Here’s a post on the interesting history of the Arial font and why the article’s author can’t stand it. I know someone who would say the same about Papyrus.
On a related note,here’s Typographi.com’s favorite font picks for 2005: http://typographi.com/001045.php.
I found interesting research involving eyetracking the other day at PoynterOnline. When I went to the home page,I wasn’t quite sure what a site about journalism had to do with eyetracking for websites…until I realized the research is specific to news sites. Nonetheless,where a user’s eyes focus on a web page is useful information to designers regardless of the type of site it is.
Worth checking out,there’s very detailed graphs,etc showing the movement of a user’s eyes as they scan a page from top to bottom,highlighting where they spend the most amounts of time. They also spend a good deal of time discussing navigation location,advertising,paragraph length,writing style,image size (dimension),headline format,type size,and more. An interesting read to say the least.
So we had our first usability test of the new recognition web app I’m writing and things went swimmingly.
Imagine that,usability testing…with real users. It was a pleasant change for me. We got tons of great feedback and fortunately it tells me that I’m really on the right track.
This is a high visibility project and it can’t be bad when the CEO drops in to see how things are progressing and the Director of HR comes down to participate in the tests. The project sponsor told me today people are pressuring her to get things wrapped up because they want me on their upcoming projects. Not bad for 6 weeks on the job.
Ok,time to stop tooting my own horn and write something useful to somebody.
Go to http://www.keen.com/zenza1964. Read it. Enough said.
I attended a demo for a CMS by Sitecore recently. The organization is looking at it in order to more efficiently update content on our external sites but it’s also of interest to me as an intranet developer for the same reasons. Sitecore offers full support for Microsoft’s .NET plus XML, SOAP, XSLT, HTML, CSS,Javascript,C#,and the DOM so that it can easily integrate with ERP systems,CRM tools,financial systems,etc. More about that in a later post however. Because of the wide range of department representatives attending,the demo didn’t get too technical but focused more on the role of an Editor.
The Editor functions seem to most closely map to the responsibilities of copywriter,meaning they are ultimately responsible for generating content. What I liked most about Sitecore in this regard is the ability to establish a workflow. Within the system,the overall adminstrator can specify areas which are editable by the Editor. The Editor can then add,delete,modify,etc content within these areas and mark it as pending for the next step in the workflow. This could be the adminstrator,another higher level Editor,legal counselor,compliance,corporate branding,or anyone who might need to approve content before it is published. Any level can send copy back to lower levels for revisions along with the ability to attach notes to the copy. It’s my understanding this workflow can have unlimited steps as long as it stays linear.
Sitecore also makes allowances for dated content. Content can be created in a staging area and then given a date in the future when it should automatically be published. For example,the developers for an E-Commerce web site can put together promotional materials ahead of time for their big post-Thanksgiving sale and set it to be published Thanksgiving day at11:59p or whenever they like. Conversely,content can also be set to expire automatically at a future date.
The technical developer-focused demo is this week so I’ll have additonal details after that. So far though,I’m pretty impressed with this product and excited about the opportunities using it could uncover.
I saw a discussion somewhere recently about the May 1st reboot. If I’m correct,the idea is that every May 1st,designers and developers will unveil redesigns of their sites. www.may1reboot.com will serve as a focal point for people to find those creatives participating in the program. I think there might be prizes (besides Internet fame) for best design but I’m not sure.
One of the reasons The reason I don’t have more information to offer about the program is the god awfulness of their web site. I don’t want to mercilessly bash it but I’m not sure I have even one good thing to say.
I should preface the following by saying that I’m no Nielsen when it comes to usability. I like images,I sometimes deviate from #00f as a link color,and I hate to tell you Jakob but sometimes I don’t even underline them. That being said,the reboot site (for me anyway) is totally unusable.
First things first,you need Flash in order to view anything at all. I know,people will tell me that Flash has like 98% penetration…whatever. I’m using a new install of Firefox and I had to go download it. My mom isn’t going to go get Flash to look at any web site. Granted,my mom is not their target audience…but as a professional web developer,I would assume that I am their audience. People are doing ridiculously cool things with Flash but it should add something to the presentation that can’t be accomplished any other way. As near as I can tell,they didn’t use Flash for anything that a little intermediate level knowledge of CSS couldn’t pull off.
“As near as I can tell” brings me to my number two beef with this site. I can’t read anything on it. That’s right,I CAN’T READ ANYTHING ON IT. Ok,that’s a slight exaggeration but once I got Flash installed and actually took a look at the site,I found very little contrast between any of the design elements. Dark red,faded grey,or pale yellow text against a black background. To make matters worse,it displays in the super small font that only the really super über hip and in the know designers are fond of. The text can’t be resized because it’s all in Flash and my young eyes just can’t take it. The default display of the links is in a color that’s either the same color as the background or pretty close to it. To me they’re totally invisible until I stumble across them with the mouse and then they light up. Maybe there’s more contrast on Mac because the colors aren’t so dark but I have to figure I’m not the only developer working on a PC. Some of us might like to participate in the reboot but like me can’t get the information they need to do it.
Did I mention the annoying music that plays INCESSANTLY in the background? I couldn’t stand it and I had to keep opening and closing the tab the site was running in as I flipped back and forth for reference while writing this.
I understand art for art’s sake and even being weird just for the sake of being weird. I can understand if some of the submissions are experimental,cutting edge,and/or not entirely usable because of it. But in this instance,the site is intended as a tool to convey information about the event and in that regard,it just fails. Miserably.
Anyway,I’m not sure there was any point to this post other than a chance to rant like a usability fanatic and possibly as a general outline for what NOT to do when developing. I’m going to start work shortly on a redesign of my site and I was interested in participating but now I’m not so sure I want to be associated.
Here’s the latest certification from Brainbench. In the immortal words of Mr. T,“I pity tha fool” who’s reading this blog,is in this profession,and isn’t taking advantage of these free resume building,raise getting tools. You know how much you know,but here’s third party verification that you can show any employer.
Those of you using IE/Win may notice that I finally fixed the whitespace bug that’s been causing a 2 pixel or so whitespace to appear between the top banner and the navigation elements of this site. Although the fix was so simple,I wouldn’t necessarily consider myself lazy for taking so long to do it. It’s more a matter of actually remembering to do it (I primarily use a Mac for at work browsing or FF/Win at home).
Big thanks to Rands for posting about Veer. He raved about their design catalog and even the ads…yes,the ads. Having never heard of Veer,I decided to check it out. Point to http://www.veer.com/ and check it out for yourself. Like Photonica or Corbis,they sell stock photography and all sorts of other media. I spent about an hour in the Ideas section alone,mostly downloading the free and amazingly attractive wallpapers. If you’re ever looking for media for any project,I strongly suggest you start your search there. If you’re just looking for inspiration,again,this is the perfect place to start. Enjoy!
On a side note,you should check out Rand’s site. With almost 30 years in the industry,his posts range from project management and tech life in general to writing and Las Vegas. His insights are useful,relevant,and,particularly the Vegas posts,entertaining.
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