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Tuesday, July 31, 2001
Spent some time last night messing around with a way to publish this blog as XML, using a PHP script to parse and format it. I'm interested in trying out other ways of presenting blog information, like in Flash or Shockwave interfaces, and XML seems the simplest way to do it. Here's the tutorial I'm working from. It's pretty simple; most of my time last night was spent repairing line breaks and lost spaces between characters in the .php scripts. Anyway, you can see the currently quite dull xmlblog here.
Monday, July 30, 2001
In response to Matt Webb's comments about the apparently nodal nature of everything interfaceable:
Webb says the following: "for each node [in a system] there are a number of exits and a number of items attached to it. A node is a location in a menu hierarchy, or a directory, or a place on the game map. Exits are double-clicking on folders, or pressing Select when an option is highlighted, or typing north. At this level, all interfaces are the same. I'll use the term "map" as a generic to describe the network of menus (a tree just being a special type of network), or the filesystem, or the folder tree. The point at which information is extracted from the map to the user is on entering a node, the information being about the items there and the exits to other nodes."
Matt, you might be interested in Stephen Johnston's "Interface Culture" book from a few years back. It's getting a little dated but he considers interfaces along abstract lines as you do here. I think you're right in your comments, although it seems to require that we believe that everything is hierarchical: if everything's a networked node, then everything has a parent and a child (even if recursively).
This is sort of unsettling, since I'm suspicious of an outlook on the world that seems to map so neatly to contemporary data structures, file systems, pattern languages, URLs, etc. Does it seem like things work this way because that's how we've set them up, or did we set them up that way because that's how things really are?
There are other "interfaces to traversing a space" that aren't hierarchical or nodal: narrative, for one. Historically, views on the connectedness of things have been _other_ than nodal or hierarchical. French philospopher Henri Bergson (c. 1910) would have taken issue with even conceptualizing discrete "nodes" at all, and argued for a "flow" state very like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes in his recent books, and how contemporary Nobel physicist Ilya Priogene believes the universe actually functions.
On the other hand, experience tends to make me agree with you: almost everything looks nodal and hierarchical. Categories work great and are helpful. From such-and-such a point, I can get to N other points. Which is why Design Patterns (including interface design patterns) seem so effective and satisfying.
Sunday, July 29, 2001
If you're in usability, or work with usability in any way, or even if you don't, please read this interview with Jared Spool at webWord. He's got some solid evidence that the stuff we thought mattered, didn't. That the way usability and IA folks approached problems didn't work; almost no website allows "successful" user experiences more than 50% of the time. That the most usable and sucessful sites on the web--Dell, Ebay, Amazon--haven't had usability people working on them; they are sucessful because the businesses decided customers would be at the center of the business model. Of course, barely anybody else really makes that commitment.
This is really scary: Spool says, "We've never seen a site that succeeds more than 50% of the time, let alone 60% or 70% of the time. We don't know what one looks like. We certainly don't know what it takes to build one. Oh, we can pretend we do. But we really don't, because we never have seen one. And what's worse is that the sites that have come closest didn't use what we've been preaching. What does that say about what we know?"
Monday, July 23, 2001
I'm going crazy! I'm working on a contract job writing user documentation for a suite of content management tools. This is possibly the most poorly-designed software I've ever seen. One unfortunate user here, who is an advanced computer user by any measure, said "this is the hardest stuff I've ever had to use on a computer." It's almost indescribably hard, which is bad, since I have to describe it. Even the people here who worked on building it (the last in a series of three teams to touch it) don't really understand it; they kind of go by feel. Naturally, no documentation, no specifications, no designs, no contact with the programmers who built it.
Eh, what do I care, I'm moving soon.
Friday, July 20, 2001
I'm sure this is being linked to by everybody, but it's so great that I can't take the chance that my two or three readers will miss it. TheyRule is information architecture as social commentary. Tip: nothing shows up at first, so click on "Load Map" and pick one from the list.
Thursday, July 19, 2001
We tried to go to the Agillion auction today. No luck! The streets for blocks around were clogged with SUVs horribly parked, in ditches, and in parking lots of nearby buildings. I guess everyone wanted those 60 Aeron chairs.
I've met two or three people from Agillion who really liked it, thought they were doing good work for good reasons. But, dang it, no one has ever been able to tell me what they did. It's been a joke among people I know; nobody could figure out what service or product they offered, including some who had done consulting work for Agillion! Customer service...web...view of the customer...something. Before I heard someone say it, I also used to think that it was pronounced as if it were French: "Ajeelion" (rhymes with my Pepe le Pew pronunciation of the city Lyon). I think the first person I heard say it was a guy handing out t-shirts. I asked him "what's this place again?" He said, "Agillion, you know, like we're going to make a jillion dollars."
Friday, July 13, 2001
Lavish Flash thing about the Tour de France. It's quite beautiful, but sort of hard to navigate around.
Wednesday, July 11, 2001
I just posted a response to ID Magazine's 2001 Interactive Media Design Awards issue which came out last month.
Monday, July 09, 2001
heychad! Check out this Airport article by Cringely.
It sounded easy. I'd find a house through one of those two gaps, knock on their door, then ask if I could buy them DSL service in exchange for mooching some bandwidth over a bootleg wireless link. It SOUNDED easy, but wasn't. People don't like to hear that others have found them by squinting through a telescope. They are suspicious of free offers. Or maybe they were just suspicious of me.
Friday, July 06, 2001
If you have to create flowcharts and wireframes, please look at Erin Malone's examples presentation. Then please do them that way.
I also am enjoying The Map Is the Thing like everyone else. All the maps of all the public transit systems all over the world, from the simple to the frightening.
