The top ten usability problems
The top ten usability problems in Mozilla. Developers are slowly getting into the usability game, and that's a Good Thing for open source. I believe OS will make it if they follow (or stay ahead of) the curve from functional to usable to invisible software. We've done functional, right now the challenge is to make it usable.
I had an insight that
I had an insight that let me simplify the XFML DTD a lot: now the only things in an XFML document are facets, topics and pages. Nothing else. XFML DTD 0.7 and example file.
Mind your phraseology! - Using
Mind your phraseology! - Using controlled vocabularies to improve findability.
Switching to Outlook: why is
Switching to Outlook: why is it so slow getting email from my server? Anything I should know? (Screenshot)
Use language to design a mental model.
Designing a mental model: Six Degrees - Why messages, files and people?.
I am in the process of designing a mental model for a metadata app I'm working on, and it is fascinating to think about the choices you have, and the way a mental model is closely related to language: the nouns and verbs you use to describe what is going on. I think I need to find some good books on linguistics. Any recommendations?
What do I call my "metadata"? "XFML map" or "metadata document"? Metaphors abound. "Connections" or "links" between topics? One of my best inventions I think so far on this is that each map has a "network". Just saying that: ...
"A map has a network of connected maps around it"
... explains a lot of the philosophy and the technical details of XFML. No further explanation. One word! Before I said that, you may not have known this thing, after I say it it is obvious. Questions will arise:
"How is a map connected to other maps in its network? - Through connections between individual topics."
The word "network" conjures images of connected maps, exactly how I want users to visualise this. Use language to design a mental model. Language, especially the categories and metaphors you choose, guides thinking. I've been reading Frank Herbert (again) - gotta be careful with that.
I have used Eudora for
I have used Eudora for years as my email app, mainly because I was worried about virusses with Outlook and didn't want to succumb to MS. The last few weeks it started crashing on my machine, so now I'm moving to Outlook after all. It also means I can finally try out SixDegrees. Oh wait, darn, my trial installation expired and I never even used it (because I was using Eudora - SixDegrees doesn't support Eudora yet). What now?
Robert Barta wrote an excellent
Robert Barta wrote an excellent topicmap tutorial this time using AsTMa, another way of expressing topicmaps (usually XTM is used). AsTMa= Authoring Tutorial. Check it out!
A thoughtful post by DonnaM:
A thoughtful post by DonnaM: Content Inventory - when is it enough?
Simon did a great job
Simon did a great job on email archives, one of the last bastions of techie-induced design where nobody seemed to have heard of usability or design. Finally, that is changing. css-discuss archive.
As you may know, I
As you may know, I am coding some software that works with XFML. I am going to do some testing end August, through September. I want to find out if the philosophy of XFML (= "Distributed, loosely connected metadata can solve the problems of badly entered or very specific metadata.") holds up in real life.
If you have a weblog or content site and are interested in this exercise, get in touch. People joining will be expected to write about their experiences good and bad with authoring faceted metadata, I'll set up a central weblog for that.
Sticky test
This post should only show up at the top of the working without a job category.
Four thousand two hundred pages
Four thousand two hundred pages driving Donna nuts. Is a content inventory really worth the work?
Joshua sees the light. My
Joshua sees the light. My take on this: don't size text. I've given up on it. What's wrong with default text sizes anyway?
Victor points to this good
Victor points to this good looking faceted browsing interface and notes exactly how clever it is in its focuss on its audience on the result page.
Cell Biology (washingtonpost.com) (via Peterme):
Cell Biology (washingtonpost.com) (via Peterme): "When somebody turns off their cell phone for you, it's true love."
The whole metadata thing I'm
The whole metadata thing I'm working on with Simon Willison is becoming more and more obvious. I'm really surprised nobody has done this: the more I think about it and now that it's taking shape, the more absolutely obvious it seems: metadata should be syndicated and connected. Somewhat like news items (RSS). I can't even remember why exactly it took me so long to get my head around it all.
Thanks to Simon's Secret XML Powers, it's also turning out to be surprisingly easy to code. I wouldn't be surprised if we have working code in about 20 hours of work. I'm interviewing this week, so I don't have a lot of time for coding, but even so it's not as much work as I'd thought. I think we're succeeding well avoiding the political pitfalls that make the RSS specifications such a mess - the advantage of dictatorship I think.
Coding together while living in different countries seems to be working out as well - mostly because we divide our work clearly. We'll see how it goes, I'm curious how we'll deal with coding together without using CVS or some versioning system.
I think the first real life applications will be on my colombia website, and then I want to make it work with a mailing list archive. Maybe the Sigia-L list? We'll see how it goes...
Techie stuff IA's need to
Techie stuff IA's need to know. (I know, I was going to stop posting. I'm trying, really!)
Semantic Research Inc.: "Semantica is
Semantic Research Inc.: "Semantica is expert-centric: We recognize that every organization, at all levels, has subject matter experts that have tacit understanding of the organization's processes, markets, products and assets. "
Usability Junction: a new South
Usability Junction: a new South African usability company, set up by a friend of mine. If you need South African usability testing, contact them!
The Disintermediation Blues / On
The Disintermediation Blues / On the sad state of online car- and mortgage-buying services: "It's not news that in recent years people with expertise (or, heaven forbid, degrees) in the social sciences were usually ignored when it came to handing out the top job in Silicon Valley" (Still taking time off, just couldn't help myself posting this for future reference. Via IASlash.)
A few weeks off
Since it's the fashionable thing to do, I'm gonna take a few weeks off from this blog. Got a book to finish, a job to apply for and summer to enjoy. You enjoy too!
Simon Willison: "Moment of realisation:
Simon Willison: "Moment of realisation: I just figured out what it is about Flash that bugs me so much. Flash is rubbish at text. Sure it can render text in pretty ways, but it never feels like real words. Flash takes good old fashioned text and locks it away in a pretty but shallow world, one that is out of reach of search engines, screen readers and my all important right mouse button. What good is text is text if I can't search it, select it, copy it, paste it and generally processs it in whatever way I see fit?"
Amazon Light: very very very
Amazon Light: very very very cool. This amazon interface (based on Google) might actually be more useful than the real amazon.
Lycos are looking for a
Lycos are looking for a usability engineer in Boston, MA (USA). More usability jobs.
Another Tire Swing Cartoon although
Another Tire Swing Cartoon although I preferred an earlier version (but were did it go?). More usability comics
Shirky: Communities, Audiences, and Scale
Shirky: Communities, Audiences, and Scale (In case you missed this in April - I did)
"Can we have a medium that spreads messages to a large audience, but also allows all the members of that audience to engage with one another like a single community?" The answer seems to be "No."
oreilly.com -- Creating Applications with
oreilly.com -- Creating Applications with Mozilla coming in September: looking pretty cool!
Useful bookmarklet: Page Weight
Useful bookmarklet: Page Weight & Speed (includes image weight!)
Clever discussion on webgraphics about
Clever discussion on webgraphics about generating navigation for a website in Flash automatically from a link tag that points to a file containing a TOC (XFML maybe?).
Wired 10.08: The Bandwidth Capital
Wired 10.08: The Bandwidth Capital of the World
"AT FIRST GLANCE, Seoul seems like just another sprawling metropolis: Its buildings, hastily constructed with dubious financing in the months leading up to South Korea's 1997 economic crisis, are the sort of blocky, concrete-and-glass high-rises that give many modern cities the air of prefab homogeneity. Wide boulevards are choked with the oppressive traffic common in East Asia or, for that matter, Silicon Valley. Megamalls and underground shopping centers filled with Body Shops and Burger Kings cater to teens and young professionals. There's none of the high tech visual overload you see in Tokyo, or the clean-scrubbed, old-meets-new urbanism of Scandinavia - nothing to indicate that Seoul is the most wired city on the planet."
Functional Spec Tutorial :: What
Functional Spec Tutorial :: What and Why: a really good looking tutorial.
Interesting classification scheme spotted at
Interesting classification scheme spotted at Safeway
Amazon.com: Information Architecture: Blueprints for
Amazon.com: Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web: Christina is still editing, but the book virutally exists :)
Many people pointed to this,
Many people pointed to this, here it is for my own archiving purposes: After the Dot-Bomb
ieSpell - Spell Checker add-on
ieSpell - Spell Checker add-on for Internet Explorer" "ieSpell is a free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a webpage."
The papers for IBM's Make
The papers for IBM's Make IT Easy conference 2002 are up (via, again, Victor).
Centrally imposed metadata structures aren't sexy.
Victor points to Dubliners, in which Joe Clark (when is that book published? I'm waiting for it!) laments that Dublin Core isn't used. Ha, I know why: centrally imposed metadata structures aren't sexy. Ask Victor : his categories are crazy as hell, but they are his. That's the point. What would be the value for him adding boring metadata that is so general to the point of becoming useless. That's why I have hope for XFML.
I'm on the plane reading
I'm on the plane reading up on some blogs I've missed lately! No, it's not Internet over the Atlantic, it's IE's Work Offline feature (Mozilla has it too). Very very cool. I wish there was a way to just point my browser to a set of bookmarks (when am I gonna get a decent bookmark managaging function?) when on a fast connection and say "suck them all in baby, I'll watch them offline". Maybe an idea for the Moz guys?
PS: I'm typing this on the plane as well, in Notepad. I also wish there was a way for Movabletype to work offline. But I guess that's what we have Radio for.
I've been using Photomesa for a few months now, and it is great. ZUI's (Zoomable USer Interface) are a great and logical way to manage your picture collection. I've got three months worth of pictures in there, and I see no problem scaling it up to many years of pictures. It's too bad nobody has made a commercial product out of it (it could do with a bit of polishing and additional features). For that matter, it's too bad nobody has made a decent picture management tool, ever, as far as I know. I'm a photographer by training, and I know there's a market there. I'm sure a company could easily create an amazingly useful tool that all professional photographers and many consumers would use. I'm not sure why that hasn't happened, but it's dissapointing. Maybe because it would be too easy for MS to incorporate the zooming metaphor as an option for viewing folders in their next release of Windows, thereby killing the product mentioned above. No, that's not it, the zoomable interface is only part of what I want, there is a lot more: annotation, proper metadata, ... MS actually have some decent research on this, too bad I can't find it - wanna try? My email+blogging time is limited to 40 minutes today and they're running out.
Innovation seems so damn slow.
I just found the preview edition of Groove on my machine again, an online collaboration tool. Anyone care to install it as well and try it out?
I'm also still looking for the killer tool to manage my social network. Any ideas?
I have a question box
I have a question box on one of my sites, and I was considering building a system that would allow multiple people to answer the questions I get, and to archive them online; this email message made me think about the privacy aspect of it:
"Thanks. I hope my question won't be posted on any public message boards -- I'd be embarrassed to have it posted! It's just a question that I asked because I am trying to get a better understanding of the experience that my friend is going through".
When I do find time to design this system, I'll use this quote with one of the personas.
eDesign (pointer by Jeff at
eDesign (pointer by Jeff at IASlash) has some really good stuff, like this story of assistive technology for disabled users. Too bad I had to hack the URL to link to it, and too bad the new site suffers from bad links and error pages, else I would have subscribed straight away.
For those interested in DTD's:
For those interested in DTD's: I am now uploading the DTD's for XFML to Yahoo! Groups : xfml Files. Feedback on the DTD's very welcome, we're version 0.41 at the moment. Version 0.4 introduced IDREF's.
New Project
Here's the thing: with the book almost finished, and XFML moving towards a stable spec fast, I am starting a new secret project. It's gonna be all about (surprise!) metadata.
I'm not a real programmer myself (although I've build a CMS or two in my time), so I'm looking for someone to work with me on this with PHP and XML skills. If you're interested, drop me a line at peter@poorbuthappy.com. If things work out as planned, this little project is gonna kick some serious ass.