Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed – sort of reviewed

Jakob Nielsen, love him or hate him*, preaches a core set of web-usability values are that are so ridiculously simple, they are practically irrefutable. Make a search box big enough to type a full word into, make pages accessible to users with disabilities, make your pages load quickly, avoid marketese – hire an editor. This just makes sense.

Some very smart people dislike Nielsen. He shits on Flash. He says users don’t read (they “scan”). They say he thinks users are stupid. I encourage his detractors to read his book Designing Web Usability. You will probably still dislike him, but you will be able to do so with a new depth and fervour. You will also avoid making a bunch of really stupid web-design mistakes.

I got my copy signed - seriously
Nielsen’s latest book, co-authored by Marie Tahir, landed in my lap courtesy of my travelling friends just in time for me to cancel my Amazon pre-order. Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed is as much a criticism of the way brain-dead PR departments of Forture500 companies present themselves as it is a criticism of web design issues.

The book itself is a thing of beauty – it is a large format, glossy, colourful, and elegantly designed print worthy of prime real-estate on your nerdy coffee table. The writing has a smart and straightforward style that contrasts nicely with the marketing-tripe-writing on many of the criticised homepages. The leading chapters are worthwhile reading for anyone interested or involved in web development.

The chapters that follow, a criticism of 50 popular website homepages interested both for it’s criticism of common design blunders and for the eye candy on being able to flip through 50 popular homepages at once. The appendix reads: “Throughout this project, we frequently had the pictures of all 50 homepages spread out on our office floor. We found it quite powerful and visually stunning to be able to see all of the sites side-by-side.” (see an old aov post where I put together the top 50 sites at the time)

For a good overview and introduction to the book, read the interview with the authors at the publisher (New Riders) website.


* disclosure: I love him.
 

uCommerce, my ass

I got my copy signed - seriously
So I’m flipping through Jakob Nielsen’s new book, Homepage Usability:
50 Websites Deconstructed
(he scratches my back, I scratch his), when I come across his criticism of the consulting behemoth Accenture’s homepage. While lambasting the site for its ambiguity, with just cause, Nielsen and his co-author Tahir, applaud Accenture for using the heading “eCommerce” to link to a section about what Accenture calls uCommerce (Ubiquitous Commerce). Nielsen’s point is that people won’t understand jargon your organization has made up itself.

Accenture made this animation, not me
Ok, this make sense so far, but, uCommerce!? I made that shit up! I don’t know how long Accenture has been hawking that bologna, but I made a post last January on this very site describing the concept of uCommerce or Ubiquitous Commerce.

The lesson I took from this and recommend you take from it as well is as follow:

Beware, the people that run the world are no smarter than you and the bullshit they create is no better than the bullshit you create.

I wonder if posting on your blog is the same as mailing myself a sealed envelope…

 

explodingdog book!

buy it for the one you love and read it naked
Finally!

The greatest thing in the world happened!

Exploding Dog has finally released a 220 page book of 10 short stories he drew! From Sam:

This book is 220 pages of 10 short stories i drew over the last year. One story is over 80 pages long some are as short as two pages. Over 100 full color pages with all new pictures and stories about moon monsters, love, flying and other fun explodingdog stuff. I published this book myself. If you like Explodingdog, you will probably like the book. Please buy one so I can make some of my money back. The image on the left is the graphic on the cover. The book costs $30.
thanks
sam

I have been looking forward to this forever. This is great.

 

XP is a frog

Windows XP flag logo
According to a story at the Microsofty news site ActiveWin, frog design (don’t you hate companies who’s names are all lower-case?) was involved in the design of Microsoft’s new Windows Media Player look and the new Windows XP flag logo.

I also discovered recently that icon design gurus IconFactory designed the new Windows XP icons. ambiguous AND diverse They are very pretty (although, as I’ve said before, simply maaaaan). This crew also made a nice transition from the pixel-perfect to the new big-ass smooth Mac OS X icons for Audion (also see their gallery of other OS X icons – some of the nicest I’ve seen – be sure and check out all of the ‘client samples’).

frog has long been a not-so secret weapon of Steve Jobs, having worked on a slew of early Apple and Macintosh products as well as the infamous NeXT (more company capitalization) machines.

I remember years ago walking in to a local computer store with my good friend Dan and the cheque from our small business loan in hand. We needed two high-end desktops – which at the time meant Pentium 200’s with MMX with 32MB of RAM. As soon as we saw them, we knew which ones we had to have. this is the desktop version - being power users, we bought the tower version A beautiful sleek black minitower with matching mouse, keyboard, and monitor. They were Acer Aspires, but we later found out they were one of the PC world’s earliest non-beige boxes and they were designed by frog. I still have the matching phone at my appartment.

I also remember being amazed and confused by the wonderful inclusion of the Buddy Holly video by Weezer on the Window 95 CDROM.

 

XP is a frog

Windows XP flag logo
According to a story at the Microsofty news site ActiveWin, frog design (don’t you hate companies who’s names are all lower-case?) was involved in the design of Microsoft’s new Windows Media Player look and the new Windows XP flag logo.

I also discovered recently that icon design gurus IconFactory designed the new Windows XP icons. They are very pretty (although, as I’ve said before, simply maaaaan). This crew also made a nice transition from the pixel-perfect to the new big-ass smooth Mac OS X icons for Audion (also see their gallery of other OS X icons – some of the nicest I’ve seen – be sure and check out all of the ‘client samples’).

frog has long been a not-so secret weapon of Steve Jobs, having worked on a slew of early Apple and Macintosh products as well as the infamous NeXT (more company capitalization) machines.

I remember years ago walking in to a local computer store with my good friend Dan and the cheque from our small business loan in hand. We needed two high-end desktops – which at the time that meant Pentium 200’s with MMX with 32MB of RAM. As soon as we saw them, we knew which ones we had to have. this is the desktop version - being power users, we bought the tower version A (then) beautiful sleek black minitower with matching mouse, keyboard, and monitor. They were Acer Aspires, but we later found out they were one of the PC worlds earliest non-beige boxes and they were designed by frog. I still have the matching phone at my appartment.

I also remember being amazed and confused by the wonderful inclusion of the Buddy Holly video by Weezer on the Window 95 CDROM.

 

pervasive connectivity

My cell phone can handle voice and data (web/email). The voice works are you’d expect – quite well for a cell phone. The data works as you’d expect – like shit. It’s ridiculous. Typing on the numeric keys is so slow it’s embarrassing and the three line screen is just too small.

The Danger Device
There is hope for those of us who have some type of phobia of disconnection. Danger is a company about to release a handheld device that is about the same size as my cell phone works are a traditional cell phone, and has data features that look as though they may actually be usable.

The device is mostly screen and slides open to reveal a full thumb-keyboard. It can handle all of the web/email data features of my current phone, as well as always-connected data features such as instant messaging (not sure what protocol).

Handspring's TreoHandspring has a similar device coming out with more advanced PDA functionality, but will not be ‘always-on’ connection ready until next year. It is available with either thumb keyboard or graffiti and was designed by the bad-ass geniuses at IDEO.

Is any of this necessary? We threw out necessity as a factor years ago. I wonder if our language will eventually discard the word ‘necessary’ the way equatorial languages have no word for snow.

 

four beautiful things

Dodge Magazine #1 – Pixel art at its best. Messy and perfect at the same time. It’s put together by the guys at super-design site k10k (in hibernation until Dec. 1) and design shop XL5.

Rustboy – A personal short CG film still under development by the aforementioned XL5‘s Brian Taylor. Some of the preview QuickTime videos are absolutely beautiful.

SodaPlay.com – A java-based physics simulator that is completely addictive. Be sure and turn on the audio feature and try the various models (hit the ‘file’ button).

Warcraft III Cinematic Trailers – Computer animation with cinematic style and a tactile realism that makes Pixar and Squaresoft (makers of the Final Fantasy movie) look like flipbook animations. It is well worth the long wait to download all three cinematic trailers listed on the page.

 

Google is a better mousetrap

Did you know:

  • Google gives more weights to links that are bold or have a larger relative font size?
  • Google uses the text in links to a page to help rank that page? As they “often provide more accurate descriptions of web pages than the pages themselves.”

the best part of google is the ooThis all comes from an academic paper written by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, now the CEO and President of Google, respectively. Their paper, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (PDF) outlines the concepts that make Google better than other search engines.

There are a few pages that you will gloss over if you aren’t interested in database design. However, this document is interesting for the average reader in much the same way as Discovery Channel shows about epic engineering projects can be.

Tonight, print off the 20-page PDF file and read it in bed.

 

QWERTY, Cut, & Paste

VIEW LARGE IMAGE - If only there was a 'launch Microsoft Word Norwegian Version 4.07b' button
Speaking of behemoths, Microsoft introduces a keyboard with the long overdue Copy, Cut, and Paste keys. A Microsoft Word key is lame, but anyone who has done the Ctrl-C + Ctrl-V a hundred times knows that the pinky and index finder were not meant to be that far from each other for any length of time.

I know this is please our good friend Dan James (despite what this photo may lead you to think, Dan does not play hockey). He’s been ranting about Cut & Paste keys for years. Also, Microsoft’s keyboards are the most spill resistant I have every seen. Very clever engineering.