intodimensions.com

On Google News Technology page this morning appears news about Nokias new cell phone, apparently the first ever with a hard drive in it. That’s not very peculiar in itself. What is though is that the same news story appears twice only four items apart. Sure there’s a different picture and sure the links are for different stories but it’s all about the same thing. This seems to be another effect of automatic news-gathering.

Just a minute ago I went to Monster.com and got a surprise. There was a message saying the site is going through schedule maintenance. That was a surprise but not the main one. A bigger suprise was that the message was posted in ten (!) different languages (original page [PNG]). Monster.com must be a very international place.

Bobby is a free online usability-testing service:

This free service will allow you to test web pages and help expose and repair barriers to accessibility and encourage compliance with existing accessibility guidelines, such as Section 508 and the W3C’s WCAG.

A lot of organizations, especially public/government organizations, use Bobby to make their sites compliant with laws and common usability guidelines. I tried my university’s web page (not a pretty sight) and I also ran it on this site (not too bad but there’s work to do) with some interesting results.

Not sure it’s the best concept from a usability standpoint, but Core11.com is a cool website.

[posted with ecto]

Boxes and Arrows:

Ads: IAs dislike ‘em; I dislike ‘em. And, as an information purist, I believe everyone dislikes ads. They interfere with navigation. They flash annoyingly. They disrupt the flow of content, awkwardly placed, as so many of them are, right in the middle of the content we want to read. Even worse is when they have been somehow blended into the content, as if we wouldn’t notice. Ads, in short, dilute content and diminish the effect of a page.

This interference can be especially frustrating for IAs. We spend time architecting a page that will meet user needs in the best way possible. We’ve done user research. We’ve understood business models. We’ve brainstormed. We may even know that a page has to support ads, but if you’re like me, you try to place them somewhere out of the way, like the bottom of the page. And then the dreaded moment occurs, probably at the final schematic review, when the marketing director or some other important stakeholder looks at the page, searches in vain (ignoring all your fine work), and finally points to the top of the page and says, “We need an ad right there.”

What’s an IA to do?

[posted with ecto]

InformationWeek:

IBM has teamed up with a little-known open-source scripting language company, Zend Technologies Ltd., in a bet that such an alliance will yield an easier way to build Web sites with dynamic content.

Web sites capable of providing users with personalized content or answering individual browser requests for specific information need to be able to extract the desired information from a database. In the early days of the Web, that meant laborious programming. Zend Technologies’ PHP scripting language was designed to help programmers without advanced Java or Microsoft C# expertise build applications that tap into those database services.

This is a very nice boost for PHP.

[posted with ecto]

CreativeBits:

You need to have an order of importance in your communication. Many designs around us try to say too many things all at the same time. When all the elements have the same weight the reader has nothing to focus on. He gets lost. He gets frustrated and you lose your audience.

[posted with ecto]

Brinkster.net:

I’m not sure how useful you may find this Adobe Acrobat bit, but I’ve had a reason to use it recently and thought I would share it.

Say you have a large multi-page PDF document stored on your Web site. And lets say you want to link to a specific page in that PDF file right from your Web page. You could split the specific page out of the file, or you could force your reader to scroll to a specific page, but this is a more elegant solution.

Pretty nifty thing - I’ll probably use sooner or later.

[posted with ecto]

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report:

To the delight of gadget freaks and the consternation of some web designers and thinkers, the new Autolink feature in Google’s latest toolbar sticks links on your site that you didn’t put there.

For instance, if your company’s site includes a street address, a link to Google’s map service will magically sprout from your page. Likewise, a book’s ISBN number will trigger a link to an Amazon page selling that book. The BBC and CNET cite additional examples.

[posted with ecto]

Here’s something interesting I just came across. On a web site, I was filling out a form asking for some personal information in return for getting a free sample of a product and in the drop-down menu for ‘Marital status’ the choices were:
- ‘Prefer not to answer’
- ‘Single’
- ‘Living with a partner’
- ‘Separated/divorced/widowed’
- ‘Married (or equivalent)’

Now, I can see why you in some situations, for marketing purposes, would want to know a person’s marital status, but what the heck is an ‘equivalent’ of ‘marriage’? Isn’t there a better way of making the selections than the ones above?

[posted with ecto]