heisel.org

Let’s not forget about graceful degradation

Tuesday | December 4, 2007 | 10:59 am  

Far be it from me to be a nat­ter­ing nabob of neg­a­tiv­ity, but in all the Web 2.0 eupho­ria (I hate that name, BTW), let’s not forget about grace­ful degradation.

Let’s exam­ine the dis­cus­sion between Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 in regards to errors like this:

Web 1.0: What is this?

Web 1.0: Where did you get this?

Web 1.0: Where did you learn about this kind of thing?

Web 2.0: [Filled with teen angst] I learned it by watch­ing you!

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

Zeldman gets it right

Wednesday | November 21, 2007 | 5:15 pm  

Haunt­ingly beau­ti­ful and inspir­ingly cor­rect, a must read for all Web pro­fes­sion­als: Under­stand­ing Web Design

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Web design

Best sig on AIM today

Tuesday | May 16, 2006 | 5:05 pm  

“The user-​generated con­tent would create the site.” (via Laura)

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Business, Journalism, Web design

What’s wrong with saying “the midwest”?

Wednesday | November 16, 2005 | 9:33 am  

It’s not as if the mid­west con­tains America’s liver and large intestine…

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

Checking out Odeo

Thursday | June 23, 2005 | 9:51 am  

I just got my invite to Odeo, which is pretty sweet so far.

I’ll do a more detailed write up this week­end (sorry… my days belong to work and my nights belong to a Rails project for her), but here’s my first impressions.

What it is

The site promises to be a one-​stop shop for find­ing, sub­scrib­ing, down­load­ing, and cre­at­ing your own Podcasts.

At the moment, the Pod­cast cre­ation tools aren’t released yet, but it’s an early beta — no big whoop.

The design

I can’t say enough about the site’s design. It’s great stylelis­ti­cally and in terms of intuitiveness.

It feels like a more sub­dued, yet more hip, iTunes Music Store for Pod­casts (sans the mon­e­tary exchange, at least for now).

One stand­out fea­ture is the abil­ity to pre­view the Pod­cast with­out leav­ing the site or firing up an mp3 player on your desktop.

When a fea­tured Pod­cast is listed, or when you’re view­ing a Podcast’s info page, there are nice, unob­tru­sive con­trols that let you play, rewind, and fast-​foward a Pod­cast, as well as add it to your sub­scrip­tion list.

There are links to add your own Pod­cast to the direc­tory, but it’s down­played on many pages.

I think for Odeo’s direc­tory to become a suc­cess they need to play up the abil­ity to add your exist­ing Pod­cast to the site.

That, and a killer API.

The directory

The ‘listen’ sec­tion is a direc­tory of avail­able Pod­casts. You can view fea­tured Pod­casts, search for Pod­casts or browse by tags, pop­u­lar­ity, and recentness.

The tag­ging deci­sion is inter­est­ing as it’s the first time I’ve seen it applied to con­tent not cre­ated by the user.

With Flickr and del.​icio.us the end user is cre­at­ing con­tent (either photos or book­marks), and they have an inter­est in tag­ging them to orga­nize their content.

Though tag­ging a feed in Odeo is just as easy, I didn’t find myself tag­ging any of them while perus­ing the avail­able feeds.

Per­haps, like the Wikipedia, a core group of users will find them­selves tag­ging content.

Once you’ve found Pod­casts you’d like to sub­scribe to, one-​click adds them to your qeue for sync­ing with your desk­top com­puter / iPod.

The Odeo Syncer

It’s Python pow­ered, whoo-​hoo!

It breaks on my Pan­ther (10.3.6) machine at work, snap!

When I get a chance to try it at home I’ll give it a shot.

That’s all I’ve got for now… I’ll post a more in-​depth review once I can try out the syncing/downloading functionality.

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

Dreamhost has Rails, Fastcgi

Saturday | June 18, 2005 | 1:56 pm  

Hooray!

Dreamhost now sup­ports Rails and FastCGI.

Now, other than this blog, I’m nor­mally a TextDrive kind of person, but Erica’s school signed a con­tract with Dreamhost.

I prob­a­bly should have advised them to sign up with TextDrive, but at the time I hadn’t used them that long and Dreamhost was a known quan­tity that I’d feel safe in recommending.

Plus, at the time, the school was just look­ing for cheap host­ing for their mostly static with a wee bit o’ PHP site — which Dreamhost is fine for.

But sub­se­quently, they’ve been look­ing to do more and more and more with their Web site, and in hind­sight, I’ve been wish­ing that I’d sent them to TextDrive because of their great sup­port for developer-​friendly technologies.

But now that Dreamhost has Rails, I can help them build some great apps (in my spare time, ha ha), until they can make a move to TextDrive.

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

del.​icio.us has a new look

Monday | June 6, 2005 | 4:21 pm  

If you haven’t del.icio.us’d any­thing yet today, check out their new interface:

It’s got a shiny coat of Javascript-​powered tag usabil­ity added on!

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

Amazon’s crummy messages

Thursday | June 2, 2005 | 12:31 pm  

Erica and I were look­ing to switch cell phones and providers, so we decided to go with the Amazon Razr deal I men­tioned.

Thus started a descent into madness.

Maybe I’m being a bit harsh, but given how well Amazon usu­ally designs their sys­tems, the process of order­ing a cell phone with ser­vice can be a bit daunting.

Not long after we placed our order, we got this note from Amazon:

There has been a delay in pro­cess­ing your wire­less order. We apol­o­gize for this incon­ve­nience. We are wait­ing for a final deter­mi­na­tion of ser­vice eli­gi­bil­ity from the car­rier. Unfor­tu­nately, Ama​zon.com is unable to process a wire­less order until we receive approval from the carrier.

At this point, you do not need to take any action. Rou­tine delays of a day or two are not uncom­mon if car­ri­ers are expe­ri­enc­ing high volume or system issues. …

And that’s where I stopped read­ing the note. After all, like most people, I scan my e-mail look­ing for the impor­tant info. I closed the note know­ing this:

1. My order with Amazon is delayed
2. Because they’re await­ing final approval from Cingular
3. Cin­gu­lar has to do a credit check (this is men­tioned promi­nently while doing the order)
4. I don’t need to do anything

Great, I’m a lazy Amer­i­can — I’m good at not doing anything!

Appar­ently I should have taken that more to heart. A few days later, I checked the status of my order on Amazon’s Web site.

This is what I saw:

You can click the link to read the full mes­sage. But what it says is:

1. I haven’t been approved
2. I need to cancel my order
3. “We cannot pro­ceed with­out some action on your part.”
4. In five days, if I don’t do any­thing, they’ll cancel my order.

That, my friends, is one of the worst error mes­sages I’ve ever seen.

Let me get this straight… I need to cancel my order, Amazon can’t pro­ceed with­out action on my part. But, if I don’t take any action, they’ll cancel my order.

Being a bear of very little brain, I can­celed my order like I thought Amazon wanted me to.

Then, a few days later, fig­ur­ing I’m going to have find another phone/plan/provider I re-​read my e-mail from Amazon a little more closely. And I dis­cover this nugget of wisdom (empha­sis mine):

Until this is resolved, it is pos­si­ble that the infor­ma­tion in the “Your Account” sec­tion of the Amazon site will incor­rectly indi­cate that this order requires your atten­tion and may direct you to cancel - please dis­re­gard this until we get more information.

A jigga-​what?

So I reordered my phone/plan. Got the same note, got the same error mes­sage, did noth­ing. Now my phone is on its way.

Amazon, what the fuss? (iTunes)

In an effort to be con­struc­tive might I sug­gest the fol­low­ing changes?

The first and most defen­sive thing would be to not have a mes­sage saying I need to cancel my order, when I don’t.

Absent that, your ini­tial note should say this:

1. There has been a delay in pro­cess­ing your wire­less order.
2. We are wait­ing on your car­rier to com­plete a credit check
3. Do not take any action
4. If you check your order status on the site it may prompt you to cancel. Do not cancel your order.
5. If your credit check is declined we will inform you and cancel your order
6. If you have any ques­tions you can con­tact our Cell Phones Spe­cial­ists at 1-800-201-7575, Monday through Friday 10am to 7pm EST.

A six-​point e-mail is much easier to skim/read and digest than a six para­graph mes­sage with nearly 300 words.

Finally change your “error message” to accu­rately reflect the status of my order!

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Business, Web design

RSS subscription usability

Thursday | May 26, 2005 | 12:39 pm  

Veen brings up a good point about the usabil­ity of sub­scrib­ing to RSS feeds.

With the roll­out of feeds on our paid sports site, and as we’re begin­ning to roll out feeds on AJC.com, it’s a ques­tion I’ve tried to tackle.

We did the XSL thing on ajc­sport­sPlus, but I have my wor­ries about it.

I can easily see my mother book­mark­ing that page to read head­lines, rather than get­ting all the ben­e­fits of an aggre­ga­tor. Yes, despite the fact that our trans­formed page says not to book­mark it and it does point you to our help page, I still think folks might skip past that as their eyes go into “find the con­tent I want” mode.

Though it may be jar­ring, dis­play­ing the raw XML might prompt users to hit the back button and click on the “What’s this?” link we pro­vide next to all our feeds.

That solu­tion, though, feels like you’re pur­pose­fully let­ting a child touch a hot kettle just so they’ll learn their lesson.

There are two out­comes: the child might learn to use a pot holder when reach­ing for some­thing hot and the user might click the help link or they might never touch the stove/feeds again.

Maybe instead of a sheet show­ing the con­tent and instruc­tions, the XSL should render a splashy page that would give instruc­tions for get­ting and sub­scrib­ing to aggre­ga­tors (with screen­shots or a screen­cast). It could tout the ben­e­fits of RSS — “It’s like Tivo for news” or some such.

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Journalism, Technology, Web design

Quote of the day

Tuesday | May 24, 2005 | 10:47 am  

“It’s a Gmail task in a Hot­mail world”

A coworker sent me that quote, and nei­ther of us can find the source… if anyone out there in great wild Web knows, please drop a line…

Update: 5-16-06: Thanks to irayo we now know the source:

“Cross-referencing was impos­si­ble; I was attempt­ing a Gmail task in a Hot­mail world.”

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