caitlin gannon

The Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness offers truly brilliant examples of how NOT to write user instructions.

“Sanyan Wield Ways and Means” is either the victim of machine translation or contains some obscure coded text:

1. With appertain rotor of screw setting pre ceiling on the under standing that screw no wield. May wield two-faced, pressboard securing, wield pre to begin with wiping ceiling of bilge dasto.
2. Thread of length need half again as many as tad.
3. Open toy of batteries shuck. Verification batteries, whereafter stow down to a certainty need locklust lest take place accident.

I couldn’t agree more. Sounds like a good way of going about it.

There’s also a very frightening set of instructions on how to vacuum a cat that has fleas.

Inknoise offers a great timesaver: a CSS layout generator that allows you to define how many columns the page should have, pixel widths, background colors, etc. Defining all this CSS code by hand is a pain, and Dreamweaver doesn’t help much, so these templates are quite handy.

In A List Apart (16 Jan 06), Jeffrey Zeldman offers a different perspective on the “Web 2.0″ hype. His explanation of the phenomenon is particulary succinct:

Some small teams of sharp people—people who once, perhaps, worked for those with dimmer visions—are now following their own muses and designing smart web applications. Products like Flickr and Basecamp are fun and well-made and easy to use.

That may not sound like much. But ours is a medium in which, more often than not, big teams have slowly and expensively labored to produce overly complex web applications whose usability was near nil on behalf of clients with at best vague goals. The realization that small, self-directed teams powered by Pareto’s Principle can quickly create sleeker stuff that works better is not merely bracing but dynamic. As 100 garage bands sprang from every Velvet Underground record sold, so the realization that one small team can make good prompts 100 others to try. […]

The best and most famous of these new web products foster community and collaboration, offering new or improved modes of personal and business interaction.

The masses first got a taste of the “new” power of the Web via political blogs, especially around the last presidential election. They realized a blog isn’t just geeks talking about code, it’s also something that can mold and change opinions.

And then, of course, there is the money aspect:

As the first properly valued “Web 2.0” properties began to find buyers, a frenzy like the old one popped hideously back to life. Yahoo spent how much? Google bought what? Here was real blood in the water.But how to persuade the other sharks in the tank that this blood feast was different from the previous boom-and-bust? Easy: Dismiss everything that came before as “Web 1.0.”

“Web 2.0″ isn’t just about blogging and tagging, nor is it just about the cool & shiny technologies (AJAX, primarily) that make these new products work. It’s a fundamentally different approach to managing information (what? allowing users to define their own categories? letting any guy off the street make changes in Wikipedia - are you crazy?).

There are some serious cultural implications to this New Web Thing, whatever we want to call it — for example, our reverence for experts in a field may change as we realize that plenty of people have knowledge to share, whether they are academically decorated for it or not.

But for those of us who are web savvy, it’s also important to remember that the average person has still never heard of “Web 2.0″, doesn’t really know what a blog is (though they think the neighbor’s kid might have one), and only uses the Internet for email, shopping and sending obnoxious chain letters to their family members. In reality, most of us web types will continue to develop applications with an eye on the possibilities but with most of our efforts still focused on the basics: usability, reliability, scalability, good design, etc. But bit by bit, the groundswell will influence “traditional IT”… who knows, maybe I’ll sneak a wiki into my next design…

Web designers take note: you have less than a second to make a good first impression when someone visits your web page.

Researchers [at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada] found that the brain makes decisions in just a twentieth of a second of viewing a webpage.

Not only does the brain make an instant judgment about the site based on a split-second glimpse at its design … this judgment also influences the user’s opinion of its content:

[T]hese quickly-formed first impressions last because of what is known to psychologists as the “halo effect”. If people believe a website looks good, then this positive quality will spread to other areas, such as the website’s content.

Since people like to be right, they will continue to use the website that made a good first impression, as this will further confirm that their initial decision was a good one.

So our task is to snag the user in 1/20 of a second in order to get her to read what it has to say. No pressure!

“Information overload” has been in our vocabulary for decades–we can all relate to the frustration of receiving 100+ emails a day and not having enough time to process all the information that comes at us. We joke about it.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett offers a disturbing new view on this problem: we are being overrun by memes (self-replicating ideas such as common knowledge, song melodies, beliefs) — and the outlook is grim.

Dennett writes in the Edge Annual Question 2006:

The human population is still growing, but at nowhere near the rate that the population of memes is growing. There is competition for the limited space in human brains for memes, and something has to give.

Thanks to our incessant and often technically brilliant efforts, and our apparently insatiable appetites for novelty, we have created an explosively growing flood of information, in all media, on all topics, in every genre. Now either (1) we will drown in this flood of information, or (2) we won’t drown in it. Both alternatives are deeply disturbing.

What do I mean by drowning? I mean that we will become psychologically overwhelmed, unable to cope, victimized by the glut and unable to make life-enhancing decisions in the face of an unimaginable surfeit. […]

If we don’t drown, how will we cope? […] What will happen to common knowledge in the future? I do think our ancestors had it easy: aside from all the juicy bits of unshared gossip and some proprietary trade secrets and the like, people all knew pretty much the same things, and knew that they knew the same things. There just wasn’t that much to know. Won’t people be able to create and exploit illusions of common knowledge in the future, virtual worlds in which people only think they are in touch with their cyber-neighbors?

Imagine a world in which the aspects of culture that tie us together–music, traditions, art, philosophy, science–have become so tremendously diluted that we lose that common thread. It would be like “culture shock,” but for everyone in the culture.

On a more applied (and less depressing) note, the role of information designers/information architects/whatever they are called is likely to grow as our constant flow of information grows. People will become more dependent on tools that filter information (witness the dominance of Google and Yahoo!) rather than tools that collect data–and a clean, usable interface will of course still be critical to any data filtering program.

Eric’s weblog - Convert Table Row to Hyperlink

Thank you Eric - this technique saved me a lot of time. I was looking for a way to make an entire table row highlight (change color) on mouseover. This technique has the added bonus of grabbing the hyperlink from one column and applying it to the whole table row as well.

It’s just a little bit of JavaScript and a few CSS styles. I’ve posted an example here. Easy!