October 2005 Archives
Dave Taylor has published an interesting post about Forbes' Attack of the Blogs article. It brings balance to the controversy, the blogosphere being extremely quick at taking on any polemic subject, in particular if this is about itself. The comments are worth reading too.
I fear now for my children growing up into a world where the leaders turn their backs on the spirit of reason and inquiry. Where the new cardinals of the church deny evolution not on any grounds of empirical reason or evidence, but rather like children having a temper tantrum because they want it not to be so. Where the leaders of this country try to take Terry Shiavo's husband to court not because of any evidence, but because they are angry to have been proven wrong by science. Where cowardly murderers kill innocent men, women, and children and claim to do it in the name of a religion, meaning something that no one can possibly argue with from a rational point of view. Where the education board of Kansas makes the state a mockery by demanding that irrationality be held to be as valid as science. Where 1.2 billion people consider it acceptable for some man with a vision to utter a Fatwa ordering some person killed simply because he doesn't like what the other person chooses to believe in or even just disapproves of his line of inquiry. Where political correctness means that if some lines of inquiry are pursued, others feel free to harass and abuse and even threaten the people trying to find out the facts. Where people believe that they have the right to tell others what to believe, what to wear, what to eat, what to say, and what to think.[...]
It is time to speak up. It is time to say that facts are what matter, not faith, that human progress is accomplished through unfettered use of reason and inquiry and tolerance and discussion and debate, not through intolerant and irrational acts of terror or edicts. For all of our children and for the future, speak up against this wave of intolerance and irrationalism washing over the world.
Adam Bosworth, Speaking up.
I've been watching the stats of various blog hosting providers over the past year, and I'm puzzled with the LiveJournal stats. From January to October 2005, the number of accounts has grown 51%, however the number of accounts that are "active in some way" has grown only 4% over the same period. Actually, it is stuck below 2.6M since at least June. Am I wrong or has LJ reached a plateau in terms of active/loyal bloggers?
Teens don't use Yahoo! says Jeremy who points to Jeff Clavier's post about Web 2.0: the teenagers' web ain't the geek web:
Three words: MySpace, Facebook, AIM.These services were the most often mentioned by the teenagers, and seemed to get the most of their attention. Then came Google, LiveJournal, MSN Messenger/YIM – because friends use them.
Clearly missing: Flickr, Skype, Yahoo, blogs – i.e most of the buzzwords we had been talking about for three days at the conference.
Of course one may want to take a conversation with just five american teens with a grain of salt before going full steam ahead in generalizations.
Meanwhile, BBC News goes all Slashdot/Kuro5hin. That's right, the Beeb is bringing to the masses the moderation system in use on the geekiest web property: Slashdot! I'm looking forward to seing it in action.
Mark Pilgrim is cooking something that looks very interesting:
I'm writing Greasemonkey scripts to parse all the known microformats. I have two done already:http://diveintomark.org/projects/greasemonkey/hcard/
http://diveintomark.org/projects/greasemonkey/rellicense/hCalendar is next. I've already done XFN parsing too, which is part
of Magic Line:http://diveintomark.org/projects/greasemonkey/magicline.user.js
Eventually all of these will come together in a super-script that
parses all available data in every page you ever browse, and publishes
it to your own private Atom Store via the Atom API. (This part is
already written as well, though unreleased.)Imagine having your own private database of every person you've ever
stumbled across online, and being able to download their vCards into
your address book. And every event, which you can download into
iCal/Sunbird/Outlook. Plus a list of all the Creative
Commons-licensed content you've ever read, which you can repurpose --
legally, according to the terms of the license.Now imagine searching such a database. And subscribing to your search
results as a syndicated feed.It's coming. Within weeks, not years. All the data is out there;
people are publishing this stuff anyway. If they publish it just 1%
better (with appropriate microformatting), I can get 1000% more out of
it.Or do you just use your browser to browse? That's so 20th century.
Jakob Nielsen has updated his now famous Top Ten Web Design Mistakes for 2005. Since I (foolishly) promised to write more about our recent capgemini.com redesign, I'll use it to benchmark how we performed:
1. Legibility Problems
We're using flexible font size, thanks to the CSS design, so anyone can resize the font provided they use a modern browser. Note how the texts in the headers resize on top of the background images (the image height will adapt to the text). We've also increased the line-height to make content-heavy pages even more legible.
2. Non-Standard Links
We use standard blue, underlined text links, differentiate visited/unvisited links, provide visual clues when a PDF is behind a link, don't open pages in new windows and avoid "click here" (though I still have to fight against bad habits for those last two, I have to remind content contributors Why "Click here" is bad linking practice on a regular basis). Although our site is almost entirely dynamic, we've gone the extra mile to provide cruft-free, readable URLs for everything.
3. Flash
Always my favorite:
If your content is boring, rewrite text to make it more compelling and hire a professional photographer to shoot better photos. Don't make your pages move. It doesn't increase users' attention, it drives them away; most people equate animated content with useless content.
When I'll get fed up of chanting that one for the zillionth time to people who confuse interactivity with a Christmas tree, I'll just page-slap them with this one :-P. We got it right but I had to strongly resist, until the last minute before launch, against throwing a Flash animation right in the middle of the home page. Last month I killed a Flash site in the egg in just two minutes with the usual killer questions about what our visitors, and us, are really expecting from a business site (you guessed it, certainly not a fancy Flash animation getting in the way). I'm not an anti-Flash at all, but I reckon that 90% of the time, money we spend on Flash is simply wasted on eye-catchy but content-free decoration that provide no value whatsoever for our visitors. May be it's because I don't speak their language. Let's try for a second...
Message to marketing: Flash is so web 1.0! :-P
4. Content That's Not Written for the Web
Apart from being a constant quest (i.e. not just a redesign issue) this is something I placed very high on our design agenda from day one and we're doing an ongoing, serious work on it. I reckoned that it would represent 80% of the total work, and some people didn't believe me, now they do! Not that we did an awful job previously, our sites are recognized for the quality and depth of their content, but in a jargon-prone industry that's not a reason for not trying to do better. More on that later. (I won't commit to definitely get rid of the dreaded S-word or leverage though!)
5. Bad Search
We brought a simple, one field search form on top of every page in the site. And we changed our search technology to further improve results. I agree with Nielsen on the fact that it requires considerable work and a significant investment.
6. Browser Incompatibility
I've never, ever, tolerated Windows IE-only designs for an external web site. I find this utterly insulting for the visitors and a proof of ignorance (I completely disagree with Nielsen's stance about ROI, it's not more costly to produce a cross-browser site, it just requires competent people who know better than the Microsoft monoculture). And now that we are doing a better job with web standards, more power and choice to anyone using a modern web browser!
7. Cumbersome Forms
We could debatably do better about this one, but we reduced the pain (I hope) to a minimum. I'll always resent filling-in a 10 questions registration form before downloading documents, I'd rather have on any document an easy way to contact the right person after I've read its content, found it valuable and want to action it.
8. No Contact Information or Other Company Info
"Contact us" link on all pages (with pre-filled context for business pages), list of all offices, pretty extensive background information... looks like we're OK. By the way, not making the basic contact information available on a site is simply illegal in France!
9. Frozen Layouts with Fixed Page Widths
I feel slightly guilty about this one, though I continue to find fixed layouts better for content-heavy sites because they are easier to read (there is a good reason why newspapers have columns with limited width: readability). But we have an elastic-width variation of our layout on the intranet, we'll see how it flies.
10. Inadequate Photo Enlargement
This point is relevant for e-commerce sites, but irrelevant for a site like capgemini.com.
I reckon we score 7 out of 9 applicable points in Nielsen's 2005 cuvée, not bad for a design orchestrated early 2004!
One more thing -- and a provocative one, I know -- we would never have achieved this had we done a design by committee. Not even close. For sure, it would have been much, much easier for me, had I done it the traditional way. One needs a thick skin to be able to challenge a corporation from the inside, and mine has grown significantly thicker after this particular redesign. But massaging corporate egos was not in the design brief ;-).
If I give you two names, which one would you instinctly think of as an open friendly startup and which one would you deem more like a big corporation?
Google
Yahoo!
I'm amazed at reading the Gmail Tips and Wants and Yahoo! Mail Tips and Wants that Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo! posts on his blog. That's product management out in the open with frank comparison with the competition, and I'd like to know if anyone from Google is doing the same (I don't see them doing it but I can be wrong).
I also wonder how the Yahoo! Mail product manager feels about that ;-).
