heisel.org

I’ve got my eye on this

Friday | March 26, 2004 | 1:07 pm  

There are some early, and interesting results from Poynter’s latest eyetracking study. (Hat tip to Jay).

Here’s a quick rundown:

• Users really like text — photos, multimedia elements and the like got lower viewing than text and text-links

• Users paid little attention to the blurbs beneath headline links and paid more attention to the headline-link itself. The author says this could mean headlines are even more important than we thought… they’re the primary way to convey information to readers.

• Users will scroll below the “fold” — as the long as the design doesn’t explicity cut the page in half… he said that when pages had rules or other items to distinguish “above the fold” from “below the fold” users tended to think the page ended and didn’t scroll. If the layout indicated more content, then they’d scroll.

• Ads on shorter, less packed home pages tended to receive more viewership than on more content-packed home pages

  I wonder if this isn’t just because the user is left looking for information that isn’t on your page, so they turn to the ads as a last resort.

• Multimedia elements didn’t get more hits than text… words reign supreme.

These are all very interesting results, but its also stuff that folks in the know have been saying and reading for a while.

I’m interested in seeing the full results, which will be posted starting April 5 I don’t know where I pulled that date out from… the site says starting in May.

We certainly can’t draw any hard and fast conclustions yet, but I imagine these early results indicate trends, and I hope the news industry — which used eyetracking in the ’70s to usher in better design — will take the report to heart and start improving their sites.

I, for one, will try and do my part.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Web design

Like the nipple ring

Tuesday | March 23, 2004 | 4:52 pm  

The firestorm brewing over TypeKey is raging to new heights.

There was something about the whole bru-ha-ha (aside: who remembers Wolf3D) that reminded me of an event being blown out of proportion.

BurningBird brings up the point that has been nagging me, why do we need registration at all?

I doubt that everyone really needs a SSO for all the blogs they comment on. Maybe we should all have the “remember me” boxes turned on in our various software (aside: I’ll turn it on later today and/or tommorow).

Registration may keep out spammers, but:

1. Spammers will find ways around, under, over, and through comment registration.

2. MT ships, out of the box, with a feature that turns all links in a comment into redirects, thus negating the Google advantage.

So this is, at best, a temporary setback to spammers.

No, the ultimate reason, and desire, by folks for a comment registration system — whether its centralized, decentralized, left-of-centralized, or whatnot — is that folks want a way to kick commenters off their site.

Whatever their reasons, some of which may be valid, some bloggers want to restrict commenting access, and that’s not right in my book.

So why the mammary reference in the title? The technology behind TypeKey is just like the nipple ring — its the high profile, oft-discussed topic that is getting all the attention while bigger issues remain.

If we want to register to voice our feedback, have our views filtered, or censored, then why have blogs at all… the traditional media and their Web sites have been/are doing this.

One of the things that sets blogs apart from the regular media is that there are two seperate spaces on each page.

1. The article space — This belongs to the blogger(s), it’s their place to parade their thoughts, opinions, links, etc. I can write whatever I want in the “article space” and there’s nothing you can do about it, or is there?

2. The comment space — This belongs to the audience, and there shouldn’t be anything that the author can do about it. It’s the audience’s free-for-one, free-for-all spot to cogitate, comment and contradict.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Technology, Web design

If you can’t fail gracefully…

Monday | March 22, 2004 | 3:37 pm  

Don’t blame the user, this message brought to you by Jeremy Zawodny.

If you can’t, just can’t, provide a limited or reduced-functionality version of your site/software/widget/widget-as-a-rental-service etc. then don’t blame the user.

Afterall it’s not that their browsers don’t support your site, it’s that you chose not to support their browser.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Web design

Reading (BYOR)*

Monday | March 22, 2004 | 2:08 pm  

It’s a busy day at work, I’ll post some of the neat-o-keen ™ MT hacks I’ve worked up later.

Meanwhile….

• Mark has a great take on TypeKey. Also, check out his entry on assets and Web logs.

• ALA has piece on the best way to to do pop-up windows, if you must. I’ve talked about how it’s my browser, not yours before, but we all face a situation where we’re told it has to be a pop-up window.

  This method looks to be the best, (but the onload trick might be a bit much if you only have a few links on a page that need popping).

• Jay Allen talks about lockin when you don’t use HTML markup in a CMS or blog software.

  I’ve traditionally used MT’s “convert line breaks” option to make paragraphs but otherwise coded most of the HTML by hand. Recently, I’ve been flirting with MT Textile, but I’m now solidly in the Markdown camp. It has a nice syntax, especially for lists, and it plays nice with the HTML that I still write myself (most of it). Need convincing?

* Bring your own rainbow

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Die C, die!

Friday | March 19, 2004 | 4:20 pm  

From this Slashdot entry about Portable .Net:

The death of C has been greatly exaggerated. It will adapt - it always has.

Gee, does it really have too?

All kidding aside, C really should die, or at least be half in the grave.

It really only should be used for performance focused applications that have to run on limited hardware. Otherwise, there are plenty of really good languages that need to supplant it.

And I don’t mean Java, the seed of C.

I’d love to talk with some Java folks some time… it seems like you don’t get much in return for the tradeoff you make when you go with an interpreted language.

With Python, at least you get great productivity increases, cleaner code, less cruft, and a warm happy feeling inside in exchange for some performace loss (and if you really, really need it, you can code performance-related tasks in C with Python).

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Technology

I blog humbled

Friday | March 19, 2004 | 2:06 pm  

Jeffrey Veen captures in words better than I have, or probably ever will, what it is to design for the Web.

Here’s my big secret for you today. When you design for the Web — that is, when you design exclusively and specifically for this medium — when you do that natively, so many of the things we consider problems just start to fall away. … And that’s why I don’t care about accessibility. Because when Web design is practiced as a craft, and not a consolation, accessibility comes for free.

Brilliant! Working in a culture so dominated by print wears down my Web creativity, and notes like this charge it back up. I’ve got to get to SXSW next year.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Web design

News design is flawed… and smoking is bad for you!

Friday | March 19, 2004 | 1:15 pm  

Winner, in my book, of the No Duh Award, is this great interview with Alan Jacobson.

The problem is that, except for me, and a select few, this is news. (In case you hadn’t heard, smoking is bad for you, we invaded Iraq, and Google “launched’ local search).

He’s got some good points, and some bad. Let’s recap, shall we:

Perhaps the most glaring flaw at many Web sites is that they look the same day after day. While a print edition adjusts the layout of its front page to the news of the day, many newspaper home pages do not. They’re stuck with a set template, complains Jacobson, and the daily news is crammed into it — whether this is a day with a huge story (Saddam captured) or a slow news day (the local St. Patrick’s Day parade). Headlines are all the same size, not adjusted to infer news value.

Dabo! We have a winner. I’ve written about the need to change your design before.

I’ll say it again, design is content, if your headline or photo was the same size on Sept. 11, 2001 as it was on Sept. 10, 2001, then you need a new CMS.

Small Initiatives brings up a good point regarding CMSes, if we ask for it, we’ll get it:

CMS vendors and internal site programmers would build variable-template systems if they were asked and paid to do it.

Let’s talk photo play:

The there’s-always-one-photo-on-the-home-page template is just silly when you have days that warrant running three photos. It’s denigrating editors’ news judgment when the only option is to stuff a photo into a locked-size template slot, no matter how important or unimportant a shot may be.

I agree 100 percent, photos are content. If you’ve got a slow word-news day, but a good photo-news day, then put some more photos up there.

And please tell me you’re not confining yourself to just one photo size and shape, are you?

No self-respecting designer or photo editor would accept having one spot, the same size and shape, for a different photo every day. The content of the photo changes, so the shape will have to as well.

Let’s move on to my favorite topic, scrolling…

The ideal home page, he suggests, would be confined to the limits of the size of a computer screen. That’s right, no scrolling. And the same goes for inside or article-level pages.

Sorry, gotta disagree there, vehemently. What is a screenfull on the Web? Is it the resolution or the browser size? It can’t be either, they’re both subject to change.

Print-now-Web designers, please, please, stop saying things like “below the scroll”, that’s a figment of your imagination.

That said, a well-thought-out and well-designed hierarchy of information will tend to put the most important content near the top of the page, and the less-important information toward the bottom.

Come one, say it with me… “Hey hey, ho ho, ‘below the scroll’ has got to go!”

Besides, scroll-wheels make it easy, and studies promote scrolling over paging.

But Chris, you say, with all that information, however will we provide hierarchy. Well, start with the principles of design: color, balance, type, and their brethern. There might be some room for DHTML but…

Jacobson believes that the current generation of bloated news-site home pages will die off as more sites use DHTML techniques to hide content and links under expanding navigation elements that become visible as the user’s mouse is moved over a nav element.

…not if it’s flyouts, please God, not flyouts. If you’ve got to hide information then use a click-based method.

What might be interesting, though, is a home-page design that lets you hide parts of the “index-area” that many front pages have. Couple the Javascript hiding with a cookie, and then presto you have a customized homepage.

There’s more to this good interview, and I’d also recommend Small Initiave’s take on it as well.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Web design

Why have you forsaken me…

Thursday | March 18, 2004 | 9:29 pm  

Google is down and out as of this hour… anyone know why?

This is the first time I’ve seen this in my, admittedly limited, recollection.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Technology

When link lists attack!

Thursday | March 18, 2004 | 1:13 pm  

• An open letter to Jakob Nielsen, from Design by Fire.

  Let’s end vicious punditry and promote good design from day one of a product. You can’t bolt on usability.

• Syncato, a very cool, XML-based CMS that really shows what data-driven programming can do.

  Kimbro Staken, its creator, wrote a good article about the design of his software for XML.com.

• Hypergene wanted RSS from Tidbits. They said their CMS didn’t grok RSS. Adrian gave them RSS… but no details on how he did it? Come on, Adrian we all want to know.

Edit 1:30 p.m.: I had to add this entry on The complexity principle, well written, well though out, and well worth reading.

Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Web design

Google goes local - forgets sort?

Wednesday | March 17, 2004 | 1:20 pm  

But a comment… what’s up with Google’s “new” local search (in case you are Andy Rooney).

It’s a great idea, but what interface designer fell asleep at the wheel… on the results page you can’t sort by distance.

You can narrow the results to certain radii, but I can’t actually sort by the distance column… am I the only one who thinks this is a no brainer.

I did a search for chinese and my address trying to find a good place to walk to, but I can’t sort the results. I can view the map, I can mentally catalog the distances, but that’s not the same as sorting and then immediately seeing the closest restaurant.

And in closing, a request to Google, or anybody listening… would you please make your next project a mass-transit directions site, because the one I have to use stinks.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Web design