Why doesn't Facebook people search order results by social distance? It would be a lot more useful:
Would make more sense from a user experience perspective.
Or does finding someone's social distance from a random individual involve too many calculations to make it possible?
I don't know Google's Picasa. I know of it, but don't know it. But Kumar yesterday pointed me to it, primarily owing to its recent incorporation of software that identifies people in photos based on other photos of that person. A colleague showed me riya three years ago, similar software, and I was blown away.
This is big. No longer do you have to tag group photos with people's names. It's done for you.
It's a compelling reason for me to leap from Flickr to Picasa, but having just invested $25 for 15 months of Flickr Pro membership, I'm loathe to switch. Adding to that the fact that more and more of my online world is being controlled by Google—Mail, Calendar, DNS, web analytics, search, mapping—means I won't.
But Yahoo! needs to do two things with its Flickr offering: sort out its information architecture and incorporate face-recognition software. Maybe riya itself?
As for the IA, it's dreadful. Although for an uploader (or uploadr?), there is a clear concept of the hierarchy into which my photos are uploaded, I don't this is clear to the viewer. And the concept of adding friends who are already members of Flickr without inviting them to join Flickr by email address seems not to exist—unless I'm missing something.
Someone needs to take a step back from the technology and work out what people are trying to achieve through their photos, both as an uploader and a viewer. Until this happens, the UI will be clunky and unintuitive, and it will continue to lose ground to picasa, and once again, Google will be our default choice.
I like Facebook. It's both useful—to find people you otherwise might lose touch with—and interesting—to find out what those people are up to.
I like Flickr. It's useful for posting photos and videos that you want to share, either with the rest of the world, or with close family and friends. It's also interesting to see those of friends who care to do the same.
So where should I post my photos? My Facebook friends currently total over 100. My Flickr friends are closer to 30. So I'm more lax in my willingness to add friends on Facebook.
I use the applications in completely different ways. Facebook is a very informal forum for updating with trivial shite and play the occasional game of Word Twist. Flickr is more formal, allowing me to share personal photos with people with whom I have genuine, meaningful connections.
Flickr's dedication to photo (and now video) sharing has given it a rich interface through which you can tag, name, protect, map, group photos. Facebook's photo-sharing facility is much more simplistic, with one essential yet beautiful ingredient: the ability to tag individuals' faces.
I think Facebook needs Flickr to fuel its photos and user contribution. And Flickr probably needs Facebook as an additional source of content for its users to enjoy. How, and whether, the two will evolve with one another remains to be seen.
At the end of the day, I don't think the two Fs can ignore one another
Google Chrome worries me. Its intention is no doubt to give Google even greater control over your browsing experience, wrapped up in a lovely interface to lure the unsuspecting user in.
This is all very well (kind of), but I'm nervous that its efforts will create unwelcomed competition for Mozilla's Firefox, and will not touch Internet Explorer's continued market dominance. My mum won't download Chrome, nor indeed would she have downloaded Firefox was it not for my intervention. Only geeks will download it, the very market that Firefox has cornered, myself included. Infighting for market share between the two will only serve to strengthen Microsoft's relative dominance.
Amusing and cheeky that they chose MySpace in the BBC News demo to highlight the graceful degradation experienced when a tab crashes.
I received an email from the Royal Mail this morning containing the following text. Nothing more, nothing less.
Dear Dan,
Your Debit card Visa with card number xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx will expire soon.
Thank you
The Royal Mail Group
(I obscured the last four digits of my debit (lowercase) card number for my own peace of mind.)
The card is registered with them to allow me to pre-pay for self-printed postage saving me many a Post Office line.
My main question is "so what?" What should I do about it? Where is the link inviting me to enter the details of my new card? Oh, and why are they thanking me for my soon-to-expire card?
No thought whatsoever has been put into the content of the email. Where is the call to action? And therefore what is the overall purpose of the email?
I clicked on an advert for Dell's Studio 15 laptop today. Not because I was interested in buying it; but because I was mildly interested in what it had to offer.
I went through the ordering process to see what options were available. "Lots" was the answer. I could select everything under the sun, including its colour, drive size/type, CD drive, software, graphics card etc.
It took me 39 steps (and screens) to get the thing into my shopping cart. It's a wonder anyone ever has the patience to buy a Dell.
2. I work with a lot of civil servants. (A noun in itself, as opposed to a modified one.) One with whom I email regularly numbers all paragraphs in his emails, only sparing his salutation, valediction and signature this tortuous fate. (Even pre-valedictory statements like "Please get back to me if you have any questions" are deemed to warrant the numbering treatment.)
3. It's a hangover from the necessary behaviour in government reports and memos, where paragraphs are numbered for future reference, documents that oft span multiple pages made up of 20+ paragraphs.
4. While in emails it clearly provides useful points of reference for future correspondence, I can't help but feel that it destroys the beauty and natural flow of the English language, formularising something that should never be formularised. Are emails genuinely that long to warrant numerical segmentation? I think not.
Dashwire is beautiful. It's basically a way of backing up the entire contents of your mobile phone, the contents of which are stored centrally by Dashwire as opposed to on your hard drive. It syncs automatically using your data plan (via a client-side app. on the phone), and even allows you to send SMS messages or call people "from your phone" directly from your PC via the stunningly beautiful web interface. No PC-based client-side app. necessary.
Overheard in New York: Without right-click, I just don't know what to do with the world.
It's a key reason why I've so stubbornly refrained from embracing Apple.
Please would someone pass a law to ban Comic Sans as a font? With immediate effect? There are absolutely no excuses for using it. None.
You can pretty much guarantee that anyone who adopts it as their default email font is bereft of comedy, as the font name so unwittingly implies.
Vincent Connare, its designer, should have his tombstone engraved in it, the sooner the better. Here is a more qualified critique of the font; and here is a campaign I'll be joining to Ban Comic Sans.
If I attempt to delete an email from my BlackBerry, the pop-up warning messages defaults to Delete as opposed to Cancel. If I highlight two or more messages and attempt to delete, the pop-up defaults to Cancel. The inconsistent behaviour is off-putting yet intriguing.
Thinking about it, the Ribbons in Excel 2007 are not that revolutionary. They're horizontal, visual representations of what were the dropdowns that appeared from the menu bars; re-organised allegedly to be more logically grouped. For some reason, I felt that they were marketed as something more than that in the run-up to the launch of Vista and Office 2007.
It's the re-organisation that troubles me, possibly because the grouping is still not fully logical, possibly because it's different from the File | Edit | View | Insert | Format | Tools | Data | Window grouping of its predecessor. I read a very short article on Daily Dose of Excel recently that said nothing more than if you can't find what you're looking for in Excel 2007, you'll find it on the Insert menu.
Apologies: I'm rambling, but I'm allowed given the title of the blog. (I've never really considered after naming the blog whether it lives up to its name. Another segue.) Basically, I still don't quite know where to look for stuff in Excel 2007. My preconceptions are obviously still there, formed by 20 years in Lotus 1–2–3 and pre-2007 versions of Excel. But when I can't immediately find something now, I try to ask myself "where would it logically be" and often fail to come up trumps. The Home menu doesn't seem right to me, combining lots of formatting stuff with content movement (Copy/Cut, Paste and its various offspring, insertion and deletion of columns and rows), and sorting and filtering.
To me, it would make more sense to have a Format menu item and an Operate item, the latter to cover the likes of insertion and deletion, clearing, filling, finding, selecting. (Shit! I've just realised that almost nothing in the Edit sub-menu within Home has anything to do with editing. Sort, Filter, Find, Select, Sum, Fill have nothing to do with editing!) All of your filtering and sorting should be firmly in the Data menu item.
And why the fuck PivotTable/PivotChart button is under the Insert menu and not the Data menu beggars belief. (If everything inserted goes in the Insert menu, then why don't Insert Function and Insert Row/Column join the party?)
I like the concept. However I believe there was a set of workshops held by Microsoft (some of the most important workshops in Excel's history) in which Post-Its containing all of Excel's functions were arranged into areas on a whiteboard. But the wrong people turned up. (I didn't get an invite.) So the result is OK, but it's not quite right.
As an aside, I'm wondering whether things should ever appear in more than one location. Or should everything have one and only one home?
BTW, I've held off on writing such a post until a month after starting to use Office 2007, to allow my opinion to mature.
Google is great. Probably not the opening sentence you'd expect given the post's title. Let me explain.
If I had a multitude of email accounts, I could get all of my mails consolidated into a single place, all with a lovely Google-esque front-end. My calendar is similarly lovely in its Google look-and-feel. And with Google Reader, all textual content I could ever wish to read is also presented in a comforting, consistent interface, all of the titles appearing underlined in blue (to indicate their clickability), content in Arial black, mimicking the interface of its other offerings, Search included. Hell, even Google's adverts are comfortingly consistent.
But has this consistency and predictability ripped the very heart and soul out of the internet? I no longer visit my friends' blogs; nor more business-related ones. Instead I access them via Google Reader. When I shared the concept of this post with a colleague today, he relayed a recent story of someone asking him whether he liked his blog's re-design. "What re-design?" came my friend's reply, as like me he'd been accessing all of the guy's content via Google Reader. Before and after the re-design, all content had been available in 12-point Arial black, with bold, blue, underlined headings and blue, underlined links.
Information has been commoditised, in a similar way to how Apple has commoditised music with iTunes. We as users have gained hugely through consistency, immediacy and ease of access. But we have lost out too. No longer are we delighted by the beauty of someone's site design, nor do we appreciate the painstaking effort that has gone into the stylesheets that underpin it. Instead, we scroll through our content through a consistent front-end, hungry for the content itself over and above the beauty of its presentation. With iTunes, content of the musical variety is accessible literally at the click of a button, without the opportunity to experience the joys of the physical products that accompany the music, the record sleeve, the vinyl itself, or the CD artwork and the booklet's contents.
Maybe it's time to take a step back, to appreciate the frame within which the content sits, or to appreciate the artwork accompanying a music purchase.
Amazon UK has recently undergone a make-over. And it's rubbish
First of all, it's not logical. When not signed in, it suggests that I sign in, but I have to hunt high and low (and right) to find the link to do so. Once I'm signed in, it now says "Hello Mr..", the first period probably representing the abbreviation of Mister, the latter being the end of the sentence, having been unable to display my surname. I conduct a search and am presented my results. I'm informed that it's "Showing Top Results", but I don't know what "Top" means. Furthermore, I'm no longer given an option for re-sorting the results, until that is I select a category within which to filter my results; only then can I change the default relevance sort to bestselling, price or average customer review.
And finally (for now at least), its overall feel suggests it's brought to me by Littlewoods or Argos. I don't mean any disrespect to either of these brands, but they're not brands I associate with a slick, professional web presence. All in all, well, it's just rubbish.
The award has to go to the implementation team behind Microsoft Word's Reading view. It's the default view in which documents open in recent versions of late, unless you find the tick-box in the options menu that saves you from the pain.
I'm genuinely hoping that the technical implementation missed the mark by a long shot, because getting the technical implementation so woefully wrong would be way more forgivable than anyone writing such dreadful business requirements.
I opened a twelve-page document today, which displayed across 154 "screens", the first two of which were visible on opening the document. The first screen was entirely blank; the second contained a single word, wrapped over two lines.
Dreadful.
Google is doing what AOL tried to do a few years back. They're working on providing stuff that will keep more and more of your internet viewing time within the confines of Google. But they're going about customer engagement in a very different way.
Take Google Mail. This was a great introduction. But besides threading, a slightly more appealing user interface and a greater level of storage, it had little to tempt a Yahoo! or Hotmail user across. So they developed Google Apps, allowing you to fully control your own domain's mail through the same interface. Oh, and you can then manage all of your domain's email accounts through that same interface. And it's integrated with Google Calendar. Sweet.
Aside from email, what else do people do a lot of online? Ah, read stuff. Google Reader enters stage left. Now you can read the stuff that you generally read within a single interface, all in a single place. (I often wonder whether I'm losing out because of the resulting blandness of the peripheral experience. That's an aside.) Oh, and then there's news, catered for by Google News—news reading is just not suited to Google Reader.
Why limit things to traditionally online activities? Now we have Google Docs and Spreadsheets, taking albeit a tiny proportion of viewing hours away from Microsoft..Slowly they're drawing us into a Google world, one which you may or may not like, or indeed approve of.
AOL tried to do the same five years ago, but there is a key difference between the two approaches: Google invites you to join their world; AOL foisted everything upon you the moment you inserted that wretched CD into your machine. The browser itself, email, shopping, messaging, everything was AOL branded and unless you had a certain amount of technical ability, an amount that most people are devoid of (not a dig, just reality), you couldn't escape from the resulting AOL-branded hell-hole.
I like what Google's doing. I enjoy using their products, and I feel that they add huge value to my online experience. I despised AOL with a passion, and whenever I used my parents' PC (brought to me by AOL), the hatred raged further while I hunted for the uninfected IE shortcut on the desktop.
Whenever things are foisted upon a user, whether they're good or bad, there is an equal and opposite reaction by the user, Newton's fourth law, I believe.
Opening the BBC News site today brought nothing but pleasure. Here's why.
First of all, a comparison of the old and the new. Here's yesterday's site:
...and here's today's:
Both of the above pictures are the same relative size. So the first obvious point of note is that the new site is wider. Both are fixed-width, not scaling with the browser, but the new one is designed for optimal use on a 1,024-pixel screen. Any less, and the left-hand side will be chopped off. So the new site is 995 pixels wide including margins, 973 without, leaving space for the browser's left and right-side display, scrollbar included.
It's quite a brave move for such a wide-reaching organisation. W3 Schools, whose work I only know because they always come top in Google's rankings when you search for browser statistics, informs us that as of January 2007, 80% of people had browsers 1,024 pixels wide or greater, six percentage points of the remainder having an "unknown" screen size. That leaves 14% of people unable to view the BBC's new offering. This number will have reduced in the ensuing 14 months, but is also probably low anyway because it's informed by techies, who are generally ahead of the technology curve.
At a width of 800 pixels in Firefox, the user gets the words "Bodies recovered" in the first link in the right-hand column, but no more.
But fortunately, my screen is wider than 800 pixels—a mighty 1280—so I see everything. And it's all centred on the page, much more pleasing to the eye than the old, left-aligned version.
And it's much cleaner, with lovely attention to detail. The left-hand navigation has a much nicer feel to it. It doesn't feel crammed in, instead extending further down the page with appealing levels of separation between the elements.
In the body of content itself, there is a better level of separation
between the content elements. Much of the additional width available is dedicated to the right-hand modules, almost at the detriment of the main body of content (the right-hand column is now 66% of the width of the main body, compared to 49% of its width in the old site), but this allows for bigger text and hopefully more meaningful headlines.
The graphic at the top of the page is a lot more professional, the solid red and orange highlight bars further down the page give a strong sense of location. And the unconventional footer, complete with the Roman year, caps off a wonderful page.
I'm not a user experience expert by any stretch, but I am a user, and I know what I like. And I like this new offering. It's the third style of the BBC News site that I've known. The second one threw me for quite a while after its launch. This one is less of a step-change, but is a natural progression, in my head at least.
I'm not sure why, but today I remembered that I found out about Microsoft's decision to underline mis-spelt words in the New Varsity pub just off the Warwick University campus in the Summer of 1995. I was told by Amanda's fiancé. I was shocked.
I still see it as an affront, an insult to my albeit limited intelligence, an unnecessary return to school days, a similarly unnecessary ridicule of me, the author, in a world where most underlinings invoked by my installation of Word are caused by an incorrect setting of the language (usually CY: Welsh or US: American English). I still have no idea how the language is set.
In December, I received eleven marketing emails from Amazon.co.uk and twelve from Amazon.com. A total of 23 in 31 days.
Surely this transcends the line from marketing to spam, no?
The packaging for Microsoft Office 2007 sucks big time. It made my recent such acquisition traumatic and thoroughly unrewarding.
Whenever you buy an Apple product *, you know you're in for a fabulous, rewarding experience when you open it. Every component is meticulously designed for pleasure and function. Irrespective of the product itself, you know that by the time you've got to it, you've enjoyed every moment of discovery—every unfolded box, every individually-wrapped component, every carefully crafted booklet. By the time I reached my Microsoft product (no more, no less than a holographic CD), I wanted to snap it in half out of sheer desperation and frustration. (I didn't.)
Once I was through the ubiquitous cellophane wrapper, I was confronted with an inelegant frosted-plastic case about the size of a standard paperback fiction book, its only redeeming design feature being one rounded corner. Immediately beneath the plastic was some thick, glossy paper marketing the product therein. But the puzzle of how to get to the CD itself was confounding to say the least—something worthy of the Krypton Factor's Intelligence round. A red tag seemed to indicate the intended direction of travel, but I was unable to figure out what it meant, or how it should be operated.
In the end, I prised apart the plastic packaging, breaking the hinge that I later discovered to be the critical part of the preferred method of opening, and tearing slightly the paper that supported the marketing blurb. I'd hope that the experience highlighted Microsoft's lack of attention to product design, as opposed to my own intention. I'll let you decide that.
A couple of shards of plastic later, I was confronted with the CD itself, but I took another five minutes to find the 25-character reference number that is crucial to the Office install. Looking in vain all over the outer part of the packaging, I eventually found it on a sticker on the rear of the inner portion of the packaging—not obvious at all.
Overall, a dreadful experience that has sullied the product itself.
* My Apple experience has been limited to iPods, but I understand the same to be true of the wider Apple range.
Some time ago, I started using GMail as my mail client. The only way I could do this without changing my email address (me@domain.com) was to auto-forward all email to me@domain.com to me.domain@gmail.com. I could then configure GMail to respond from my me@domain.com account, but it did this by putting "From me@domain.com on behalf of me.domain@gmail.com" at the top of each email. Rubbish.
Recently, Google Apps enhanced its functionality to allow you to direct your MX records directly at its servers, and for it to control your domain's email address. So now, me@domain.com can be accessed directly through GMail. And I can even change the GMail logo to my own domain logo. No reference to GMail apart from a google url and a "Powered by Google" footer, accompanied by a diddy logo. Fabulous!
Now I need to figure out how to migrate all my me.domain@gmail.com mail to me@domain.com. It's no mean feat, by all accounts.
Today, Amazon launched their new product: Kindle. And what a bag of bollocks it appears to be.
First, a summary. Kindle is a portable device that allows you to download the text of books and read them on the go. It is capable of storing over 200 books, weighs in at 292 grams—compared to an iPhone's 135 grams—and measures 19cm by 13.5cm, very similar dimensions to your standard paperback fiction book. And it's a mere 1.8cm thick. The cost: $399 (£195 and falling, not that it'll be available in the UK).
So, it's small in size, relatively big in storage, and light. It's not cheap, but not crazily expensive.
Now to its drawbacks.
The first obvious one is that it's about as proprietary as you can get.
The screen is not backlit which allows the battery to last for 30 hours; but not having the option for backlighting is a big weakness. Its screen has a good resolution enabling beautiful font display, but don't expect a reaction when you touch it. A touch-screen it ain't, despite this becoming an expectation of portable devices during the three years since Kindle was on the drawing board.
This is primarily a reading device, so why it has a fully-functioning QWERTY keyboard I have no idea. (Further, why the keys are angled to suit the few true touch-typists among us beggars belief.) It would have been much more appealing to save the space (or make the screen bigger), and incorporate a touch-screen keyboard into its, er, touch-screen. And even the keyboard itself is bespoke. Its only symbols seem to be forward slash, @ and the full-stop/period.
And get this: it's black and white. Actually, it's capable of four shades of grey, 15,999,996 fewer colours than the iPhone.
All in all, it's weak. Maybe it's competing in an entirely different market to that in which other portable devices sit—aiming at the book reader rather than the technophile—but nonetheless, these people are likely to be familiar with mobile devices and functionally-rich keyboards. It's the equivalent of Nintento unveiling the Atari 2600 in 2006 instead of the Wii.
Amazon itself admits it's a technology company, not a retailer. It's had a go here, but it's missed the mark by a mile. Maybe I'm also way off the mark with this, but my first impressions are not good. You may have gathered.
(BTW, if you're still reading, the title of this post was inspired by a 1980s TV advert for Kinder Eggs. I know nothing of the advert itself other than the line Kinder; Chocadoobies. I googled chocadoobies to do some research, and am pleased to announce that no reference has yet been made to them, whatever they may be. So here's the first, along with second and third. Does anyone else remember the ad.?)
I tried to download a programme for the BBC's iPlayer tonight. Below were the hurdles I had to jump over to get to where I wanted:
Not the best user experience to get someone to use your product. I then had to download the 578Mb programme itself (titled Beautiful Young Minds). I'm 7% in so far, at which point I realised it was sucking the life out of any meagre bandwidth I might have wanted to use to, say, post about the ordeal I'd just gone through to register.
It's hardly Joost now, is it? The content may be better, but the UE sucks.
Update: iPlayer uses a P2P thingamyjig called Kontiki which hoards your bandwidth and gives your CPU an unnecessary workout (courtesy of a process called Kservice.exe). And this is when iPlayer's completely shut down. Dreadful, BBC.
I'm not a huge online shopper. I dabble here and there: the odd router from dabs.com, flights from Expedia, quite a bit of stuff from Amazon and odds and sods in and amongst from various other companies.
I was surprised recently on finding out that most shopping baskets empty when you either leave the site in question or leave your decision-making process that bit too long.
This strikes me as stupid on the part of the retailer.
I think the principle behind the decision is that if you don't get around to checking out, then you mustn't actually want the products. I disagree.
Often, I'll put something in my shopping basket either fully intending to buy that item or prompting me to buy something similar—an iron, for example, but not necessarily that iron.
The retailer's decision to remove the iron from my basket may result in my forgetting completely that I need a new iron, causing either irritation on my part when I next need to iron my shirts, or an impulsive buy from an offline retailer (Robert Dyas?) when I next see an iron in the flesh/metal/plastic/Teflon™.
Surely much better for the retailer to have a conveniently placed Empty Basket button to allow those shoppers annoyed by the persistent basket to let its artificial bottom fall out ready for their next shop, which may also never see the light of the check-out. Windows shopping, if you will. ([Dan bows] I thank you.)
That way, I get to save stuff indefinitely in my basket, the online equivalent of leaving my Sainsbury's trolley on aisle three while popping for a haircut, returning to find it where I left it, contents still intact. Not that I do that, of course. That'd be madness!
I need an extra flag in Google Reader. Currently, posts can be. starred: they're either good or they're not. And you may have noticed, unless of course you read my posts through Google Reader, that I now have a little widget on the right hand side of my blog exposing my last five starred items.
But often there are posts that I want to flag for reading at a later date. It's because either I don't have time to read the full post right now, or I'm skimming through my unread items on a device that's unsuitable for the content. (I skim through a lot of my subscriptions on my MDA Vario on the way to work, a device that's fine for text, but cumbersome for anything more advanced.)
So Google, I'd like a new flag, one that says "judging by the title, this article may well be of interest. But I'm not able to qualify this possibility right now, so just keep it to one side for me will you until I can, there's a good chap."
Thanks.
YouGov's branding seems odd to me. It strikes me that some branding people decided that they wanted to embrace the second person plural, so branded it such. But the people who use the site are, by definition, living life in the first person singular. And as a user, you has a different meaning than was intended by the branding folk. If anything, you for the user could be construed to mean government.
The same could be said of YouTube. And the BBC's email address for sending pictures: yourpics@bbc.co.uk. But not of myspace or my.yahoo.
Apologies to Simon for not holding the lift for him on leaving work this evening.
I get very confused between the <|> and >|< buttons. When you analyse the buttons, they make complete sense; but when confronted with the option accompanied by a very aggressive deadline (the lift doors closing), I never fail to fumble for the right one. Tonight, Simon was delayed by this fumbling. I, however, suffered no such delay.
The only way to do a search from pages within the BBC News site (including the homepage) is to use the search box at the top right. This takes me to a set of results from across the entire BBC web presence. I didn't want this did I? I searched from BBC News, so I wanted search results from BBC News. (It reminds me of the dilemma on Directgov and its predecessor, ukonline.gov.uk, of whether to serve results from the site itself or from the whole of government. Technology limitations meant that my preference of serving site-specific results won.)
OK, so now I'm frustrated, but at least I can use the tabs at the top to refine my results. I click on the BBC News & Sport tab and get the results I'm after. Unfortunately, I can't find what I was looking for, so I decide I want to go back to the homepage and navigate for the page myself. Unfortunately, the BBC hasn't left a trail of crumbs for me to do so. Indeed I am at least two steps from the homepage. I can either click the Back button twice (inelegant to say the least), or I can click on a random result and then use the left-hand navigation to take me back to the homepage.
Getting back home from the search results page is a fundamental requirement, and leaving it out is a major faux pas for the BBC.
(As an aside, here is Hansel and Gretel part 1. Again, about perceived difficulties in getting home.)
When I want to attach a file to an email in Google Mail, there's a redundant click. First, I click the Attach a file link, then I click Browse. The first click brings up the text box that will store the filename; the second one brings up the standard file browser pop -up.
If I want to attach something else, I click Attach another file and then Browse again.
For a little while, Google had removed the need for a second click when attaching further files. Not sure if this was an enhancement or a mistake, but either way it's gone.
It's not the end of the world, but it's a little frustrating.
I've spent the entirety of the last 31 months with unmoderated comments on this site. There has been the occasional one that I've deleted because of offence or stepping over the line, and quite a few sporadic spam comments that have gone by the wayside. But in the main, I've welcomed the few comments I've received (917 undeleted comments from 797 posts).
However, recently I've resorted to pre-moderating comments. That means reading the comments before allowing to appear as part of the site. The reason is the recent arrival of a new spammer, one who doesn't seem phased by the captcha.
This flummoxed Francis at first despite the instructional copy (the same comment coming through four times), so I've made it a little more obvious, adding a background image to the comment box on focus. I don't think it works in IE, but hopefully it hammers home the message to Firefox users.
Francis pointed me to a product called WriteRoom. It basically makes your entire screen black, giving you a distraction-free canvas for noting down ideas, stories, etc. Apart from being a neat idea, the site it was surfaced on also has a neat little feature, which is both useful and sweet.
The toggle width link next to the title widens the main content column and removes the right-hand modules section, allowing you to focus on the content itself. Beautifully, it does it gradually, as if you're widening the browser window. Lovely use of stylesheets, or some sort of technology.
Hell I'm pissed.
I browse through my digg articles in Google Reader and stumble upon one that draws my attention. (Actually, I tend to click each one of interest and then go straight back to my GR-scrolling-task to look for other interesting stuff. Only when I've got to the bottom do I turn my attention to the content of interest.)
At the end of this process, I have a bunch of digg tabs stacked up on the right of my Firefox tabs. In days of yore (which I think ended yesterday), clicking on the digg title opened the article of interest in the same browser tab. As of today, it spawns a new one. So if there are six articles that catch my eye I have to spawn twelve browser tabs.
Hell I'm pissed.
I'm annoyed. Very annoyed. Here's why.
In Internet Explorer 6, CTRL + central mouse wheel used to change the font size. It used to drag the fonts from smallest to smaller to medium to large to largest. As far as I can recollect, wheel towards you increased the font sizes; wheel away from you reduced them.
In IE7, two changes have occurred:
The first of these issues doesn't seem to take into account stylesheets particularly well. For the BBC News website, things look fine. For this site, the different components drift towards or away from one another, as you zoom out and zoom in respectively.
The latter is annoying not because of its inconsistency with IE6, but because of that with Firefox 2.0.
Now I'm not saying Microsoft is wrong. There are certainly arguments for zoom rather than font scaling from an accessibility perspective. And as for the zoom direction, you could argue that either Mozilla or Microsoft is right:
My issue is with the inconsistency this causes in people's user experiences. While Microsoft may have had some logical explanation for changing the behaviour of the scroll-wheel, the fact that people had got used to its old behaviour meant that (in my view) it was too deep-rooted to change.
So, now we have two products, both of which I use to do the same thing (in different contexts—sometimes things don't work properly in Firefox, and other times I want to do a spot of IE testing), the two of which react in diametrically opposite ways when I perform the same function.
I'm annoyed
I'm confused. Google has a lot of products nowadays. A non-exhaustive list of its biggest ones would include Search (along with its various nuances—Image Search, Blog Search, Book Search etc.), Mail, Maps, News, Froogle, Calendar, Documents & Spreadsheets, Photos (Picasa), Groups, Reader, Video and that's by no means comprehensive.
Some of them are marketed on the various country homepages (Google US, Google UK etc.) just above the search bar. And some stuff is surfaced on top of some of its personalised services. But it's not consistent. Here's how it looks.
There just doesn't seem to be a consistent aproach to this. Overall, it's a mess. Google has got away with a shoddy user-experience for too long. It's time to rationalise.
A while ago, Elise pointed me to Snap, a neat little application that generates previews of links when you hover over them.
I've finally got around to looking at it, having seen the app. installed on a few websites that I've stumbled upon lately. I decided to give it a try here.
I quite like it, although for some reason the bubble doesn't quite pop out of the link itself. It's offset to the right a little. Probably something to do with the stylesheets.
Let me know whether you like it or not (by commenting). I'd be interested in your feedback. I'll take it off if you don't like it.
There are a couple of Firefox extensions I've recently stumbled upon which, when used together, are quite beautiful. They're both to do with the tabs at the top of the browser.
The first is called PermaTabs. Basically, it makes any tab(s) that you choose permanent. So you can't close the tabs by accident, and new pages can't load in their place.
The second is called FaviconizeTab. This allows you to reduce the width of any tabs to the width of the favicon.
Combined, the two extensions are neat. They allow you to keep all of your "always open" pages safely on the left-hand side of the tab bar, while ensuring that they don't waste unnecessary page width.
Like so! Now my email, meebo and calendar are always there and handy.
Back in February, I suggested that Jakon Nielsen should focus on his own site's usability as well as commenting on that of others.
It seems he's taken my advice, reducing the width of his site to 800 pixels, where before it spanned the full window, irrespective of its width.
Here is his updated top ten mistakes in web design. In the main I score quite highly. My policy on new browser windows (point 9) is that anything outside of this site will spawn a new window/tab, while anything within will stay within the confines of the window/tab. This is mainly because I have leaky text (diverting people to other content mid-post), and even if people jump off mid-flow, I'd still like to give them the opportunity to read the end of the post. Meanwhile, I'm sufficiently modest to believe that my site never warrants more than one window. (Many would argue that one is too many.)
On Nielsen's point 3, I will commit to making visited links red to highlight this to the user. Maybe at the weekend.
Update: visited links are now grey. Hover over visited links and you get white text on a grey background. The red didn't seem right. The grey is more subtle, and the reverse colours on hover are in keeping with the theme elsewhere in the site. Hope this helps.
I've recently been introduced to the beautiful font that is Georgia. I've used it for my date headers (see above), along with the titles of my right-hand modules.
It's a serif font, but it looks good and reads well on screen. I've decided to use it as my font of choice on the workstream I'm now leading.
There are two shortcuts in Firefox that are too close for comfort:
I use the latter more often than the former. However, I've missed the F5 key on a number of occasions, finding that the tab has disappeared rather than seeing it refreshed.
The two F-ing keys are frustratingly close to one another.
I'm genuinely not particularly bothered about online advertising. It's white noise in the background which I usually choose to filter out, but which on occasions will draw the eye and the resulting mouse-click.
However, get your priorities right, FFS.
I've just clicked on a link from Dry The Rain to Men's Health. It's an article about keeping your body fit through 18 little tricks.
Thirty-two seconds after the article started loading, the page finally finished downloading. Most of the intervening time was spent waiting for the likes of pointroll and doubleclick to serve the adverts they felt I might want to see. And I'm on broadband.
My frustration was particularly high because Men's Health deemed the adverts more important than the content. So while I was waiting for the ads to load, I had nothing to read. And the article was split over four pages, each behaving in an identical way. (Actually, page 2 took 65.437 seconds to load in its entirety according to Fasterfox.)
I'm finding this trend more and more prevalent as the internet evolves. Advertising is killing rather than supplementing content. By putting their content in the hands of the servers of their adverts, content providers lose control of the user experience. Destroy the user experience, and you lose your user base; it's as simple as that.
Advertising is an important part of the internet. But it needs to be given its rightful place. People don't buy newspapers for their adverts; nor is this the reason why people visit web pages. Make sure your adverts supplement your content. Not the other way round.
If you have a keyboard with a Windows key, you may or may not know that it can be used in a couple of useful shortcuts.
What annoys me is that the former takes way too long, much longer than the traditional method of right-clicking the Start button. Not sure why, but it's annoying.
Thanks to Francis for pointing me to the free online demo. It's certainly worth a look if you're interested in the imminent Office release.
The login process is a bit frustrating. First of all (and in retrospect I should have predicted it), the demo wasn't compatible with Firefox, so I had to switch to IE. Thereafter, it was an unintuitive log on process, but I finally got there.
The demo itself is a Citrix-based browser application, which works really well—no downloads necessary apart from Citrix itself. A remote connection launches a server-side application: Excel, Word, Outlook, whatever you're interested in.
Excel itself has some new functionality, but the majority of the stuff under the bonnet does the same as its predecessors. However there are two significant changes:
The intuition is a funny one. The grouping of features and tasks seems more logical, but given that it's different from what we're used to, it doesn't immediately come across as being intuitive. In Excel of today, the fact that the Find feature is on the Edit menu is bizarre, until you realise that it shares a pop-up with the Replace function. I can't immediately find its equivalent in Excel 12.
If you click Alt, the pop-up shortcuts are a bit freaky, I have to say, but potentially useful. Oh, and I'm happy about one bug that they've fixed. In the Alignment tab of the Formatting pop-up, the Vertical dropdown used to have an element (Top) missing from the top of the list, and you needed to scroll up to get to it. Scroll no longer.
In summary, it's nice, but I don't see this as a step-change from a functionality perspective. Which is probably a good thing. They've taken this opportunity to invest significantly in the user experience, and to polish some of the features that previously had limitations.
I won't be rushing to upgrade, but I'm confident that when I do, it won't be a whole new world.
As for the other applications, Word and PowerPoint look like they've had similar make-overs to Excel, while Outlook merely seems to have an extra entry on the main menu (Business Contact Manager). Oddly, when you launch an email, it gets a ribbon treatment, maybe because of its tie-in to Word.
The demo's certainly worth checking out.
When you search for flights on expedia.co.uk and click search, you are presented with a holding screen, informing you that:
Expedia.co.uk is searching for
flights on selected travel dates:
Thu 23/11/2006 — Sat 25/11/2006
(Obviously the dates in question are those pertinent to your requested jaunt rather than mine.)
The em dash (—) between the dates should be an en dash (–), and there shouldn't be any spaces.
It's only a tiny point, but on a screen that all flight-bookers will see, they should really get it right.
Google Maps is wonderful in the cotton-wool-filled world of broadband. You can zoom in and out and move around the place with aplomb (lovely word that I've not used in ages), and indeed gay abandon. (I wonder what sort of traffic that phrase will drive.)
However, on dial-up, it's dreadful. And here's an analogy.
It's like having a cake that you want to divide among your friends, only to find that one particular greedy friend has dived head-first into the offering. While that friend is doing their best to work his/her way through the cake in its entirety, all the other friends are standing back, bereft of even the smallest morsel. In my analogy, this equates to Google Maps hogging every last ounce of bandwidth (as the ounce is the SI unit of bandwidth, I think you'll find), at the expense of all other browser tabs.
Meebo disconnects, unable to grasp the little that it needs to stay connected. Even the sibling product Google Mail struggles to keep abreast of the online status of my friends, or whether I've received any mail since trying to find the location of Liverpool's John Lennon airport in relation to the M57 (my GM task of the day). Try to refresh my blog CMS, and I get a time-out.
Come on, Google! Share the bandwidth. Surely 56kb is enough for everyone to play nicely. Or will I have to opt for your lesser competitor, Streetmap while on dial-up, and not invite you to the party?
I finally worked out how to centre my site on the screen (or should I say center as that's the instruction I had to put in my CSS). It looks much better now.
I've put relative positioning on the body (giving an auto positioning instruction for the left and right margins) and I've told it to render the background image in the centre at the top. Seems to have done the trick, and it was easier than I first thought it would be. Some early experimentation a while ago resulted in some bizarre behaviour, which put me off trying further.
Also, I've put a cheeky little corner image at the bottom right-hand corner of the blue bars below each post, to visually associate the bar with the post above, rather than the post below. I think it was a little confusing, and hopefully that's helped.
Aggregator readers will not notice any change, but please pop along to see the change in all its glory.
It's interesting how the internet keeps changing. In the early days, I used to do everything in a single browser. I think the reason for this was fourfold:
All four of these issues have been addressed. There's lots of interesting and useful stuff out there (along with lots of tat, but hey). Firefox (and IE 7) offers multiple tabs within a single window. Broadband allows you to get much more stuff to your machine much more quickly. And memory and processing limitations become less of an issue by the day.
So, now I can have lots of stuff open at once. Great! Er, no.
While these barriers are largely a thing of the past, we as humans like things to be organised, arranged nicely and logically.
So, in the early days of Firefox, I did tend to open oodles of tabs. Nowadays, I'm finding that I'm consolidating a lot of stuff, largely thanks to RSS. As such, I have four internet-based inlets/outlets, and thus have a standard set of four tabs open:
If I want to search for stuff, I can do so through the search bar in the top right corner of Firefox, and that's pretty much the internet covered.
Google has further enhanced its personalised homepage so that you can now have multiple tabs within the page itself. It's still not flexible enough to cater for the four tabs above, but maybe over time, I'll go back down to a single browser tab.
As an aside, I've just noticed that apart from my actual email address, all reference to Gmail, including the URL, has been changed to Google Mail.
I've just noticed that Rob has kindly stepped in and sorted out a little issuette that was bugging me. I was trying to figure out how to solve it, even posting to one or two forums. I got a few replies, but my technical knowledge was insufficient to action the replies I gratefully received.
The issue: how do I display a single date heading when I post multiple times in a day. Before the fix, the system was displaying a date heading for every post.
Thanks, Rob. Not sure what the fix was, but appreciate it.
My brother highlighted a neat little application. It's called TuneGlue, and essentially, it finds music similar to artists that you already like.
It's Flash-based, and I'm thinking that its user interface is more impressive than its business value. But nonetheless, it's worth checking out.
In case you don't know already, Meebo is a beautiful web-based application that allows you to log into your Instant Messengers without installing a client application. I found out about it last November, a day after having to install Yahoo! Messenger on my then parents' PC to get a tiny bit of technical support from Australia (Rob).
Yesterday saw its 20th release, and it's grin-worthily neat. First of all, its look and feel is more rounded and professional, with a great log-in screen and an enhanced icon system to signify the numerous IM variants. But possibly the most significant development is the ability to pop-out windows, including the main buddy-list itself. These appear as new Firefox (or IE for all you heathens) windows. This may seem like a minor development, but it truly takes the application to the next level, and it now sits squarely alongside its thick-client competitors.
My only significant outstanding requirement is the ability to group friends together, specifically a single person's multiple IM variants.
Nothing to download, so no reason not to check it out. You'll love it!
Check this out. Absolutely beautiful!
A little under a week ago, I requested some feedback on the old look-and-feel. I was delighted by the amount of feedback that came back. So after some half-assed futzing mid-week, I sat down in earnest (and indeed in the living room) last night to try to introduce a new look-and-feel. Around you are the results of a full battery-life's worth of CSS work.
The graphic design for the new look is courtesy of Elise. Thanks! The coding has all been done by myself, which is a miracle, as it's more a case of trial and error than anything more scientific. Padding and margins have been confusing, and I've little idea why some of the things work, but they seem to. The stylesheet feels to me a little like a house of cards, ready to collapse with the slightest breath of wind.
All of the futzing was done in Production (1. Make change, 2. Refresh homepage, 3. See what's broken, 4. Go to 1.), mainly because I didn't really listen when Rob told me how to access Dev. After all, it's hardly a mission-critical site.
Anyway, there's still some stuff to be done, but here are the main changes to date, in light of the feedback.
There are still a few things to do. Firstly, I need to talk to Elise about the possibility of her making a few tweaks to the look-and-feel. For instance, I want the Posted by bar to have a light-blue background, but when I try to do that myself in the stylesheet, loads of other stuff inherits the same background. Also, some of the spacing and sizing needs a GD's eye, I feel.
Also, I need to work on the comment form, as per Rob's advice. Rob: if you're reading, it would be good to get some more input on how it could best be changed.
I need to figure out how not to repeat the date line for posts created on the same date. Some reading about the Smarty template engine needed for that.
And finally, I need to work on some new, more appealing left-hand modules. I can't guarantee satisfying Dominic's yearning for numbers, but I'm hoping to make a more useful sidebar. Again, this needs some template changes, which I find more difficult than the CSS stuff. If you make an error in CSS, it looks funny; mistakes in the templates and the site doesn't work.
Your feedback (constructive) on the new look would be gratefully received.
It's good that accessibility is getting some press on the BBC's website. I watched Click, the TV equivalent.
It was slightly odd that the challenge set for Emma Tracey, a blind journalist for the BBC's Ouch magazine, was to buy a book from Amazon. Not sure how useful the book will be when it arrives.
I would have thought that Amazon were leading the way on accesibility, but it appears not, and it proved a frustrating experience.
I downloaded it at 11:30pm BST yesterday, an hour before its advertised 16:30pm PDT launch.
So far, I like it. I like it a lot. The menus seem more logical, the look-and-feel more professional and clean, and it has some nice new features, including remembering form completion, useful for my site users (who used to lose a comment entirely if they didn't pass my captcha).
There are quite a few important extensions (and less important, but nice-to-have themes) that don't yet work on 2.0. (I particularly miss the TinyUrl Creator and Fasterfox.) Hopefully they'll be upgraded soon.
I have one gripe. In 1.5, if I typed a keyword or two in the address bar (multiple words separated by spaces), it automatically looked it up in Google and loaded the first result returned. Very useful if you're confident that your keyword(s) will bring your desired site to the top of Google's listings. Not sure whether it was an extension that I'd activated, or whether it was a feature that has since deemed unnecessary. Either way, a little annoying.
Nonetheless, if you're on 1.5, I urge you to upgrade. If you're on Internet Explorer, I implore you to make the switch.
If you're reading this post, then I would love it if you could comment on it.
I'm currently going through a site re-design (with the help of my infinitely better-qualified friend Elise). This is in part because it's long overdue, and in part because the current design was a tactical change to the one I used when Stateside: its reference to New York's subway line numbering was no longer relevant now I'm living in London town, so the header has become somewhat bare.
So, I'd like to know:
I'm afraid that I won't be able to address the drivel that appears in the posts, but hopefully I'll be able to address some of the looky and feely and positioningy issues.
Obviously, once the changes take effect, this post will be out of place, as the answers to 2, 3 and 4 will be null.
Please, comment away!
There are three ways to find a word in an opened Outlook email.
They're not interchangeable. It depends on the email type (rich text, html etc.). Bizarre, and somewhat annoying.
There's an interesting article called Where am I? on A List Apart this month. It's intended as a "back to basics" look at navigation.
I agree with the basic tenet on which the author, Derek Powazek, bases his discussion. The past/present/future ethos is simple yet powerful: where have I been, where am I and where can I go next?. It seems like an intuitive model for navigation.
Whether past is actually interpreted as past behaviour or what's structurally behind you is something that many sites have struggled with. Should your context be based on the route you've taken to get to where you are? Or should it be based on the information architecture of the site? I firmly believe in the latter, as it gives all users the same context, and brings with it a sense of stability. You aren't presented with different signage on the fifth floor of John Lewis depending on whether you took the lift straight from ground, or got the escalator up from four; nor should you be.
However I think the guideline to never, ever link to the page you're on is wrong. (The site on which the article sits flouts this rule, btw.) Irrespective of where I am within a site, I am comforted by the fact that clicking the logo will take me to the homepage. Even if I'm on the homepage at the time, I want, and expect, this behaviour. The same is true of primary navigation. Although this functionality may appear redundant, it brings to the user a sense of consistency and comfort that shouldn't be overlooked. The fact that it's easier for content management systems to do this is by the by.
I wasn't aware that Caribbean and Brasil were languages.
Above is an extract from BBC News' left-hand navigation on the Americas homepage. I was under the impression that the Caribbean was a region and Brasil a country, English being spoken in the former, and Portuguese in the latter.
Am I missing something, or is the BBC as confused as I am by its navigation.
Today saw a change to the left-hand navigation on the BBC News website. The Sport, Weather and On This Day elements used to be differentiated from the rest of the navigation, as they were graphics with a background colour: Sport was yellow, Weather was blue and On This Day was turquoise.
They now appear in a regular font, albeit in capitals. I don't like this.
First of all, there are too many different facets of the website being amassed in the left-hand navigation. Geographical areas (including a clickable map), high-level news topics, features (e.g. In Pictures and Week at a Glance), the RSS feed, other BBC offerings (e.g. Sport, Weather) and versions in other languages. These appear in three different styles: bold, regular and capitals.
The module separators are not consistent with one another: an inexplicable dotted line below Entertainment; a small space before the RSS icon; slightly larger spaces before the related sites and language sections, each of which has a capitalised, grey heading.
And finally, there doesn't seem to be any correlation between what I would describe as the primary navigation (up top) and the left-hand navigation.
While I adore the BBC's website, its navigation strategy needs some serious work. There are a lot of places to point people to, and it strikes me that they are not doing this well. Maybe it's time to expand the real estate to accommodate more navigation (the left-hand navigation is very narrow), although browser stats suggest that 20% of people still use the 800x600 screens for which the BBC caters, down from 30% a year prior. Or maybe it's time to introduce personalisation, something that was promised when Pete Clifton was editor - I will never use the language module, for example.
(As an aside, in IE, links on the BBC site do not scale with the rest of the text. On 1 July, 2005, Pete Clifton confirmed that this would be addressed within four weeks. Still not done.)
Even if they don't choose either of these routes, they need to do better than turning off background colours to address their navigational issues.
So, Google Finance has launched. Although he's likely to be biased, Matt Cutts highlighted a clear benefit. If you search for a company name, you don't get an error indicating that you've not entered a ticker symbol. Instead, you either get the finance page you were looking for or a list of close matches. Simple, yet so effective.
The draggable maps are elegant and neat (try flicking between the zoom levels and tell me that ain't sweet!), but maybe more cool than useful.
John Battelle raises some good points, one of these being the fact that Google is slowly intervening in its own search results through its own content offerings - generally for the better, but intervening nonetheless. Keywords such as map, convert and calculate keep you within the Google world. Search for a ticker symbol on google.com (or .co.uk for that matter), and the first result returned is the one from Google Finance. Whether this ethos goes against its core values is another question.
I've just found the worst primary navigation on the internet. It's on a site called Britain USA, maintained by the Public Affairs Team of the British Embassy in Washington DC.
The primary navigation that sits atop the entire site consists of a set of images that stereotypically typify Britain, each of which links to a page on the site. Each has an alt text (which is one thing, I suppose), but for those using Firefox, this doesn't show up on hover (rightly so), leaving you to guess where you might be taken. Here are the images and their destinations.
- Carnarvon Castle (I think): takes you to a page about Wales
- London Eye pod and St. Stephen's Tower: tourist information (why of course)
- Tennis balls: culture, sport and leisure
- Prince William: the British Royal Family
- Some tartan socks: Scotland
- A bag of fish and chips: food and drink
- A London Underground sign: "Bringing a pet to Britain". Huh?
- The door of Number 10: UK system of government.
Overall, a thoroughly dreadful experience.
Finally we have another instalment of Joel Spolsky's thoughts on design. This time the focus is on usability, which he sums up in a single sentence: something is usable if it behaves exactly as expected. I say 'finally' because I was expecting more regular entries on this subject. He promised a series of posts, even providing a list of contents that he would be conforming to. The first three posts came in quick succession - on 25, 26 and 30 January. Then over a month before the next post, dated 7 March. Not what I was expecting, so maybe it's an example of bad usability? I digress.
To some degree, I agree with his adage. If something behaves exactly as expected, then it is usable. But can something that is usable behave in an unexpected way? Expected behaviour implies good usability, but does good usability imply expected behaviour? Is it an if or an iff relationship?
On first use, the iPod user experience is confusing, which I would argue makes it user-unfriendly. There is no "stop" feature, which I was recently reminded of by my friend Sesh, who has recently overcome his iPod virginity by plunging in with an iPod video. "How do you stop a song?", he asked.
"You can't" was my reply. "You either pause it, or hold down play to turn the iPod off." Is the iPod any weaker because of this 'feature'? I honestly don't know. I've been iPodding for two years and 23 days and now that I'm used to it, if I were to change my player to one that had a stop button, I would probably be confused, initially at least.
Using Spolsky's Mac OS vs. Windows example, both have their plus points from a usability standpoint, some of which contradict one another. It's great that you can resize a pane in Windows by dragging any of the pane's edges. And isn't it great that you can move a pane around in Mac OS by dragging any of the border area? Both have generated expectations among their respective user bases, expectations that conflict. To me, this example shows that the relationship between expected behaviour and good usability is one-way.
When the Windows 98 look and feel was introduced, I was up in arms, even continuing to use NT 3.51 as a comfort blanket. A week into the '98 experience, I loved it. It behaved in a way that I had not expected, but it was certainly usable. And new expectations were soon set.
The point is that our expectations are based to some degree on our experience with other products. If we always work within these confines, usability will not progress, people's expectations will not be challenged, and progress will be slower. Sometimes it takes some radically different usability (and some balls) to push the envelope. Google's primary user interface is by and large the same now as it was seven years ago, but does this make it good or does it make it familiar? It would take a brave woman (women are better at UE than men) to change it - if it ain't broke, don't fix it - but maybe this would help take it to the next level.
Jakob Nielsen is always held up as the stalwart of usability, and singly stands out more than anyone else I can think of in any other field. Yet in my opinion, his own site (useit.com), has some areas that are in need of improvement.
By far the most frustrating feature of his website is the lack of columns. On many of the article pages (here being an example), his text runs across the entire width of the window. While this may have been acceptable in the days when a resolution beyond 800x600 was almost unheard of, nowadays it makes for tiresome reading. And data suggests that over 75% of people have moved beyond 800x600s.My laptop monitor is 1280 pixels wide, probably about average. Using the default Firefox font size and a full screen window, the first full line of text in the above article contains 142 characters. Most books contain around 60 characters per line, which allows the reader to pick up the next line without dropping a beat. I've always been aware that on my site, the left-hand column is quite wide, and I think I'm pushing the limit at around 110 characters per line using default settings. However, the jump from 110 to 142 makes a huge difference to readability.
Also, the hierarchy of titles at the top of the homepage is a little confusing. The site's information architecture is not immediately obvious from scanning the homepage, with no navigational element standing out to guide me.
And when I resort to searching, the results page is on a different domain and feels like a completely different place. And this is from the man whose top ten mistakes in web design included the phrase: consistency is one of the most powerful usability principles. The screen has been designed specifically for a narrower screen, and although it clearly indicates that the results are from useit.com, the first one I happened upon took me to a completely different site: nngroup.com.
Sort it out, Jakob!