June 2007 Archives

When checking the recent links in my del.icio.us network, I found a video, Blogging: In Their Own Words, by Karl Fisch. In the video, students and teachers from Arapahoe High School reflect on their use of blogs for teaching and learning. It is a testament to the important role blogs can play in education even though many of the comments could be true for many online publishing methods. The last three minutes of the video does hit on some of the ways blogging is different than class-based discussion forums - namely, feeling ownership of the content, synthesis of ideas across subjects, and communication that expands beyond boundaries of the class roster.

You can watch the video below.

Just found this on Engadget. Nintendo has announced a dev platform to allow anyone to create software for the Wii. This is important because the Wii's innovative controller will allow for an experience not generally found on PCs or other console systems. What are some educational applications of this?

I was lucky to attend the all-day web design tutorial with Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering at the Penn State Web 2007 conference. So much of what he said seemed like common sense, but when we looked at examples, both on the web at large and at PSU, so many of the design principles weren't being followed. The day gave me a new lens through which to look at web sites I am involved in creating.

One thing that struck me was how so many of the examples of usable webpages looked rather drab. This was in contrast to the exercise Jeffery Veen conducted at last year's web conference where he showed webpages for a split second, and just based on the visual design users made a judgement as to whether the information on the page was trustworthy or not.

I guess there are two elements are work here. One is affecting the user on a gut level, invoking an emotional response. Another is helping the user with whatever task they came to your website to complete. The two elements don't have to be at odds, but one has to decide where to focus development resources and screen real estate. I suppose it doesn't matter if you engage the user with your visual design if they can't actually use your site to accomplish anything.

Below are the notes I took during the session:

Information foraging theory - users follow links based on their "scent".

Design webpage around for scent, not navigation. Links give should give off scent of the information to which it leads. With each click, the scent should get stronger. Trigger words give off scent. What trigger words are your users looking for?

Doesn't matter how many clicks it takes for user to get from home page to the content she is looking for, as long as getting more specific with each click.  User complains if goes from specific page to general page.

search engines are scentless.

nav panels are often scentless. scent is often specific. nav panels are often vague.
short pages reduce scent - instead use long pages with more information about links, user will will figure out where to go more easily.

Must look at value of site for loyal users vs new users. (Note to self: Do ETS community sites focus too much on loyal users and not enough on new users)

Use page real estate to give of scent. Big block images don't give off scent. Don't relegate scented links to little tiny sidebar or navigation bar.

catalog tests - print out website and give it to users like a catalog. Let users highlight what excites them in the catalog. Then ask them to find the same content on the website. Can they?

Fixed width page is okay. Users don't care if page is fluid or fixed. Fluid width just makes developing harder.

The one thing that will improve your site: Spend more time with your users. Watch your users.

Put info at gallery level. Prevent pogosticking from gallery page to content pages.

Don't chunk. A gallery with everything on one page is easier to use.

Home page should just direct users to the content page they want.

When users use site search to find the content they are looking for, they usually don't succeed. (note to self: How could we get search out of the clickstream of our community sites? Heavier use of taxonomy?)

People don't move mouse until they decide what they want to click on. Dynamic pull downs or flyouts are not very usable. Can also take extra hand-eye coordination to use.

People don't react to names of media, "podcasts and videos" - meaningless... why not "pdfs and documents" or a menu item labeled "webpages"

patterns: replacement for standards and guidelines. Standards don't allow for innovation. patterns evolve over time. Devs aren't required to use patterns. They can change them and re-add to pattern library.

You can find more notes on this session at Audrey's blog

Allan Gyorke, Jason Heffner, and I talked about creating websites for community and collaboration (html slides) at PSU's Web 2007. We showed examples of community sites, discussed why you might want to create one, and demonstrated some software options for powering the site. 

For those of us still thinking about the burgeoning era of transparency enabled by the web, I present 2 items from the May 25th edition of NPR's On the Media.

First, an interview with Jason Calacanis, who advocates that full text and/or audio of interviews be made available. Sure, why not? I see unedited content slowly becoming the norm.

Second, a piece exposing the editing that goes into NPR news programming. Sound editors remove pauses, "umms", and other missteps. It made me feel better about myself to know that people really aren't as articulate as they seem.