I recently started a twelve month internship at BT, where due to security reasons, I can’t take a laptop or any removable media to work. As a result, I can’t use my tried and tested system to get things done. At first, I was given one task at a time, so didn’t really need to organise myself much, but as time has gone on, I’ve had more and more things to deal with at once.
Working in a Microsoft Office environment, everyone has and uses Outlook, but its to-do list is not the most flexible tool and doesn’t scale nearly as well as a dedicated program like Things. Instead, I’ve started to use 37signals’ Ta-da List, a simple online task manager.
Ta-da List is far more basic than Outlook and much more than Things, but its beauty lies in the lack of clutter. To get to my tasks in Outlook, I’d have to open the application, click the to-do tab and then focus on the small portion of the screen in which the list resides. With Ta-da, I get a plain list with large fonts, devoid of emails, calendar items and other noise. Outlook is a wonderful program if you need total integration with the Office ecosystem, but when I’m deciding what to do next, I need as few distractions as possible.
I guess this highlights the divide that separates many programs; those that do one thing and those that try to do everything. When you’re reading your calendar, do you need your email there as well? Is it sensible to put your RSS feeds in your email application? Looking at the programs on my personal computer, it’s definitely a case of one application per task, with the notable exception of Coda. But I digress.
When your productivity system is suddenly rendered unusable, it’s initially difficult to adapt. Without your trusted tools, you have to invent an entirely new system within a set of limitations and this takes time to adapt to. However you manage, it’s important to remember not to lose control over your time because of unfamiliar surroundings and tools.
Published in Productivity, tagged 37signals, Outlook on 5th August 2008. One comment.
Designing forms for the web is a tricky business. Left-aligned labels or right-aligned labels? What about putting them above or using none at all? Tool tips or more substantial help text? Thankfully, Yahoo design chief Luke Wroblewski is here to help.
Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks is sadly not available in the UK, so if you really want to buy it, you’ll have to either download the digital copy or have it shipped from America (although it comes with the PDF version if you order a hard copy). I think it’s a shame because it would probably do well enough to justify its presence over here, but I guess that’s the cost of going with a smaller publisher.
Wroblewski begins by outlining the problem: “Forms suck. We should design accordingly.” He introduces the basic benefits of good form design and then moves on to cover every aspect of web form design in the clearly delineated chapters that follow.
Although there’s a lot to take in, Wroblewski writes very clearly and the full colour book is full of illustrations. Best of all, each chapter ends with a short list of best practices, so you don’t have to read through an entire section again when you use it as reference. Web Form Design also includes a number of contributions by other authors, labelled as ‘Perspectives’ in the book. These are well placed and offer additional context to the main text.
With the higher price due to shipping, my expectations were somewhat higher than usual for Web Form Design, but it’s more than justified the price I paid for it. It’s a very specialist book, but one that will probably stand the test of time better than a lot of other technical books. For anyone who designs web forms on a reasonably frequent basis, this is an essential read.
Published in Book reviews, Usability, Websites, tagged forms on 2nd August 2008. No comments.
Nectar is a loyalty card scheme which I recently signed up for because you can earn points at the supermarket I use. It’s a pretty large scheme, so I was surprised to discover just how poor the Nectar website’s usability is. Let’s walk through the task of signing up for a Nectar card, having heard about the scheme in store.
So, load Nectar.com and you’ll immediately notice two things that are conspicuous by their absence. First of all, only the browser’s title bar tells you what Nectar is, a place that most people won’t look to assertain the meaning of a website. It mentions points and there are some offers, but it lacks a definitive statement of intent.
Aside from assuming knowledge of the product, Nectar’s homepage also contains no obvious link to a place where you can get a card. Going from potential customer to an actual customer should be an easy process. There’s a small ‘Register’ link in the top right corner and a couple of pointers hidden in the menus, but these are probably too little, too late for less determined users.
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Published in Usability, Websites, tagged forms on 28th June 2008. No comments.
I’m a fairly frequent user of Amazon’s Wish List feature, but its usability is far from ideal. It may be okay if you don’t access it too often, but I use it to store a list of books and other items that I intend to buy sometime, but not right now. Here are two really simple ways in which they could improve the usability of Wish Lists:
Don’t make me hover over a link or click twice to access my Wish List. The site’s redesign makes you do this, even though there’s plenty of space in the interface for a simple link.
Before the redesign:
After the redesign:
Allow me to save the default sort order of the Wish List. I assign a priority to each item, but whenever I load the page, it sorts items by date.
Ideally, I should be able to click on “Wish Lists” and then see my list sorted by priority. Instead, I have to click the “Gifts & Wish Lists” drop down menu, then on “Wish Lists”, then “Sort by”, then “Priority (high to low)”, then “GO!”. Amazon make you click five times more than is necessary, but they could improve the usability of Wish Lists by altering two simple parts of their design.
Published in Usability, Websites on 16th June 2008. No comments.
There are plenty of books on typography, but few come as highly recommended as Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students. I have a growing interest in the subject, so I thought that that this would give me an grounding in typography and tie all of the bits of information that I’d picked up from elsewhere together.
The page you see when you first open the book is a perfect example of the clarity with which Lupton presents the subject. I simply reads, “Typography is what language looks like.” Crisp, concise and succinct.
Thinking with Type is divided into three sections: Letter, Text and Grid. The first introduces the context in which the rest of the book can be explained, looking at the history of typefaces and their evolution since the presses of the Middle Ages. It explores different letterforms and their anatomy, so you’ll never wonder what people mean by a ‘humanist sans serif’ ever again.
While the first section concentrates on individual letters, Text examines what happens when we bring them together into a coherent block of text. Lupton explains tracking, line spacing, alignment, hierarchy and paragraphs, both in the context of print and the Web.
The final section introduces the historical context and practice of using grids in design. It’s perhaps less focused on typography than the previous chapters, but it’s a relevant and welcome inclusion nonetheless.
Unlike most books, Thinking with Type’s appendix is actually well worth reading. It offers helpful hints, short pieces of advice and a brief guide to proofreading conventions.
As you might expect from a book of this sort, it’s designed really well, with interesting but consistent page layouts and typography that’s easy on the eye. Thinking with Type is also just the right size and length to be referred to while you’re working.
While I already knew a fair amount about typography, Thinking with Type has undoubtedly been a worthwhile purchase. It’s clearly structured, provides a solid historical context, explains theories clearly and has excellent examples. I’d highly recommend it to anyone who uses type on a fairly regular basis and wants to learn more.
Links:
The book’s website
The book on Amazon UK
The book on Amazon USA
Published in Book reviews, tagged typography on 14th June 2008. No comments.
Getting on the front page of Digg is huge achievement for many Web developers, but is it really worth it? On May 19th, one of our articles on Thunderbolt - The Top 10 Most Entertaining Speedruns - made it to the front page and it gives us a chance to analyse what really happens once your site gets ‘dugg’.
During the first hour of being on the front page, we received 6,583 unique visitors. To contrast, we usually get around 600 a day. The second and third hours were similarly strong, as we got 5,918 and 4,032 unique visitors respectively. The traffic then tapered off as we moved off of the front page and on to the second, third and so on.
Although Thunderbolt is a fairly lightweight site, we ran out of bandwidth within 10 hours of being dugg. During the first hour, our host told me that we were going through about 4GB every 15 minutes! We quickly adjusted the limit and continued to attract visitors though. The traffic boost lasted quite a few days, helped on by a sizeable number of StumbleUpon users.
Using Google Analytics, we can also see where Digg users are and what sort of habits they might have. They spent less time on the site than usual, viewing an average of 1.44 pages (41% less than usual) and spending an average of 2:12 on the site (31% less). 94% hadn’t been on the site before (11% more than usual) and 79% left without going to another page (8% more). 72% were from the US, 10% from Canada and 6% from the UK. As you might expect, Digg users are pretty tech savvy. Only 16% used Internet Explorer, with Firefox dominating as the browser of choice with a 73% share. 15% also used Macs and 5% were on Linux, significantly more than most user profiles.
In total, the number of unique visitors produced by being dugg was around 48,500. That’s not bad for free, but Digg and StumbleUpon users don’t interact with your website in the same way that others might. We didn’t get any significant boost in the number of forum users, RSS feed subscribers or repeat visitors. So aside from using up all our bandwidth, being dugg hasn’t really had any worthwhile effect on the site. That isn’t to say that it isn’t nice to see these sort of crazy traffic numbers on a site you work on, but it’s certainly not sustainable.
Published in Websites, tagged Digg, Thunderbolt on 1st June 2008. No comments.
The amount of information that we’re bombarded with increases every day. Processing the numerous links to websites, videos and photos is one thing, but how do we keep track of what we’ve seen so that we can refer back to it at a later date?
Bookmarks are the traditional solution; file away a link to the website in your browser for safe-keeping. Yet I’ve found myself bookmarking websites very rarely of late, relying instead on my memory to recall which appropriate websites I could visit or what I could type into Google to find what I was looking for. Does the bookmark paradigm scale effectively to deal with the massive amount of information that we encounter?
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Published in Productivity, tagged bookmarks, organisation, relevance on 20th May 2008. No comments.
Safari is a fine browser, but I’m put off by its lack of seemingly basic features, like a new tab button. Sure, you can get plugins to solve this, but you shouldn’t have to. However, one thing it does right is colour. Observe:
This image, taken from my GTA IV review demonstrates why colour profiles can cause havoc on the Web and why you should care. As you can see, the Safari image is more saturated and the Firefox one washed out. This is because Safari supports embedded colour profiles, while Firefox does not.
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Published in Websites, tagged colour, Firefox, Safari on 10th May 2008. One comment.
My review of Grand Theft Auto IV is now online at Thunderbolt:
As our alter ego Niko Bellic sails across the Atlantic towards the unknown promised land of America, you can’t help but draw parallels with Rockstar’s own journey. Having conquered the last generation of consoles, they now face an uncertain transition to the Xbox 360 and PS3, where the pressure to exceed the already high standards is enormous. With such a burden, this is perhaps the most important game in the series since Grand Theft Auto III…
Published in Videogames on 10th May 2008. No comments.
Although CSS is not a complex language to learn, the amount of best practice advice out there is overwhelming. It seems like there are essentially two tiers of CSS knowledge; the first will give you to a reasonable understanding so you can make a basic website, while the second will help you progress to a professional level. There are plenty of books that cover the first tier, but not too many that do the second. This is where CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions comes in.
Andy Budd’s book is aimed primarily at those web designers and developers who already have a good understanding of (X)HTML and CSS. It starts with the basics, then quickly moves on to the advanced techniques that you bought it for. The first chapter goes over code structuring, meaningful markup and using appropriate selectors to get the job done, while the second is a recap of the box and positioning models.
CSS Mastery then covers in detail background images and image replacement, styling links, lists and navigation, forms and tables, layout, hacks and filters, and bugs. Budd then includes two walkthroughs of entire designs, the code for which can be downloaded as it can be for the rest of the book.
Technical books can be dull and suffer from a lack of clarity, but CSS Mastery is written in a style which is easy to digest and understand. Multiple alternatives are given to problems like drop shadows and rounded corners, giving you a great overview of which one is most suitable to you.
Although I consider myself to be a pretty advanced CSS user, I definitely learnt a lot from reading CSS Mastery. Sure, there are plenty of tutorials on the Web, but few are as well written and edited as this.
Links:
Book website
The book on Amazon UK
The book on Amazon USA
Published in Book reviews, Websites, tagged CSS on 7th May 2008. One comment.
