Monitoring in AWS Console
The new Amazon Cloudwatch monitoring ($0.015 per hour for each Amazon EC2 instance, so that’s about 10 US$/month per server) graphs in the (free) AWS console for ec2 instances are AWESOME:
(Yea, that’s a strange disk read spike there…) Now I just have to learn to interpret these and understand what’s going on there.
Time on site stays the same, regardless of slower pages
What happens to user behavior when we tweak the site to be slower in various degrees for them? It turns out that over a large gradient of site slowdowns, users in general spend around the same amount of time on Facebook, as measured by session time (user activity up until a certain period of idleness). Logically, page views suffer as a result.
Upload and download speeds with TATA Indicom in India.
Typical upload/download speeds at the farm with TATA.
Test
Installed blogging client on new laptop. Ready to go.Tesssssst.
1 of 2 New Yorkse katten ter adoptie
Wij hebben 2 katten ter adoptie: 1 witte en 1 zwarte. Ze zijn 4 jaar oud, we hebben ze meegebracht uit New York 2 jaar geleden. Over 1 maand vertrekken we naar Colombia en we kunnen ze (spijtig genoeg!!) onmogelijk meenemen, dus we zoeken iemand om 1 van de poezen (of beiden) te adopteren.
Het zijn 2 vrouwtjes. Ze woonden de eerste 2 jaar in het appartement in New York, maar zijn nu gewoon buiten te wonen, dus ze kunnen binnen of buiten. Ze zijn beiden gesteriliseerd en gevaccineerd en hebben een chip ingeplant. Ze zijn ook zindelijk (binnenshuis). Het zijn heel lieve katten, vriendelijk in de omgang.
We kunnen ze spijtig genoeg dus onmogelijk meenemen, bel ons op 03 / 325 88 70 or email petervandijck @ gmail dot com als je meer informatie wil.
Stuur deze webpagina ook door naar je vrienden, alvast bedankt!
Foto van toen ze nog klein waren:
Foto’s van nu:
Bel ons op 03 / 325 88 70 or email petervandijck @ gmail dot com
Eurostar confirmation page: “Unless you have a photographic memory, you might want to print this page for your records.” :)
Jared Spool interviews Brian Kalma, Director of User Experience and Web Strategy for the darling of Internet retail, Zappos.com.
Podcasting isn’t hip anymore (and most of the companies founded during the hype have done really badly), but it’s still a very useful thing.
Language classifications
In Arambol, India, I came across a small travelers' library where you could borrow and exchange books, with about 100 books organized in the following 4 categories: English, Dutch, German and Funny Languages. Unfortunately I got a picture of the library but not one of the classification:
The Journal of IA is up. It’s a peer-reviewed journal, which is fantastic, because it not only makes IA more serious and research-driven (which it needs), but mainly because it encourages the creation of this kind of research. I don’t particularly care if IA as a discipline survives or goes the way of “knowledge management”, which drowned in unscientific blabla and became pretty much irrelevant (with apologies to everyone who identifies with this). But I do care a lot about good research in my field, and this will hopefully encourag that.
One thing though: content is only available in PDF format. Guys! This is ironic in more ways than I can count.
What is a mobile phone called?
There’s a great discussion going on on the IXDA mailing list about what we call mobile phones (and what we call sending SMS messages) in different countries. I’m trying to summarize here, please leave a comment with info on your country and also note where this list may be wrong:
- USA: Cellphone or cell, texting.
- China: “Handy phone” (?)
- Iran: mobile. (landlines are called “telephone”).
- Spain: "teléfono móvil" or "móvil".
- Denmark: mobile phone.
- UK: mobile or mobile phone.
- Philipines: cellphone.
- New Zealand: “mobile” (but cellphone is also used).
- India: mobile. Telephone or landline for a landline.
- Korea: “handphone”
- Japan: keita.
- Dutch (Netherlands): mobiele telefoon.
- Dutch (Belgium): GSM.
- France: "téléphone portable" or "portable" but since "portable" is used for laptop too some people call them "mobile".
- Germany: handy http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handy
- Indonesia, they call it hand phone or simply abbreviated as "hp" pronounced "ha-pe". "*Ha*" as if in *ha*m and "*pe*" as if in*Pe*psi. In terms of texting, they use "SMS".
- Turkey: "pocket phone" ("cep telefonu")?
In general, “text message” is more widely understood than “SMS”.
I also created a Google survey, I’ll open up the results. Fill in the form about what phones are called in your country here.
Choose your language: “Apple”
Apple’s Belgium language gateway has “Apple” as a language option :)
Verkoop
(In Dutch)
Wij verkopen de volgende dingen, in Belgie, in de volgende 2 maanden. Contacteer op petervandijck at gmail puntje com of 03 325 88 70.
Alles is zelf af te halen in Deurne, Antwerpen (dicht bij autosnelweg).
Wit babybedje Ikea.
Goede staat, 1 jaar oud met matras. Goede staat. Originele prijs 90 euro, nu 49 euro.
Changing table baby.
Van Ikea. Changing table gedeelte is afneembaar om later in gewoon kastje om te zetten. Wit. Goede staat. Origineel: 100 euro. Nu 49 euro.
Kast babykleren.
Ikea kast babykleren. Wit. Nieuwprijs 100 euro, nu 49 euro.
Burostoel.
Van Ikea, redelijk goede lichtgroene buro stoel.
Prijs: 20 euro.
Televisie
Zonder afstandsbediening. Werkt goed (wij gebruiken hem met Belgacom TV bakje). 49 euro.
Grote Ikea kleerkast.
Ikea kleerkast met 5 kasten. Inclusief vele laden etc. Zeer goede kwaliteit. Nieuwprijs 600 euro. Nu 299 euro.
Handmaaier.
Zonder electriciteit of gas (enkel duwen, en geen lawaai), perfect voor stadstuintjes, en ecologisch. Werkt perfect. Nieuw 100 euro, nu 49 euro.
Droogkas
Werkt perfect, 1 jaar oud. 95 euro.
Wasmachine
Werkt perfect, 1 jaar oud. 95 euro.
Mannenfiets.
Goede staat, 49 euro. 5 versnellingen.
Barbecue
Zeer goede barbeque merk Weber, goede staat, 49 euro.
Fietszitje kindje.
Kan op de meeste fietsen gemonteerd worden. Hoogte verstelbaar. 29 euro.
2 boekenkasten.
Van Ikea.
Prijs: 25 euro voor de 2.
Keukenmeubel.
Van Ikea, met 2 laden en 2 vulbakken. Dik, stevig hout.
Prijs: 50 euro.
Sta-diepvries.
Van de makro, 1 jaar oud. Werkt perfect. 6 laden.
Prijs: 150 euro.
Zwart-wit HP Laserjet printer P2014.
Perfect voor thuis- of office gebruik, veel beter dan deskjet printer (goedkoper in onderhoud en sneller). Print enkel zwart wit. Past op Mac of PC. Van Makro, 1 jaar oud. Met USB kabel. Met 1 laserprinter cartridge (gaat lang mee).
Prijs: 65 euro.
Ijzeren kastjes Ikea.
2 kastjes buro-stijl Ikea, met sleuteltjes. 1 horizontaal (rood), 1 vertikaal (grijs).
Prijs: 55 euro elk of 75 euro voor de 2.
Stalamp Ikea.
Mooie lamp Ikea, met stevige voet.
Prijs: 20 euro.
Sofa
Sofa van Ikea. Overtrek kan gemakkelijk gewassen of vervangen worden. 1 jaar oud. Stevig gebouwd.
Prijs: 85 euro.
Oude werkende piano.
Een werkende staanpiano. Alle toetsen werken. De piano is wel vuil (moet gekuist worden). 1 voetpedaal werkt, het ander is kapot.
prijs: 295 euro.
Multilingual kids and family
We are visiting family these days, and I noticed they weren’t very sure which language to speak to the kid, Spanish or English. I think it should be generally the native language (Spanish in this case), unless you want to encourage that other language explicitly. In any case, I have the feeling those things set in a pattern pretty easily so there’s no need to explicitly discuss it.
Anyone care to share experiences dealing with family and multilingual kids?
Why people don’t get that Digg’s new URL shortening “service” is evil is beyond me. It hijacks the URL conversation by using that frame.
Jorge blogs (in Spanish) about the latest IA Summit.
New sustainable design book
Design is the problem – the future of design must be sustainable is a new Rosenfeld Media book. Go check it out.
Oh good, someone was blogging the IA Summit. Lots of links to presentations there.
Let’s talk about the sea
Joshua Porter on the IxDA mailing list: “There is a saying that I particularly like: ‘If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood...Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.’ So...right now we're discussing what to call the people who are gathering the f'ing wood. Should they be called wood gatherers, or boat architects or sailing experience designers? Here's a suggestion: Let's talk about the sea.”
Lou Rosenfeld: “Long ago I was probably one of the world's greatest information architects. For, perhaps, a year or two. (It might have had something to do with the fact that there were only about two dozen of us who claimed the title at the time.) Then I got bored and more importantly, the homesteaders were better at it than I was. So I moved on. And that's fine; the issue wasn't one of competence and intelligence, but of personality type and attention span.”
Increasing traffic.
This is what I like to see happen after a redesign of a mid-size informational site.
Visits:
Pageviews:
Traffic coming from search engines:
Guess at which point we launched?
The next thing I want to see happen is for those lines to start slowly but consistently going up (which I think they will). User satisfaction (as measured by feedback) is also way up.
(The little bumps are weeks.)
Review of “Selling usability: user experience infiltration tactics”
Webword was one of the first blogs out there, and it was all about usability, so I loved it. John Rhodes was the man behind it, and today he emailed me with a new book he wrote, which I’m reviewing here.
The book is about selling user experience, not from the top down (ie. convincing your CEO), but from the bottom up, which is how 99% of us have to sell it. It’s funny, it’s brilliant, if I could write like that I’d be writing my next book today. I love it.
If you're doing UX work in a large organization, you should buy this book. And if you're a UX consultant, you should too. It's that simple. The book is worth it's weight in gold: it gives you (as a UX person) insight in how to really get things done in large companies.
The first chapter starts off good (and I’m gonna put a lot of quotes in this review to give you an idea of the writing style and wisdom in the book):
"99% of the people in an organization are not thinking about UX and the other 1 % are thinking about women, fire and dangerous things. Most managers understand UX about as well as they understand the average airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow."
A wakeup call, but true. It’s a practical book, can’t emphasize this enough:
“This book is full of stealth. We’ve got guerilla attacks, end runs, and cloaking devices. These tactics are not conventional. I’m asking you to reject the frontal assault. We’ll be successful under the radar.”
In "2. The First Business of Business is Business", he explains what business is all about.
“How Do You Talk About UX? The advice I am going to give you next is worth the price of the book: Do not talk about user experience for at least a month. Instead, before you say or do anything regarding UX, think about what it means to the bottom line. Modify your language to be more in line with the true intentions of the business.”
Chapter 3: User Experience is an Ugly Baby
I didn’t know Donald Norman used the term “user experience” in 1998 and 1999.
Again, John puts his finger right on the problem:
“Most folks involved in UX do not have business or management experience. This means that few people can bridge the gap between the two worlds. There isn’t a common language available. This leaves UX at a disadvantage.”
In chapter 4: Understanding Your Role in the (Dis)Organization, he explains how companies *really* work. Forget about the org chart.
"Managers hate risk; they love people who can reduce it. In business, there’s nothing so valuable as a sure thing. Put that idea in your pocket and never let it go."
In the following chapters, John explains how to deal with managers, co-workers, designers, sales, CEOs and executives, teams, stakeholders and consultants. One chapter each. This part of the book is pure gold: for every group, John clearly explains how they think (and this is true in almost all organizations), and even more importantly, how to influence them).
More good quotes:
"A consultant has power nearly equal that of a customer. There isn’t quite as much juice flowing, but it can be pretty damn close, especially since your organization is probably paying this person hefty sums of cabbage."
"I like almost all designers and developers. The reason is pretty simple. Unlike so many workers, these men and women get real work done. "
"Sales people talk. They talk to a lot of people and they talk all the time, mostly to product managers, marketing, and of course customers. Although unusually biased, these workers have an exceptional grasp of what your company has to offer and what your customers want and need."
By the time we get to chapter 14, it's back to you. How to use project momentum to your advantage. Here's the first sentence of this chapter: "All projects are headed in some direction. You want to understand the vector of activity and inject UX along the way." Damn good stuff.
Now go buy this book.
I've only read half of the book this far, but I am wildly enthusiastic, so I'm going to go ahead and post this review right now. Buy this book. Order it for everyone in your consulting company. Really. It's almost at the level of "Don't make me think", which I think is the best book about usability ever written. And I only say "almost" coz it lacks the funky illustrations. Go order it! If you’re disappointed you can email me personally.
Cruxy in the deadpool
Cruxy was a smart, future-looking service with a great team and great technology, but it never took off hence it’s now shutting down. “The world has changed for the better, and we are glad for that, but at some point we have to admit, Cruxy is not needed or used by enough people for us to keep going. While we have had an amazing cloud-based business model since day #1 that actual made sense and worked, thanks to my brilliant, co-founder Jon Oakes, we were never able to scale our business up with enough volume to allow us to make an actual living.”
The Nielsman does it again (after years of nothingness): really big menu dropdowns work well (as opposed to regular “menu” dropdowns). I believe it.
Screencasts of clickable wireframes
I’m working on a large project in a global team, and yesterday I tried something new: making a screencast of my (clickable) wireframes. I did a search today and remember reading about it first here.
So far it’s working great. Team members like this as a way to communicate, the screencasts are fast and easy to make, and they also help me in getting to grips with my own work. I’ll post more details on the how-to later.
I like to watch Dries talking. He talks a bit about how the raised money for Acquia, and other good stuff.
The “mere category effect”
Now Iyengar has published a new study showing that one way to combat the effects of excessive choice is to group items into categories. It turns out that even useless categories make people happier with their choices.
In other words: even “useless” categories can be better than no categories. The study is titled: “The Mere Categorization Effect: How the Presence of Categories Increases Choosers’ Perceptions of Assortment Variety and Outcome Satisfaction” (PDF)
One day I’ll be able to write like this. “The first thing I had to do was figure out what customers needed, which I did by talking to as many customers as I could until I started to get kind of bored because I kept hearing the same thing.”
The IA Summit is next week, get your tickets now if you haven’t yet. I won’t be able to make it unfortunately (I should be there next year). Have fun everyone.
Facebook international.
Facebook seems even more aggressive about being international than Google was, check this out:
- 40 percent of Facebook users are not using English.
- More than 70 percent of Facebook users are outside the United States.
- It reaches more than 10 percent of the total national population in 26 countries.
- Facebook is available in 43 languages and is in the process of being translated into another 60 languages.
- Since offering an Italian-language version of the service about a year ago, the number of users has grown from 350,000 to about 8 million.
- 25,000 volunteers helped translate Facebook into Turkish last year, and there are now 9 million Turkish-language users signed up for Facebook.
- Facebook is working on five Indian languages, including Tamil, Punjabi and Hindi.
Rock and *fucking* roll, as they say.
Hahaha Pluto is a planet in Illinois.
I consulted with Myngle from initial idea to IA and into development, and now they got a million bucks in funding. Yey for European startups!
My Mediatemple versus Amazon EC2 hosting stats
The public Pingdom stats of poorbuthappy.com http://www.pingdom.com/reports/ogy7t9gjlgs0/ show how since the move in January from Mediatemple (gs 20$ plus an extra MySQL container 150$) to Amazon EC, hosting is not only cheaper (the EC2 server plus S3 storage is about 100$/m – ok, the stats don’t show that but I’m telling you) but more importantly, the site is about 50% faster (response times have gone from about 1500 ms to about 1000ms). A 50% increase in response times is a big deal, and we haven’t even done much optimizing on that EC2 server.
We’ve open sourced the Poorbuthappy one-click deploy code. It’s still rough, but it’s a start. I’ll try to work on the documentation soon, which is probably the most important bit. http://code.google.com/p/one-click-deploy/
One-click deploy is one of the greatest things I’ve ever added (Chris added it really): it’s like versioning: once you start, you’ll never go back.
Playing with metaphors
“The platform falls through the cloud and is smashed to earth like a plummeting stock price!”
Great playing with metaphors, reminds me of Peter Morville’s playing with the metaphors of tags as leaves and taxonomies as trees. (“But we all know what grows from piles of dead leaves right? Beautiful new trees!”)
Netbook
I am considering buying a netbook, and I wonder if it’ll be good enough for work. Will report back.
Balsamiq mockups review
I have been working with Visio for many years now for making mockups and wireframes, but a few weeks ago I bought Balsamiq mockups. It’s a tool that lets you make simple mockups that look simple. I am in the very early stages of a large project and I like the fact that I can easily make something that looks unfinished enough to be discussed as a possibility, not as a finished product (which happens often with more polished wireframes). I was making actual sketches on paper and scanning them before, but they are often hard to read and understand – doing it in Balsamiq is faster.
My conclusion: Balsamiq mockups is fun to use and makes the team focus on what matters by being sketchy, but it needs to evolve just a little more.
Features.
Balsamiq lets you drag & drop lots of UI elements on a page, and combine them into mockups. So far so good. You can save as PNG and paste that into Powerpoint for presentations.
Grouping. You can group elements together, and then move them as 1 element. This works as expected.
Backwards/Forwards. You can move elements to the back or front, this works as expected.
Text. You can type in text, for which you have to doubleclick the element. I would prefer to just be able to select an element and start typing, but that’s a minor problem.
Locking. You can lock elements in place, this works fine. However, you can not unlock 1 element (if you want to make a little change to it), there’s only an option to Unlock all (see screenshot below). That’s a little annoying, if I want to make a change to something that’s locked, I have to unlock all and the relock everything again.
No multiple screens.
One drawback: each screen in Balsamiq is 1 file. So no multiple screens per file. That makes it much harder to keep a project with many screens organized, or to share it. I had about 20 screens in this document and things were already become a little messy. It’s doable, but not great. The tool can have many screens open at once (switch with tabs at the bottom), so it’s workable, but not perfect. My projects usually have between 20 and 100 screens, so let me manage that.
No backgrounds.
Perhaps related to the fact that there are no multiple screens, there are no backgrounds. This is a big problem for me: reusable backgrounds (containing the basic website elements) are a HUGE efficiency win for me in Visio: if I want to change the logo, I just change it once in the background.
No concept of Masters.
Also related to not having multiple screens, there are no masters. To be honest, Visio doesn’t have a decent concept of masters either, but Axure has, and it rocks. Masters are complex (grouped) elements that you reuse on many pages. If you make a change to the master, the element is changed on all pages. For large projects and for efficiency, you really need this. For example, a master can be a search box with a submit button and some text. Change the text in one place and it’s adjusted everywhere this master is used.
No easy creation of new UI elements.
If you want to create a UI item in Visio, you just use the drawing tools and make it, then group it and save it as a new element, done. The only way to create a new element in Balsamiq is to import it as a picture (I had to check the manuals). I made a few sketches on paper of some elements, scanned them, then imported them, but they didn’t look good and it was too much work.
Conclusion.
For the first weeks of the project, Balsamiq was great. It kept people focused on the fact that these are still just sketches, and was fairly easy to use. For the rest of the project, I’m gonna switch to Axure though, which has the necessary features to efficiently manage dozens or hundreds of wireframe pages.
On the positive side, Balsamiq is working on a browser based version with collaboration and commenting, which will totally make it rock for quickly iterating through different designs. Add some power features like multiple pages, backgrounds and masters (you could even leave out backgrounds if you have masters), and you’re done! And even for these few weeks, it was worth the money.
More funky categories
In our series of funky categories that start with a C, here’s the South Park main navigation:
All pretty straightforward except for “Crap” :)
Only IE users welcome in USA?
OK, so if you want to visit the USA, you need to visit this webpage to get a visa waiver https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta/, which doesn’t work in Google Chrome (it does work in IE).
If you require travelers to your country to visit an online application before you leave, you better make sure it’s fucking up, US customs!
1-click deploy
We just added 1-click deploy from Subversion to poorbuthappy.com. It’s the first time I have that available, so no fudging with FTP-ing changed files or command-line crap. And it ROCKS!
The first time I read about the importance of 1-click deploy was at Joel’s website, (he calls it 1-click build) and then later in the Flickr Scaling Websites book. Now I finally have it. It rocks. Maybe we’ll open-source that. Here’s a screenshot of the admin screen:
Of Joel’s rules for good software, we now do many:
- Do you use source control? YES
- Can you make a build in one step? YES
- Do you make daily builds? No, but it’s not relevant.
- Do you have a bug database? YES
- Do you fix bugs before writing new code? Mmmmm..
- Do you have an up-to-date schedule? Not relevant.
- Do you have a spec? No, except for large features.
- Do programmers have quiet working conditions? Yes.
- Do you use the best tools money can buy? No money involved.
- Do you have testers? No.
- Do new candidates write code during their interview? Not relevant.
- Do you do hallway usability testing? YES.
Amazon is the new Google
Amazon really kicked Google’s butt with its web services the past years. Today, Google launched a new “status” page of their services, and I kept thinking: ”I’ve seen that before”. On Amazon of course!
Scaling stuff
You gotta love scaling stories.
- S3 rocks. (I knew that)
- Use YSlow and Firebug to set HTTP cache control (and Gzip everything).
- Just go with InnoDB (unless you need specific MyISAM stuff, which you probably don’t).
Of course they talk a lot about all the mongrel scaling crapp that Rails needs that we don’t have to worry about with PHP :)