yahoo beta with css, interestingly they didn’t have a beta page for safari, but they did for firefox on the mac. That’s a pretty significant endorsement of firefox.
Courtesy of:
design PRINCIPLES - an reh3.com resource
Monthly Archive for September, 2004
I was rather surprised to find that my web site gets 8th place on google for the search term “cat getting decapitated”, which is rather strange because I think that’s only been mentioned once in passing regarding underground marketing campaigns. Anyway, just in case the cat fanciers that have been finding my site have been disappointed through my lack of cat content, here it is, your moment of zen.
I recently upgraded to movabletype 3.0 and everything seemed to go quite smoothly, but as it turns out commenting was totally broken, so apologies to anyone who has been trying to comment.
MT seems to have an amazing ability to look like its working fine when lots of little things are broken in the back-end. I nearly had a heart attack when I looked in the apache error log, 1 whole megabyte of errors. Anyway I’ve opened up commenting again, and am taking advantage of the ability to moderate comments (sorry spammers).
I’m also considering moving over to wordPress, its a php/mysql open source blogging tool, which has some very attractive features:
- no rebuild, edit a template and its live
- Full web standards compliance
- Integrated blogrolling features
- Integrated XFN
It’s bugged me for a while that most of the User Experience/Experience Design activity seemed to be around the “consumer experience”, even more specifically the consumer experience with web sites.
I think really think the next phase of work around User Experience has to be more related to the work experience. This is especially apparent when you look at sobering statistics like:
“40% of IT projects are considered failed or partially failed”
from the Align IT Group report “IT Adoption Profiles and Application Implementation failures”
Anyway, here is an organization that seems to be practicing Experience Design the standpoint of work. There focus is “Work-Centered Design”.
Dan Brown’s nice article regarding the information architecture of email. I pulled out this little quote because I so wholeheartedly agree, making a decision as to where every email I get should live is a lot of brain power. i just about have time to read my emails that are generally making me think about other things apart from “what’s the best folder for this email” or worse “am I going to need this email again in a week, a month, a year”
“Typical email programs expect users to manage their inboxes by removing messages to folders. Every time I need to categorize a message, however, I need to make a decision about where it goes. To paraphrase Steve Krug, “Don’t make me make a decision.” Call me lazy (you wouldn’t be the first), but I shouldn’t have to make a decision every time I get an email. It’s a lot of brain power for not a lot of value. Just because I put something somewhere doesn’t make it easier to retrieve later.”
A nice article from marketingprofs.com about moving customers through the customer life-cycle: Trust Tools for Tough Times.
The Poynter institutes Eyetrack III - Homepage makes for some interesting reading. Basically they have tracked and mapped the eye movements of people viewing particular web pages, giving some valuable information about how people interact with various designs.
In some ways it’s rather like Paco Underhill’s ethnographic techniques of following people through shops and documenting how they act. If you haven’t read it I highly recommend you take a look at his book “why we buy”
I’ve loathed the AT&T “and” commercial from the moment I saw it, i don’t know what advertising flunky thought “and” is the word that they should try and associate with their products and services, like BMW is to driving, like volvo is to safety, like AT&T is to “and”, or more ironically like AT&T is to “and?”
Anyway, the point is when you don’t know what business your in or what position you want to stake in the marketplace “customer experience” suffers.
I have a problem, i forgot my cell phone, and not only that i can’t remember my voice mail number (heaven forbid it be the same number). Anyway i go to the AT&T web site and go to the tech support/faq section imagining that a phone company would post something about voice mail and this is what I am presented with:
And believe me when i say that “voice services” have got nothing to do with voice mail.
Amazon continues to set a standard that I think more organizations should try and learn from, especially for such universal activities such as “log in”. We could all save a lot of time and resources that could be used for the higher value functionality if we took more time to look around us to see how others have solved similar problems.
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