Common form myths
Forms That Work - Questions and Answsers is about how to design forms for the web. It's a bit vague on tips though, and sometimes even plain clueless.
When answering a question about how to deal with error messages, they say things like "The cursor appears in the 'error' field (if technically possible)". That's not just clueless about web technology (javascript can put the cursor in any field), it's even badly thought trough advice (what if you have more than just one error field? Pick the top one one the page?) The advice really seems to come from people who have never designed a form, else they'd discuss things like client side of server side input validation. A bit dissapointing.
Anyways, a few common myths about forms in my experience - I'm sure there's more:
1. "Client side validation (javascript) is always a good thing." I've found that with certain types of longer forms, it just confuses the user to have popups tell them there are problems with their forms. The user has to scroll up, fix it, scroll down, click submit again, and up comes another warning. That's frustrating. In cases like that (long, complex forms on one page), it's better to have server side validation only, and an error page that only shows the incorrect fields, with good explanations.
2. "It's a web standard to indicate required fields with an asterix * and most people understand that." No they don't. I've been surprised noticing how many people do not know that a field with an asterix is required. For most forms, I'd recommend (if most fields are required) to put "optional" next to optional fields, or (if most fields are optional) to put "required" next to the required fields. Of course, often you'll be able to separate them out into separate sections (a required section first, and an optional section later), which is even better for the user.
A common objection to making fields clearly optional, is that it reduces the amount of data the marketing department can work with (these optional fields are usually for marketing purposes). But what are the numbers like? Experimenting with your form, the way it's worded, the way it's layed out, can bring a high level of opt-ins even though the information isn't required. Assuming making things vague will increase the value of your marketing data doesn't seem right to me.
Good looking people use Intel toys!
I talked to good man Ben from partially.org (check out the animations!) yesterday, who was carrying an Intel Play Digital Camera.
Now this little baby is a miracle of design, usability and just plain coolness. You can take a few minutes of video, audio, you can do stop-motion animation, and it just has like 5 buttons. Ben told me the software is amazingly easy to use as well. I've been trying to locate one for sale on the web, no such luck so far...
At Liga1.com I pointed before at the ethnographers Intel employs (like Genevieve Bell) to better understand humans and technology. I didn't really understand which products they were working on. Now I know. Check out some of their research.
Advanced user path tracking
User tracking with Indigeo, a system to capture user interactions on the web and compare them with optimal paths. I chatted to James about this about a year ago, and now it's kinda finished.
It gives the visitor a task, and then tracks how they go through the site, including which link they click and how long they spend on a page.
You can then do funky stuff like analyze what your users did versus an optimal path, or play back how they went trhough the site.
"The system requires just a standard web browser no plugins, no java, no javascript. All interaction is tracked on the server using a proxy application which detects incoming web requests and returns a page where all hyperlinks have an ID attached to them. This is transparent to the visitor."
James is looking for feedback, so head over and send him some!
Google corrects misspelled names
I just love the way Google corrects names: Google Search: scot mcloud "Did you mean: scott mccloud"
Metaphors and mental models
Interview with the original Xerox dudes: Bringing Design to Software
"The purpose of computer metaphors, in general, and particularly of graphical or icon-oriented ones, is to let people use recognition rather than recall."
I've been thinking about how mental models (the way users think about things) are about categories (how users organise things) or metaphors (how they explain things).
The category based mental models are really useful for information architecture. The metaphor based mental models aren't used very often - or else I don't understand them very well. I don't really see how I'd use them in web design, except for the obvious and most often flawed examples of using metaphors like "rooms" for navigating websites.
IAwiki: EricScheid's page is pretty
IAwiki: EricScheid's page is pretty interesting.
"The Japanese have a saying that only young boys or old men should be allocated the task of removing the leaves from their beautiful gardens. The reason is that both have intrinsic reasons for being a little bit, um, imperfect in the execution of this duty, and the occassional leaf will remain in the garden scape. This natural imperfection is considered a form of beauty."
Sex education
scarleteen - sex education for the real world
Cool that there are sites like this. Show it to your teen kids (if you have'em). (via cockybastard.com)
Content barrier
SXSWBaby! : notes : Design for Community 2: The Users Strike Back!
"Content can work as a barrier as well; on Fray you have to go through an entire story to get to the posting area."
Because passwords are no fun.
But do they want me?
Oddpost is very cool, but I can't help thinking "Do they want my business?". It just seems so like a net savvy game, that I have the suspicion they really won't be around in 6 months. Do they have a business plan?
I think that's the reason I'm not subsribing to the trial. (Or maybe it's because I don't need it right now...)
Gettho-ising your discussions
I just realised something: I always knew splitting up your discussions like this: WebAIM Accessibility Training Forum was a bad thing. It's better to keep the crowd (and the topics) mixed and, if you want to organise things, retroactively tag discussions with certain topics.
Now I know why: it's the same reason why having a mixed mailing list is usually better than a highly specialized one: you're turning your discussion into a sterile gettho if you separate everything out cleanly. Because that assumes people act like machines, are interested in 1 topic only, and so on.
Serendip, a site about the
Serendip, a site about the brain and lots more. (via Peterme.
The tools keep coming
"A TextArc is a visual represention of a text%u2014the entire text (twice!) on a single page. Some funny combination of an index, concordance, and summary, it uses the viewer's eye to help uncover meaning. A more detailed overview is available. "
The tools keep coming. There is a slow building of tools that help analyzing stuff. However, there is no interaction between them. Software designed to help social research and things like the above should all be able to export and import data in XML, so you can use multiple tools for data analysis. One day maybe...
Transana.org "Transana is designed to
"Transana is designed to facilitate the transcription and analysis of video data. It provides a way to view video, create a transcript, and link places in the transcript to frames in the video. It provides tools for identifying and organizing analytically interesting portions of videos, as well as for attaching keywords to those video clips. It also features database and file manipulation tools that facilitate the organization and storage of large collections of digitized video. "
And it's free as well :)
My take on the Google API
It will work. I wasn't too much of a fan of the traditional web-services hype (the view where webservices would be all). But now I can see a different world.
Say I'm a developer. I can easily imagine building a website, and using API's to Google, Yahoo, Ebay and a few other sites on one website. Even a simple one. The API's just make my life easier, that's all, and allow me to offer a better website for my client.
If my traffic is low I'll pay maybe US $10-30 for each API a year, and hupla, they're making money. Maybe I'll pay $99 to Google to use up to 100.000 queries a month on x domain names. Or maybe I'll pay autotranslate.com US$ 2 per automatic translation over soap (and charge this to my clients). It's cheaper and easier than getting a translation program, installing it on my server and keeping it up to date.
Faceted metadata XML format
Here's the thing: I've been thinking about this and playing around with it, and I think I might make a simple XML format (it's half done) to publish faceted metadata that will:
- let you build your faceted metadata
- let you publish that on the web if you like
- you can import other people's taxonomies, or parts of them
- you can merge with other people's taxonomies
Anyone can then write software that takes a map and generates navigation like:
- "More about faceted metadata on Bloug, Moresmarter, Noisebetweenstations". The links would show a list of pages about faceted metadata on those sites, as defined by their authors. (If they have published their taxonomy, that is). The system knows what that my topic faceted metadata is the same as your topic faceted metadata because I've pointed my published topic to your published topic. (Or to another published topic that you have pointed to as well.)
- Also simpler faceted metadata navigation, like "Similar articles".
For example: Lou Rosenfeld might publish a really good taxonomy for the field of information architecture, then I could import that and merge that with my personal taxonomy for my weblog.
Is there any interest in this? Is anyone else excited about this? The concepts are based on XTM (topic maps). I don't want to use XTM itself for a variety of reasons that I might elaborate on later, I don't think it would work. (ie. too complex, too flexible)
Charging for content
WriteTheWeb: The problem with charging for content
"The ones that do stand a chance are the ones that are significantly, obviously different."
Charging for regularly updated content is a pretty uphill battle. If I can get the Village Voice for free, or get a Times or Wired magazine for $10 a year, how are you going to compete with that? The problems are of scale.
Then again, charging for specialised content that doesn't have to be rewritten every week (ie. keeps some value) is pretty doable I would think.
Universities
HCII Research: Projects by PI - always interesting to see what the unies are up to...
A Conversation with Don Norman
A Conversation with Don Norman
"Design, even just the usability, let alone the aesthetics, requires a team of people with extremely different talents."
Don Norman, that cuddly old bear of usability, is interesting because he's not afraid to change his mind. (via eleganthack)
The kids are the future.
The kids are the future. I'm in Belgium for a few weeks and I've noticed some things about the kids:
SMS (instant messages over your mobile) is still really in. At a recent UPA meet I heard about some research in the UK that showed girls are likely to initiate first contact with a boy they fancy through SMS rather than in person. I guess it's nothing else than an advanced note - the role of note-pasing in girls social lifes has been well documented. There are a lot of really interesting aspects to think about here: changing roles, technology influencing the social sphere, ...
I heard the expression "sjatlief" for the first time, which I understand is a common term for a boyfriend you met through chatting, and is somehow different from a real boyfriend.
Maybe chatting, SMS and all those technologies are in a way very empowering for young girls? They use them in ways that are good for them. That ties in with the view of the active consumer, who makes cultural products his own, instead of just passively being influenced by, say, american TV programs.
Ethnography and contextual design: Ha!
It's funny how disciplines often are still separate and yet struggle with the same problems.
Contectual design is a fairly famous method for designing software that takes a very ethnographic approach. One of the problems they have is to communicate their findings to the team. The data they gather (like ethographers) is very rich, very detailed.
A spec of course can only communicate a limited amount of information. So what they do is they have group sessions where they work through the data, and like that get everyone familiar with it.
One of the things ethnographers struggle with is exactly the same: how to communicate their results. Ethnography is one of those academic disciplines that has a whole history behind it, and people tend to get stuck in that history.
They tend to believe that writing a text in a similar way the early anthropologists wrote their texts is the way to go. Ha! Ethnographers do recognise the problem, but most still seem to stick to gathering and analysing data, and then writing it up in a fairly classical manner.
To me it seems that the contextual design crowd has solved the communication problem a lot better. Sharing data with the whole team, having data analysis sessions, so the whole team gets soaked in data, and they all can go home and make decisions based on a real understanding of the subtleties of what's going on.
During the last few years, I've felt the limitations of (my) writing specs to communicate with a team. Sure, specs are nessecary and useful, but on their own they're just not enough. That's one of the reasons why working together with people who live at the other side of the world can be hard.
Anyways, I'll shut up now.
Enjoyment, efficiency, satisfaction and motivation.
I'm leaving the country and I had this huge pile of change to get rid of, so I asked the bank and they said: "If you count it yourself and put it in little bags we accept it."
Efficiency: I started counting this huge pile of change with a fairly efficient method: I went through it and put every coin in a separate pile, which I would count later.
This was hugely frustrating.
Enjoyment: Then I found myself picking out certain types of coins, and counting them and putting them in the bags at the same time. This strategy takes more time because you have to shift through all the coins like four times. However, for some reason it was a lot more satisfying.
This was almost enjoyable.
Point being: task completion time and measures like that are not the only measurements that matter. Sometimes a slower interface is better if it provides more motivation (feedback, enjoyment), which counts for a lot. If I'm not motivated, I'll chat to my co-workers, kill time on the web, and so on, and in the end it will take me longer and there will be more errors.
DSVR hosting
I moved to DSVR hosting about two months ago, so I could have my own (virtual) server to play around with. PHP, mySQL, JAVA servlets, mod_rewrite, complete control ove your apache httpd.conf file and all other config files, all the usual goodies you want. It's £300 (about US$ 450) a year. I pay about £10 a month for extra bandwidth, but that's the price of popularity, you get 3 gigs a month included. I'm on the virtual server 300 package.
I have complete access to my own server, loads of domain names, I can play around all I want and, and this is the killer, their tech support is really good.
£300 a year, great tech support.
Why this plug? I'm just impressed. Today one of their tech guys helped me fix what was a coding problem of mine, which was producing problems for their server (basically my script was writing about 20 files a minute to the server, it wasn't a pretty sight.)
So if you have more than just a small personal site to host, and need to play around with server side stuff a lot, check them out. They're good.
Serendipity
Serendipity (definition) and browsing are really closely related words. Serendipity is one of those words that I just really like. It took me a while to learn (I kept forgetting what it meant), but now I love it. Serendipity. Serendipity.
Scott Andrew is starting to play around with linking strategies. (via Matt).
I think a lot of people lately have started using Google functionality, like backwards links and similar pages when browsing the web. I was thinking about this, and decided to experiment with search terms. When I'm writing something, I usually do a few google searches. Why not shares those search terms, which constitute valuable information, since I usually have to try a few before finding the best ones.
Google searches: "serendipity browsing" and "supporting serendipity", which lead me to this interesting PPT file: Collaboration in the digital library (PPT), from Lancaster university, which makes good points like:
- Collaborative, situated learning just happens because of physical affordances.
- Collaboration (in searching in libraries) happens, it matters and we should build interfaces to support it.
... and uses ethnographic methods.
Did I mention serendipity?
Getting over hierarchies
I am getting pretty close to letting go of hierarchies when developing websites. I've been looking a lot at:
- The work of George Lakoff (at Amazon.com)
- Topic maps.
I've been playing around with faceted metadata on a site of mine. What I'm experimenting with:
- What other navigation support do we need to keep after we've added metadata navigation. What can we throw away?
- How to best presents this rich metadata?
Goodies:
- A list of methapors we live by.
- Funny this, I'd seen it before but didn't know about Lakoff back then! The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf
- Metaphors of terror
- Metaphors we compute by.
Chains and teams
I learned a few things about teams during the past two years:
- Good teams are crucial to successful projects.
- Process is crucial too, but good teams play with process, ie. adjust it to their needs for the project. Bad teams follow process literally and then complain about it.
- You can not afford a role in the team (visual design, IA, copy writing, ...) that is weak. You can only afford weak members if someone else picks up their role.
- The client is part of the team. The team needs to educate the client and put them in the right mindset to work together.
- Specs are secondary in a good team. Specs can only convey say 40% of the nessecary information. Good teams talk, they don't throw specs at each other. Specs are insurance that everybody understands each other, nothing more.
- Working together from a distance is only effective if you know each other well.
Of course this all assumes web-like projects. I'm not talking about launching the space shuttle, although many of the same ideas would apply. (Not the spec one)
Yahoo!
A Yahoo category: Home > Society and Culture > Food and Drink > Drinks and Drinking > Coffee > Kona Coffee (via the Rockabilly Librarian) The depts of the net never cease to amaze.
Seriously though: I was thinking: most forms of expression have brought forth a number of really interesting and rich genres. Think music, or photography. On the web, it seems like its still early days, because really, most sites just aren't very good... There are a few blogs out there I enjoy, and some useful sites. But mostly its fairly drab.
I think one of the problems is that we're still in a stage where most web designers (and I use the term broadly) are concerned mostly with form. Or technology. Not content.
That includes most of the weblogs, and most visual sites (the Flash crowd). Few people actually think about what they have to say, and how to say it. Almost none use the strengths of the web to reinforce their point. I'm hoping some bright kids will come up with the really good stuff soon. Us old timers will probably hate it :) Come on kids, surprise me!
I know of the blogger crowd, and the Flash crowd. But what other experimentation is going on? Porn? Maybe the real strengths of the web are being discovered at unlikely places like Geocities. I'm gonna have a look right now!
Referrer logs
I'm on page 1 on Google for the following terms:
- defining business requirements
- temp work london consulting
- information design belgium
- personal site of information architect
- resume and sequel server (strangely)
- resume objective profile programmer
- van design specification
Woo!
The great WikiNow
I was following links from Victor to other people's attempts to combine wiki's and weblogs. Turns out there are not only conceptual differences that make this a Hard Thing:
- A weblog is timebased
- A wiki exists in the Great Now
... but also cultural differences:
- A wiki is very much a group effort.
- A blog is a soapbox, an individualistic effort.
Bring this together with Hofstede's work on cultural differences, specifically the dimensions Power Distance, Collectivism and Individualism, and it turns out that blogs will appeal to cultures which value individualism (US), and wikis to cultures which value collectivism more.
However, it so happens that countries which value collectivism more (which should encourage wiki-ing), often also have a greater power distance (ie. you don't question your superiors), which may lead to less wiki-ing.
Costa Rica is the only country Hofstede tested that has small power distance, yet a high degree of collectivism. So Costa Rica wikis should rule.
Which leads me to conclude, dear Watson, that wiki's and blogs are very good examples of how culturally determined values influence web use.
WikiNow
Personal planning and key logs
Since I'm having all this change in my life, I'm trying to find something a bit more meaningful to do than developing silly websites. It's like a key log moment, trying to find what matters.
{Dodgy explanation:} When lumberjacks cut down trees and make them go down the river, the trees sometimes get stuck in the river. The lumberjack must then find the key log, the one that, when he moves it, will make all the other ones start moving again. It's all about dependencies. (From the Dune books - Frank Herbert)
The Washington Post has an interesting article on scenario development. (via Overmorgen) But I think I'm gonna let go. Go with the flow, see what happens. All this planning my life can't be healthy.
Is it Art? Is it Science? (No, it's superman!)
Here's the thing with ethnography: they seem to have the feeling they need to prove they are a real science.
I was trying to find out where I'd heard that before, and then it dawned on me: photography. I studied photography, and a surprisingly large part of photographers felt this strange need to prove they were Art (the classes were in the Academy of Arts, together with painters, sculpters and such).
I always tought that was pretty silly, also because "Art" is such an undefined thingie.
The value of ethnography, as I see it, lies in the extended attention you give a certain thing. If you look at and think about something for so long, surely you're gonna come up with some good ideas about it.
Which reminds me of a story I read about a guy who was manic-depressive. He was talking about one of his manic phases (which last a few months), and how he spent a whole afternoon staring at a glass of water, touched in his deepest soul by the beauty of it, by its connectedness with all things. A Zen master would approve, I thought.
One of documentary photography's classics is "Let us now praise famous men" (book at Amazon.com), by James Agee (writing) and Walker Evans (pictures). It is a documentary examination of poor families in the US. Is it Art? Is it journalism? Is it ethnography? Nobody can tell. But it stands tall, even after all these years.
One of the most famous documentary filmmakers ever (he shot those really long black and white movies in prisons and schools, but I can't remember his name for the life of me..., please let me know if you know his name) was in Bogota a few years back, at a conference on documentary film.
A friend of mine was there. She told me he was asked if he considered his films Journalism or Art. (The films are very impressive, and in a dry style, very journalism like. There are no voice overs, nothing added, just roll the camera and edit.) To the shock of many present he said "Art, of course."
It's strange how these disciplines have this urge to prove their worth by being "Art" or "Journalism" or "Science" or anything else with a capital. Surely it's all the same? I'd rather concentrate on making something that stands, regardless of which of the cultural maffias approves it.
The WIKI way
From Raelity bites: "I suppose the most perplexing thing is how little crossover there appears to be between the Wiki and Weblog worlds. In my mind, they're like peanut butter and chocolate. Yet reactions to this not-particularly-bold assertion suggest something more along the lines of broccoli and jello."
My ideal tool = Wiki + Weblog + Translation features + faceted metadata for navigation. When, people? When will it be here?
Better questions, not more answers
I can't believe how good Frank Herbert really was. I was looking at Dune messiah, containing quotes from the Dune books, and couldn't help noticing how much IA's have in common with the mentats described in the books. Information architecture is very much about asking better questions. Read the Dune books if you haven't already!
Here's a quote:
"Above all else, the mentat must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in this universe. He must remain capable of saying: "There's no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we'll correct that when we come to it." The mentat-generalist must understand that anything which we can identify as our universe is merely part of larger phenomena. But the expert looks backward; he looks into the narrow standards of his own specialty. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop. It is to the characteristics of change itself that the mentat-generalist must look. There can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual. You must look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself: "Now what is this thing doing?"
The Mentat Handbook ~ Children of Dune
Moving to the USA
So I've quit my job, and I'm moving to the US. (http://petervandijck.net if you know someone in NY/NJ who is looking for an information architect with a focus on CMS, metadata, internationalisation.)
Something I realised yesterday: when a client comes to me with an idea for a website, they have something in their head that works really well: a fantasy.
Requirements gathering is a bit like discussing sex in that way: the client will have this fantasy of a website, and ofcourse, in their heads it all works perfectly. Like a sex fantasy: in your head it may be great to have sex with 4 people on the beach (random example), but most people realise that that doesn't nessecarily mean they want to act this out in real life.
The client though, he can just see it. The site will be perfect. You need to get them down in the real world, because when you actually try to build this baby, all the real life constraints set in, and that's when things get hard. Prototyping is good for giving them that taste of real life...
24 hours in cyberspace
The 24 hours in cyberspace project examined how the internet affects people's lives. It is a bit shallow, but it's a good start to examining the issues. Great pictures too.
No, then The internet, an ethnographic approach (2000), an ethnographic study with some interesting conclusions:
- There is no such thing as the Internet. There are a number of different media and contents which people assemble into their Internet. There is however a clear debate about the Internet.
- Our findings directly contradict the concepts of virtual reality and cyberspace, which assume a radical separation of on-line and off-line worlds. Instead we propose four perspectives for understanding current developments.
- The Internet has considerably strengthened the nuclear family throughout the Trinidadian Diaspora, allowing closer relations between parents and children and between siblings. It has had an equally strong impact on the extended family.
ethnography and usability
I'm doing the Open University course on ethnography:
-Ethnographers are very conscious of the ethical implications of their work. But then they seem to think that getting permission solves that. As if.
-Ethnographers are slow. A typical project takes a few years. Partly, that's because of the academicness of it: grants have to be applied for, literature has to be studied. Sometimes I can't help thinking; just get on with it!
-Ethnography is fun for the same reason usability is fun. You get to deal with people.