Bad photo — great crowd of WordPress-in-higher-ed-users at a lunchtime roundtable as the annual Nercomp conference. Don’t forget to join us for the upcoming day-long WordPress University workshop on April 8. Details at nercomp.org/events/event_single.aspx?id=5938
There is an excellent article on the Smashing Magazine site titled Designing User Interfaces for Business Web Applications. The article give a good, quick. overview on how user interface design works, with excellent follow-up references (like a new book by Steve Krug, Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems
I get a fair amount of useful information off of my twitter feed — in fact it is often more informative than the RSS newsfeeds I follow. But Twitter, Facebook, Yammer and the rest of the live streaming applications share a common problem. If you want to refer back to something that floated by several days, weeks or months ago you are pretty much out of luck. The noise factor is not an issue when monitoring the stream live. I mean sure, there is plenty of noise, but it is easy enough to filter it out as the garbage floats by. But try to dig through items from the past and the noise quickly overwhelms. Anyone got an answer? Or is do we just need to accept that we must leave the past behind — even if it is digital?
As much as I love Apple and freely admit they make great products, I also have concerns with Apple’s closed-system approach. While there are some valid points to Apple’s ‘let us do the driving’ philosophy, I think users are better served when technology platforms are open. So how cool would a Google tablet be? After all, if they want to beat Windows at its own game, what better strategy than ripping off an Apple idea?
A request came up to put one of the departmental student handbooks on-line. Requirements include ease of editing/updating, access control (only our students) and search. A wiki would be one way to go. But our WordPress MU installation makes deploying new sites a cinch, including the access control, making this my preferred place for this new application. And when I think of WordPress and book-type content, I think of CommentPress . CommentPress works with WPs page hierarcy, which I find users find more familiar than the more open wiki style of organization. And it uses WPs comment structure to allow readers to add their own notes to a page. Still allowing some interactivity, but also lets the author control the official language of the document.
Keep Your Graphic Designer on a Short Leash in this month’s Website Magazine suggests that elements such as wild background colors, garish text, visual embellishments (eye candy) and animation/video distract website visitors from important content. In a case study of a redesign of the CREDO website they found an 84% improvement with a simplified design. The case study used a new service called AttentionWizard.com which uses computer algorithms to approximate eye tracking studies of a web site. The idea is these will reveal what point on the page the visitor’s eye should land on. If it is what you want them to see — like a buy now button — bingo, you are doing well. If their eyes don’t land anywhere, or on the wrong things it is time to make some adjustments. I thought it would be fun to compare the Yale and Harvard main websites using the service.
Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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