I swear, the best work I do is after 9:30 PM. Which isn’t that big a deal until you factor in my wife and 2-year old son at home, who haven’t seen me in exactly 14 hours. How sick is that? Sometimes the love for design just kicks in and takes control. I’m just lucky that they understand that, and that this situation happens pretty infrequently. I don’t know what it is, but the work I’ve done in the past 4 days has surpassed in quality the work I’ve done all year. Weird.
Okay, so an IA friend of mine attended a usability conference in sunny San Diego recently, and happened to take part in an interesting Jakob Nielsen discussion. After spending 20 minutes discussing why designers hate him, someone who apparently knows Jakob jumped in, letting them in on a little secret. It was divulged that Jakob is not actually as much of an ass as he makes himself out to be, and often-times, his outrageous statements are usually made in an attempt to get any reaction out of the community he can. And I can see that. When a two-year old is not responding to your requests, you make a harsh statement that you really don’t mean in order to elicit a response from them. So if Jakob feels that what are actually his relatively moderate views on usability are important but ignored, it would make sense to make some outrageous claim in order to get the community to listen. The side result is that the more press he gets from it, the more he can charge for his seminars (with a rumored $20k per engagement). Just a tip, I guess. Take what he says with a grain of salt, and I think it’s even more reason to ignore him.
Okay, so I know that most of my posts tend to lean a little toward me hating whatever it is I’m writing about. But you’re in for a treat today, because this past week, I found (via a link from the unbeatable Kaliber10000) the International Herald Tribune, which just happens to be the best website ever, news or otherwise. It has the perfect balance between the elusive ‘compelling content’ and out-of-your-way-but-really-damn-cool interface.
First of all, it looks as if the right designer (or team) was given total control over the interface and functionality. You can even hide the banner ad at the top with a little ‘x’ right next to it. The whole site is done with DHTML layers and Javascript, so it isn’t exactly the fastest loading site in the world, especially for modem-users, but I trust it’s much quicker than a Flash site would be with the same quantity of info. Browse by region or section, or you can browse all the clippings of the articles, and make your own list of articles to read. When you click the little icon next to the clipping, it ‘moves’ to the top bar, and the number next to the ‘clippings’ menu item changes to reflect the number of clippings you have. But I digress. I can’t really go into a full feature list here, just see it and click all the cool little buttons. You can even change the weather listings from Celsius to Farenheit and back if you wish. It’s awesome.
So check it out.
But you knew I would have something to bitch about, right? This has nothing to do with the IHT, but more with my ISP, Earthlink. And not really Earthlink, but the ‘My StartPage’ service in particular. This week (right about the time I discovered the IHT site) Earthlink decided that, despite the fact that I already have DSL through them, they needed to add a little Flash movie to my startpage, letting me know how great it is. It has music. So if any of you have used a personalized startpage, you know that there’s a lot of clicking on news stories, then clicking ‘back’ to get back to the startpage again, right? Well the geniuses over at Earthlink didn’t do the Flash correctly, and so every time I hit ‘back’ from a news story, the animation and shitty music start up all over again, letting me know how great the DSL I already have is. So I’ve stopped using it. If you know of another decent startpage service,let me know.
If you read the story below first this will make more sense. I was *almost* hired at the same Denver New Media shop as Kevin… Problem was I knew Design, HTML, and Network Administration and wanted to be paid like someone who knows and will use all those abilities. So, was I right in requesting more money than say a “low-end” designer would make? I think so, BUT they don’t. Funny thing is, I know Macintosh like the back of my hand as well as Windows and several flavors of UNIX. In fact, I can think of at least 3 or 4 ways to get that piece of shit Dave off the godamn desktop whether they are using NT or Solaris. Damn. Fuck. I hate people in high places in the tech industry, they seem to know nothing except that they *should* use Microsoft products. What a crock of shit that is. Think different and think for yourself.
Okay. So here’s the question I pose to you, the reader.
As some of you know, I am a web designer working at a midsize web shop in Denver. We have a CTO, a VP of Technology, and a Network Admisitrator. Now, the Network Administrator has had a number of servers (Sun and otherwise) delivered to him to set up, and an entire TEMPERATURE CONTROLLED server room built for him. So far, no problem. Where the friction starts is here: over half of our staff uses Macintosh computers, in some form or another (iMacs, G3 PowerBooks, G4 towers, etc.), and all of the aforementioned technology people have ZERO experience either maintaining or using Macs. I’m surprised the network admin even knows what one looks like.
Fully half the office needs to use a piece of shite software to connect to the filesharing servers, and the one that most of us work from is a tiny PC-shaped box. It isn’t even rack-mounted. It just sits on the floor and takes our abuse. Now, Dave (conveniently the name of both the SMB software and the network admin) is very unstable and crashes our computers often. And besides that, as most casual Mac users, the designers manage to get their machines in horrible states of crash and sub-crash, and guess who comes to the rescue? Me. Because our tech people could give a shit about us or our OS.
I’ve always been the person in the class that the kids come to instead of the teacher for computer help, from elementary school on up through college, but right now, I’ve got other shit to do. How come I’m the only one the designers trust to set up a new machine that comes in? I don’t get paid to do Mac support, but my question is, should I? I mean, I love doing it (most of the time), but sometimes it’s just a bitch to do, and I could be doing other things. The admin and myself tend to butt heads on a lot of issues, and I’ve just kind of given up on trying to be cordial to him. I mean, I understand that an OS is not nearly as important as another human being, but he honestly pisses me off sometimes. I’ve often thought of just ignoring the cries of my co-workers, and sending them over to have the admin help, but I know that if I were to do that, he would just come back to me with a question, and undoubtedly anything he did would have to be undone and done right by myself. And I would do all that, too, because I care that much about people having stable Macs to use. So there’s the second part of the question: Are he and I destined to be mortal enemies? Let me know what you think.
From Wired:
‘If you are going to go and buy something on a new website, you will fail. If you go to a new website, you will not be able to use it.’
He’s telling me that NO ONE HAS EVER PURCHASED ANYTHING FROM THE INTERNET, EVER? (I understand that he’s referring to the ‘average user,’ but still. My mother has purchased things online, and she only owns an iMac.. :>) Can someone please explain to me why he is perpetually referred to as a ‘guru?’ He’s got about as much guru in him as David Siegel. And Peter Catapano over at Wired even referred to the whole Nielsen Group as ‘a collective of forward-thinking tech experts.’ Forward thinking? You’re kidding me, right? I mean, these guys are designing (excuse me, they don’t even ACTUALLY DESIGN, they just preach about it) for a web that existed 5 or 6 years ago.
Nielsen believes the industry’s refusal to heed the calls of usability proponents directly affected the steep Internet market drop.
Now this might be true. Let me just reiterate that what this sentence seems to mean by ‘the industry’ is the people making the decisions, not the people developing the internet. But this….
Many of the recently dead dot-coms, he said — especially in e-commerce — made the fundamental mistake of drawing users to their sites with expensive promotions, then losing them forever with ineffective design or subpar services. And sub-par services are the designer’s fault? It takes a self-appointed ‘guru’ to say that companies fail because people don’t like how they do things?
Or maybe they weren’t shitty sites to begin with, but were endlessly tweaked by the client or the management until the design resembled nothing like what the designer had originally designed. How many times have I heard ‘We need a banner ad here… here, here, here and how about one here’ from a client? It’s never the designer’s idea to put a banner ad on the page.. I can see it now.. ‘You know what would really make my design …. pop? A ‘Punch-The-Monkey-And-Win-Twenty-Bucks’ ad right about… here.’ He seems to think that we could give a shit about the user, when actually the reverse is true. We strive to do excellent design for the user to be interested in. Because if they don’t like the way a site looks they won’t even stay for 10 seconds to find out how it works.
Those who are ready to see the light and mend their ways can download a series of reports for a fee from the Nielsen Group website. The reports contain the group’s 222 rules for usability improvement. For a fee? Are you kidding me? Rules? See the light? I can’t even begin to start telling you much that sentence makes my blood boil.
‘We can forgive a man for making a useful thing, as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.’
— Oscar Wilde
I’m really getting sick of these giant corporations that have unusable and totally useless web sites (ATT.com being the subject of this post). It’s really past the point of being acceptable. The ‘Assistance’ section (which I clicked on with a huge helping of uncertainty) actually contained this sentence: ‘Looking for something on our web site? Try SEARCHING,’ and then displayed a search box for my searching needs. No, AT&T, I’m not looking for anything on your web site, I’m just sitting here, staring at the retarded pictures and horrible design that surrounds your lack of information.
Here’s a letter I sent to ATTBroadband.com (why the fuck is my Digital CABLE for my TV considered broadband?).
I just wanted to let you know that ATT.com and ATTBroadband.com are possibly the most horribly designed websites on the web. I could not find the information I was looking for, and had I been less net-savvy, I probably wouldn’t have even considered letting you know. Your sites adhere to ZERO usability standards, and as a web designer, I can tell you that the delivery of information is the most important function of a website, not brand management or showing me silly pictures of people watching TV (like on the top frame of this page). ATT.com has an ‘online billing’ functionality, and it is not in any way, shape or form indicative that this service is only available for certain AT&T services, digital cable not being one of them. The online form simply suggested that my phone number was wrong, not that the product I was trying to pay for is not supported. So I cannot pay my digital cable bill digitally, which is ridiculous. You people need some serious help as far as your web site goes, and from what I’ve heard, that’s not the only place.
From CNN:
Palm announced a new web-gadget: the Audrey. It looks an awful lot like a toilet bowl with an 8″ screen. Will you buy one? Not me. I already have an iMac, I don’t need something LESS powerful, with a tiny monitor to do FEWER things, for only a couple hundred bucks cheaper (they’re $499-$599, depending on the color… I don’t understand, either).
I guess what I think about when I see another one of these things really isn’t whether they’ll sell (they won’t), but how much of a bitch it would be if these damn things became commonplace, at least from a development standpoint. We have enough problems with 4 major browsers (well, 2 MS browsers, if you believe some people) to code for, let alone potentially millions of these things. All of them happen to run their own bastardized versions of god-knows-what, adhering to HTML standards I don’t think, and they don’t even really have video cards, at least not good ones. I’ve viewed my personal design site on an iOpener, and it took FOREVER to load, and looked like shit.
At least they might reduce the amount of shitty Flash out there.
HA. Right.
According to WebTrends, Macintosh users account for approximately 2.79% of all web users. So, apparently, we don’t really count. Next time you’re designing a site, just ignore us. After all, we just design the web, we don’t really need to use it.
From CNN:
The newly designed VAIO QR sheds the magnesium-grey outer shell seen on its conventional line of laptops and adopts a blue-black translucent plastic surface that is so dark it is almost opaque.
And with a light grey aluminum pipe surrounding the outer edges connecting into a fold-out handle, it is reminiscent of Apple Computer’s iBook laptop….No plans are in place yet for a wider choice of colors, Sony said.
WTF? Sony might actually be the one to pull this off. Those VAIOs were selling pretty well, as I recall, without the translucent casing. So ‘industry’ analysts will be excited when someone else can sell a translucent computer besides Apple, except they were selling anyway. What a crock. Can NO ONE come up with an idea of their own that sells well? At least they’re not coming in multiple colors (did you ever notice of all the iMac ripoffs, none ever came in yellow, because Apple never released a yellow one?).The writer of this article also misses the translucent point to begin with. ‘The aim is the same — to make laptops a fashion statement as much as portable personal and business information tools. Uh, the iMac or iBook weren’t fashion statements (I won’t go into the well-worn discussion of why the translucency worked on the iMac and not on the HP Pavilion or those ugly-as-fuck pink TVs). Why can’t any of these people get it?
Also, try to find a picture of this damn thing on Sony’s site. It’s impossible. Their’s is possibly the worst navigation system I’ve ever seen. If you try to go to the VAIO section, you end up on a page telling you that the page has moved, and why don’t you try this hideous multiple-dropdown-with-graphics-and-a-go-button-on-the-wrong-side thing?
Maybe I’m wrong. Let me know.
