take a random idea, come up with about 10 examples, find random stock images to illustrate the examples, and put one idea on each page, to force readers to click through each one.

Boston.com has a collection posted under the title "Business Galleries."  The advice in one, "Saving for College," is interesting, but the random stock photos of people using laptop computers added exactly nothing to the value of the article, and splitting it across multiple pages is just insulting. I feel exactly the same way when the TV news uses two 15-second "teases" ("Coming up after the break: Are America's children learning enough about what celebrities wear to their parole hearings?") for a 60-second story.  TV is about making an emotional impact, and when the news is trivial, you can get more bang for your buck by making the same shocking point three times, rather than putting all that time together to explore the issue in more depth.

Someone must feel that sprinkling tiny nuggets of content across multiple pages is worthwhile, though I'm always angry at the designer for making a deliberate choice that forces me to click, click, click.  I have ad-blocking software installed, so I never even see the ads anyway.

I can understand putting one photo per page if the photos are compelling enough to keep the reader clicking through the whole narrative, but come on. I'd rather see a random Flickr image than a generic stock photo.