Another good band name: the Carpal Tunnels.
August 2007
Cool! Here's a much more powerful tool than my aging (but still working) Text Style Sampler for evaluating Web-safe HTML typeface choices: Typetester – Compare fonts for the screen.
Give it a spin next time you're designing a site.
From The AP, via Wired News: Astronomers spot a whopping big hole in the universe.
Naturally, they're baffled. But it makes perfect sense to me, a lay observer with barely a liberal arts degree from barely a university:
- This is where all unmatched socks go.
- This is where my kids' patience resides.
You may have noticed a new wave of spam messages that mimic registration confirmation e-mail from a legitimate-sounding Web site to dupe people into clicking through. Here's the content of one such message I received this week:
Welcome,
Welcome To Mobile Fun.
Member Number: 7645817185
Temorary Login: user9238
Password ID: yp226This Login Info will expire in 24 hours. Please Change it.
Click on the secure link or paste it to your browser: [link deleted]
Welcome,
Membership Support Department
Mobile Fun
Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox essay, in a nutshell, validates the concept of "banner blindness": people shown pages with graphical advertising units intermixed with non-ad content almost always focus on the non-ad content.
What elements attract attention most consistently? Plain text, faces and "private parts," says Nielsen.
But not most ads, he observes, with one exception:
The switchover is so new the pixels aren't yet dry, but I'll go ahead and point to Scripps' latest newspaper site redesign: CommercialAppeal.com in Memphis.
The folks at User Interface Engineering have ramped up their "infomarketing" leading to the User Interface 12 conference coming in November.
I call it "infomarketing" because UIE provides moderately detailed interviews with each of the conference session leaders -- each well-known subject matter experts -- in the weeks preceding the event. The interviews themselves contain enough useful information to be both helpful alone and great teasers for the conference.
Two posts, slightly related, both interesting reads for the search user experience crowd:
- Howard Owens says newspaper sites need better search. Boy, howdy! I commented that we have to consider the de facto standards for search keyword matching and results display established in recent years by Google and now often imitated.
Matthew Roche, writing at MediaPost, describes how a sizzling multimedia ad experience quickly degrades into a game of "throw me in the dumpster":
Cory Bergman notes NBC Universal's planned endurance run to cover the 2008 Olympics, including 2,200 hours of streamed video and 6,600 hours of coverage available in archive:
It goes without saying that such blanket online coverage raises some interesting issues/questions at the affiliate level, but kudos to NBCU for blowing it out online.
From the News of the Inevitable department: Online ads to overtake U.S. newspapers (from FT.com, linked by Greenslade).
Jakob Nielsen pretty much validates application development practices from the likes of 37signals when he writes, "Most users have low commitment -- especially to Web sites, which must focus on simplicity, rather than features."
Less really is more, it seems. The usability maestro puts the dilemma into terms every content-site designer should take to heart:
Those of us with long backgrounds running content-oriented sites may think we can write copy to sell products and services online. Maybe some of us can. But we should begin by reading Shannon Watters' tutorial over at Vitamin: Copywriting for eCommerce.
Key excerpt:
Laura Ruel and Nora Paul, writing in Online Journalism Review, neatly wrap up simple, do-it-yourself methods for Web usability tests.
The article picks up on time-tested methods I have used and liked. But its real benefit is the clear explanation for people who may never have conducted such user research, or who might otherwise make quick excuses for skipping this critical step in a Web architecture project.
