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From Apple's shiny promotional material to MoveOn's minimalist calls to action, we receive and respond to HTML email every day. If you look beyond the surface to the code, you'll see that HTML email is in much the same place that the web was back in 2000. The markup is primitive and the wide range of email clients makes it nearly impossible to achieve accessibility and consistency.
If you've had to code an HTML email you know what I'm talking about. This is the only medium in which I still use the old methods that abuse semantic markup for presentation purposes. Inline styles are de rigueur to make those table tags come out right [shudder].
Fortunately, a new groups has emerged to raise awareness of the problem. The Email Standards Project has a simple goal:
[T]o help designers understand why web standards are so important for email, while working with email client developers to ensure that emails render consistently.
Following in the footsteps of the successful Web Standards Project, this new group's aim is both simple and ambitious.
To give you a sense of how bad the current state of affairs actually is, I suggest looking at their reports on how the most popular email clients respond to the acid test.
So here's to the success of the Email Standards Project. We are not living in a world where the current version of MS Internet Explorer actually support web standards, let's hope that we can do as well with email.
In the meantime, I highly recommend MailBuild for all your HTML email needs. My clients love it and their templates provide a great foundation for learning the voodoo of HTML for email.
[Panel with Cameron Adams, Sally Carson, Dustin Diaz, and Jonathan Snook]
So what is the trinity?
- Business
- User
- Development
These are important to consider because each element can cause a site to fail. Sometimes the business unit can be in conflict with user needs. Similarly, developer desire to add new things, like tag clouds, without considering the audience will doom a project to failure. You can have novel ideas that are brilliant but the user must know what you are trying to convey.
The way these areas apply in different teams is important to take into account.
At Yahoo!, for example, the teams are very large. A team could be fifteen or twenty people broken out into smaller groups. There are then different groups for different projects.
At an agency you see different issues. It is harder to push for user testing when the objectives aren't clearly defined. Sales people, for example, have no sense of the technical issues present in development.
[Leaving the panel. I'm tired.]
I'm planning a couple of trips for the coming months and, as has been my habit for over a year now, I started with Kayak. The best fare available was on United so Kayak handed me off to United.com to make the purchase. Two screens into my experience, I realized that I was looking at a completely new version of United.com.
Overall, the site redesign is an improvement. Many of the reservation screens are streamlined to make it easier to use United.com to find the flight you want to buy. The visual design has been modernized and a few helpful widgets have been added. The best one I found shows how often the flight you are looking at is on-time. This kind of data is handy when deciding how close you want to cut the timing of your layover.
Where the design falls flat is the seamlessness of the experience. The lack of Ajax for basic behaviors like tab-switching or list sorting leaves travelers waiting for the page to reload only to show a simple comparison. Sites like Kayak and Farecast differentiate themselves from their competition by offering a seamless experience. Kayak wowed me early on with their simple price sliders that instantly update the flights displayed on the screen. This model has existed for over a year now. United should take this experience as a baseline and come up with ways to add unique value.
Moreover, many users only get to United.com by being handed off from Yahoo! Travel, Kayak, or another travel site. This is an opportunity to create a seamless experience. On United, the flight I chose at Kayak is the first presented in the list, but it is displayed below a price grid offering more expensive flights in Business or First class. They know that I am being referred from Kayak. Unless they have data to show that this kind of aggressive up-selling works, it interrupts the experience.
Instead, United could present the chosen flight clearly. They know from the referrer and the link that the user has clicked directly to a specific query from an outside location. The design should be smart enough to accomodate this. The first box should look different and clearly state that it is the chosen flight. They could then present a few alternatives based on price or schedule to reinforce the feeling in the shopper that they are sure of their choice.
If United can show me a better option than I could find on Kayak, the chance that I will go directly to United.com the next time I need fly will improve. By showing a screen with options I would never take (the $1000 first class alternative to my $230 flight) they are making me feel like I don't matter to them as much as a business customer. How they make me feel matters and is something that their design process should take into account. Like Lou Carbone articulated at the recent Adaptive Path Managing Experience Conference, your customers cannot not have an experience. By not taking the initiative to make sure that I, as a referred shopper from a travel planning site, have a good experience, United is taking the risk that I will have a bad or, at best, a mixed experience. This will impact my future travel planning decisions and may color my entire experience using their service.
United's new design gets them halfway to a great experience. The visual design is clean and the reservation steps have been simplified. Adding bits of data, like how often their flights arrive on time, conveys an important feeling of transparency. What United needs to do next is step back and do some serious competitive analysis. They should consciously position their site in the travel-planning workflow of the Web 2.0 world. Also, investing in bringing their interactions up to the contemporary baseline would help position their site as a first stop when planning travel, particularly for those customers who regularly choose United.
My prescription for United.com is a healthy dose of user research and a dash of Ajax.
I am an avid reader of NYTimes.com. I check the homepage periodically throughout the day and always read the magazine.
When I read long articles online I find myself aimlessly double-clicking on the sentence I'm reading or on a particular thought to read again. This is pretty harmless in most situations but today I was in for a surprise.
As I was reading through an article about JetBlue's response to the catastrophe that unfolded over the last week at JFK airport in New York. I was immediately struck by the CEO's proposal to pay customers for their wasted time. I double-clicked the world penalties and was shocked to see a pop-up window.
NYTimes.com responded to my aimless double-click as if I had asked a question. It took me a minute to realize what had happened. There is no apparent setting to turn this on or off. Historically they have offered links for common topics, like President Bush, but this new feature makes literally every word into a link.
On the one hand I like that I can quickly look up an unknown word, or find out more detail about a concept. As a Mac user I've been used to having a dictionary at my fingertips for years now. This new feature by the NYTimes brings this convenience to everyone.
The problem is that they accomplish this by hijacking a common interface tool without warning. I'm hardly the only person who aimlessly clicks or highlights while reading.
I applaud the New York Times for working to add this resource to their content, I just hope they come up with a more effective interface to it.
Here are a few proposals:
- Add an "Instant Lookup" on/off switch to the E-mail, Print, etc. toolbar. Make sure to include a "what is this" box to let people know what it offers them. Also allow the reader to set a default setting based on this selection.
- Add an "Instant Lookup" magnifying glass that the user can click to turn it on and then click their cursor to a word. You could even hijack the cursor icon when they click the magnifying glass so they know that their second click will look up information on the word or phrase.
- Add an icon after a few seconds of hover on a word that the reader can click to define it. This is more passive but at least gives some visual feedback.
I started really listening to podcasts in '06. These are the ones that I listen to all the time as '07 starts out.
- On the Media
- Marketplace
- Marketplace Money
- This American Life
- Good Food
- Left, Right, and Center
- Wait Wait.. Don't Tell Me!
- Inside Europe
- Science Magazine Podcast
This list reflects my bias toward the produced sound of pubic radio. I find the real value of listening to these shows as podcasts is that I need not worry about when, or whether, they are scheduled to be broadcast in my area.
I'm eager to discover more to listen to so please share your favorite podcasts with me.
UPDATE
I would be remiss to not mention that NPR has begun offering a podcast of Fresh Air. This is a must listen for anyone who cannot easily catch it on the radio.
With all the looking forward to 2007 I want to post a quick anecdote about 2006 and what it meant for work on the web.
In 2006 the standards war basically ended. For years, standards-based web designers who care that the HTML underlying each web page is structured properly have had to butcher their crafted work to accommodate old browsers. Over time, a combination of pressure on the makers of web browsers, particularly Microsoft, has resulted in an environment with fine-grained browser hacking when needed.
When Firefox exploded on the scene the pressure increased and Microsoft was finally forced to really deal with the crisis. Last year two big developments reflect this change: Microsoft pushed their conditional comment CSS solution and finally released a version of Internet Explorer that dealt with most of the major headaches.
The best thing about IE 7, in my opinion, is that it went far enough to make my life easier but not so far that it stopped the growth of Firefox in its tracks. This is important because continued growth for Firefox means continued pressure on Microsoft to either keep improving IE or just give up and support Firefox.
But really, Firefox? A year ago Firefox was just starting to really break into the mainstream but tonight I realized just how far it has come. A while ago I donated to the Spread Firefox project and bought a GetFirefox.com t-shirt that simply has the Firefox logo on the front. It joined the pantheon of my geek shirts in my gym/ beachwear collection.
On my way from work I stopped at Whole Foods to get some groceries and was still wearing the shirt from the gym.
I stopped an employee who was restocking the shelves to ask if they had any Seventh Generation toilet paper. They didn't have any but he wanted to know if I worked for that company. I was confused but he pointed to my shirt and asked if I worked for them, for the Firefox people. I explained that I didn't but that I use it and think it's great. He agreed and exclaimed, "It's so fast and slick."
Now if that doesn't mean that Firefox is well beyond a tipping point I don't know what would.
This is a busy week for me. I've just wrapped up eating lunch at my desk, in the hopes that I can get caught up on everything, and my cell phone starts vibrating. It's a number I don't recognize but the area code is obscure enough that I decide to answer the call.
"Is this Sam Felder" is the reply to my greeting. I, in a brusque voice, return "yes, may I ask who is calling?" "Sam Felder," replies the caller, "yes, that's really my name" I'm told.
Perhaps I woke up on the wrong side of the universe this morning. Have I slipped into a world populated by my doppelg?\xA7ngers? Can there only be one? How do I reply to this advance. Really, another Sam Felder?
We chat for a bit and I learn that he comes from a family of New York doctors and is a doctor in Connecticut who got bored on this post-Labor Day Tuesday and started egosurfing. I'm struck that he'd never come across my existence before as I dominate queries for Sam Felder and Samuel Felder. The change today is that I happened to post my cell phone number to the wiki at a recent conference. This was, in retrospect a stupid thing to do but, what the heck, everyone else was doing it to and I am, if anything, a lemming...
He too is actually named Samuel as, apparently, was his grandfather who immigrated in the late nineteenth century.
I had before only known of a few other Sam Felders but had never thought to contact any of them.
The most notorious of us is sadly Sammie Felder Jr. who spent twenty-three years on death row in Texas, the second longest in the history of the state. He was ultimately executed on December 15, 1999 for the brutal murder of a forty-two-year-old paraplegic man.
One other notable Samuel Felder was one of seven brothers, the sons of Swiss immigrants, who fought in the American Revolution on behalf of their state of South Carolina.
And then there's me.... and my doppelg?\xA7nger.
[Live blogged from Cory Doctorow's talk at the USC Annenberg School for Communication]
[For background, Cory Doctorow is a science fiction novelist and blogger at BoingBoing]
[Starting off with introductions from the Director of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, the Director of the Canada Fulbright Commission, and Adam Powell of USC's Integrated Media Center. Mr. Powell is discussing the important role that science fiction plays in guiding innovation.]
Spent the last few years living in the UK. When you touch down in the US you have to fill out a landing card thats covered in little form elements that you're meant to fill out. One of them is "occupation" which is such a twentieth century notion.
Science fiction is a fascinating bridge between theory and practice. When engineers explore the boundaries of what can be done it is an ethical breach. When sci-fi writers to this its called committing fiction.
[A good anecdote about a friend faking a web cast of Canada's Juno awards]
Tries to use literature to discuss emerging phenomenon. It's not about predicting, it's about writing about what's already happened.
Look at the recent incident where people paid Latin Americans sub-US wages to engage in repetitive click actions in massive multiplayer games.
One trend in computers is an open question of whether computers will be agents of self-determination or agents of control. He writes a story about this ongoing issue when he hears about MS Trusted Computing and is thought to be innovative. MS can't rebut his short story but readers can learn from that same story.
These systems can grow to become law. Like Lessig says, code is law. One elements of copyright law as it stands is that it is unlawful to tell people how to break copy restrictions systems.
Now you have people asserting that their printer cartridges are copyright protected work. Suddenly refilling a printer cartridge is a crime. With things like Trusted Computing this will get worse.
This is happening with our data. Moving from Apple to Ubuntu is enormously difficult in a way that hampers the free flow of data and thus of ideas.
Copyright is being practiced and challenged by engineers that are being asked to build systems that enforce an ambiguous and fuzzy system. They are designing systems that are robust against their own owners.
On the one hand there are developing countries who get the shaft but it's also happening in wealthy nations. In Sweden there is an actual political movement called the pirate party. Their aim is to abolish copyright and destroy the entertainment industry.
This is an issue in media studies where creators are forced to use new tools in a world with copyright laws written for the old way of creating.
The people who control the industry today view tomorrow of merely derivative.
Look at the Gray Album controversy.
This reminds one of the medieval system where if the Pope liked the work it got to survive.
So the academy is the place to study this, to ask how and why goods are made. Why is it that US who doesn't have exclusive rights in databases is still showing economic growth in this sector?
Is productizing intellectual property good for a university? These big questions need to be asked.
Does the creation of intellectual property aid scholarship or is a depropiterized regime aid scholarship? Look at the Enlightenment. Is a more pure expression of the academies interest to treat knowledge as a common good?
Look at the crazy policies on university campuses. They have pretty words but when the rubber meets the road scholarship is not protected.
[Question time]
Q: It's interesting how Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom is cited by public diplomacy practitioners. Social capital seems to play an important role in how the practice plays out.
A: Mostly looking at free and open-source software projects at the time. There are the self-interested business reasons for this but also ethical and social reasons. In the academy there are clearly people whose motivation is non-economic.
Q: More about USC's IP policy. It's more than file sharing.
A: Two things have come to attention. File sharing policy states that the purpose of the University is to promote intellectual property. This is appalling. Isn't the purpose scholarship? The other question is what happens when the school has an aggressive policy to productize the intellectual output of the school. For example, if the entire output of the film or music program became a public good would it be a net boom or a net cost? Look at the experience of the University of Reading where more money goes out then in after productizing.
Q: What about the life sciences?
A: Not really an area of expertise but worked with the Royal Society of the Arts on the Adelphi project. It should never be possible to productize life forms. One thing that seems to be a truth about negotiation is that things that were optional become mandatory. Flexibility is removed from these international agreements.
Q: Just in SE Asia. Thailand's program of generic AIDS drugs is being targeted by US negotiators. Movements at the base in the developing world is around IP but in the US and Europe it seems to be around culture and copyright. Is there a possibility of real alliance between these two groups? Do free culture activists have an obligation to pay more attention to these life and death issues in other sectors?
A: There has been no central unifying idea around these fights for a long time. There is a need for an "ecology movement" like unity. The Access to Knowledge treaty is an example of this. The core of humanitarian efforts is the flow of knowledge goods.
After pressure from developing countries, WIPO created development goals.
The Access to Knowledge treaty is truly inspiring.
Q: What are the limitations?
A: Electronics companies can't stand up against the idea that their products shouldn't control their customers even though these controls don't sell more products. Nobody wakes up wanting iTunes to do less. Companies ship devices that are far more restrictive than they need to be.
What Apple worries about is that you replace your iPod every 18 months. The problem with this is that their business depends on switching costs being too high to get a Creative device instead. In this world what Apple gets from iTunes is a compatibility right. This locks customers in to Apple's product by increasing the switching cost.
So why will competitors do this? Wouldn't an open system undermine them? Because everyone wants to compete with Apple on Apple's terms. Now you get consortia that try to be a better partner than Apple but this results in a worse device because it caters to the needs of the music industry.
Media should not be a urinary tract infection, it should flow freely and easily.
Blu-ray and HD-DVD are totally useless technologies. Vista won't support them. You have to pay extra to play them on the PS3. It's like a hostage situation.
Q: Technological future of news media?
A: Dan Gilmore nailed this: classified ads are better on the web than on paper. Google AdWords conquered the long tail of this market. News gathering entities need to find a way to survive in a world where they aren't supported by advertising.
It's clear that analysis is something that non-professional blogs can do well but what about investigation? You're starting to see some of this but it's just the beginning.
Q: Free and open-source software movement? GPL and public diplomacy?
A: It's obvious that the Internet was invented by engineers and academics. That's why crtl-R copies the whole message when you reply. The free software movement comes out of the same tradition.
They reacted to the first instance where shared code suddenly became enclosed. They created the MIT license that allows you to do anything with code except keeping someone from editing it.
It's about fundamental freedom, understanding and communicating improvements to tools. It's about self determination.
What came later was open-source. They said that freedom is nice but calling it "free" doesn't help. Commodity code bases emerge from this.
Trusted computing makes it possible to ship open-source DRM. Look at Sun's Open Dream.
The open-source movement focussed too much on utilitarian purposes to the detriment of freedom.
Q: File sharing makes information more available than the marketplace. It seems that this will move into other realms. What about individual needs vs. social control?
A: There are also social needs that arise. Look at 3D meshes that can be made into physical objects. The curators of the David let Stanford take high-res 3D images of David but the condition that was set was that further propagation be restricted. This is ironic because you can't go to Florence without bumping into David because you used to become a sculptor by copying David!
Nobody wants to handle this as bad as the music industry. All this conservatism rather misses the point. The challenge with 3D printers is about making guns and super-bugs not Mickey Mouses.
Q: Any comments about activist news hoaxes?
A: Ah, the Yes Men guys. Tries to report and celebrate them as hoaxes but never be a willing participant. It undermines credibility. The special power of a blog is that its a place where, instead of a newspaper where the cost of production must be recouped, you get to write about what you find interesting. It would be bad note-taking to take a hoax and blog it as truth. In someone interested in architectures of control and political theater it is absolutely newsworthy that someone can show up as a HUD spokesman.
Q: Blogs v. Wikis?
A: Uses wikis all the time. When publishing a book uses errata wikis. Wikis or anything that involves participation suffers and benefits from the size of community. Communities are like uranium. If they're too big they require special treatment.
Look at Making Light and the book Getting the Buggers To Behave.
Q: So what's the solution for the music industry? Should artists make money from their work?
A: The challenge of the artist and the challenge of the music industry are not the same. Is there a place in the world for the owners of vaudeville halls today? No. Is there a place for music? Yes. The same is true for the music industry. They are not an efficient way of producing music. 80% of the music ever recorded isn't for sale.
The objective of copyright isn't about compensating its about encouraging creation. We should measure music production, not music compensation.
The measure should be how many people get to participate in culture, not how much money they make.
Q: Isn't about entrenched bureaucracy? Aren't they acting rationally by trying to protect themselves.
A: But whether or not an industry succeeds should determine policy. There are people at Warner Brothers and Sci-Fi who see the future and are trying to adapt.
[Live Blogged Notes from UX Week 2006]
[Michal Migurski of Stamen]
Data Viz: Why Now?
Because the tools and the audience have caught up.
Starting with Map of the Market from the let nineties. This was inspirational but largely alone. This tree map uses size and color.
Our palette of visualization is pretty sparse.
So why now?
Reason #1: Data Got Cheaper
Newsmap by Markos Wescamp. The data costs nothing because he is pulling from an open API. Colors mean topics, size means volume of stories, etc. Also a tree map.
FundRace used mapping data in a pioneering way. Red or Blue was a cell phone/ GPS add-on to this.
History Flow visualizes the history of Wikipedia pages.
These use data that is not abstract, it is highly individualized socially created stuff.
Phyllotaxy is built on the publicly and freely available data from flickr. It specifically uses Creative Commons data. Related Tag Browser is also a cool proof of a workable algorithm.
Reason #2: Flash Got Better
Added socket communication, emphasized developing interfaces, etc.
Gapminder is an amazing example of this.
Digg Labs is another example.
Etsy is built on a number of visualizations including shop-by-color.
One use: Geography
Election result map took a media assumption and scaled the visualization according to population and other more significant data points.
Mappr came out of a project done for MoveOn and evolved into an application built on the flickr API.
Open Street Map is all about mapping from a pedestrian perspective.
Open data is critical. Free software is useless without data. The Open Source Geospatial Foundation.
Attention by Stamen (link?)
Trixie Tracker started as a baby blog and then made a product for tracking your kid's development and sharing that information with your family. Mommy crack for type-A parents.
Week in Review is an awesome data viz project that uses paper and real live human being with pens!
So the future of this stuff?
Tableau is doing some cool stuff to help people choose appropriate visualization for the data set.
[Live Blogged Notes from UX Week 2006]
[A panel on cool stuff led by Jeff Veen]
(The panel participants aren't listed anywhere so I can't keep track of who is saying what but I'll do my best to take notes. Right now they are just introducing themselves. Jared Spool is talking about what UIE does and some other people are going to demo real live stuff.)
Stamen Design Work
- mappr associates a massive placename geotag database with placename tagging from flickr.
- cabspotting tracks yellow caps by GPS on a map in realtime data.
- digg swarm that represents stories with yellow blobs to watch the digg storm in effect.
So how do they get this work (and they did the awesome MoveOn conversation visualization for election '04 conference calls)? They decide what they are interested and draw attention to themselves by doing free research projects.
MindCanvas by Uzuntu
- Demos (Jeff declares "oooh")
No marketing business model, completely word of mouth.
So why flash? Needed sound and some things that Ajax couldn't do yet
Back to Stamen: Team is three people, occasionally four. Often work only on one thing at a time because atomizing work with many projects is too difficult. Working on one thing at once leads to a unified office atmosphere.
Q: So are your desks pushed together?
Definitely. Converted one of the walls into a whiteboard wall.
From post-its and whiteboard drawings they go into data land. For Digg, for example, they had to design an API before building the API apps on top.
Back to Uzuntu.
Very mobile communication. No meetings, just Basecamp and e-mail to have formal communication. It's been two years and it works great for them. At most they have five people on a project. One person plays the conceptualization role but most drawing is done collaboratively. They also use Powerpoint for prototypes because it is the best way to collaborate. It let's them go back and forth between anyone on the staff.
To another guy (I wish I caught his name)
They also used PP for an animated comp for Harvard Business School. This was the only way to do it but realized it was stupid to do in PP. It was a way to get an idea in front of a client.
The back button is a real concern. Do users of Kayak drag a slider and expect the back button to work?
To Spool.
The back button feels vistigial because the browser was never meant to be an interactive window. Now we just have to wait for users who like the back button to die off.
To Uzuntu.
To date nobody has expressed a problem with using the browser for a flash heavy app.
Q: How do you involve users in development?
Veen: For MeasureMap they did a ton of research up front. They realized that people only use a few data points in huge stats packages. They did a little ethnography and then started building working prototypes right there in Rails.
Guy I don't know: They make a prototype just rich enough to do testing.
Veen: The team is very comfortable with throwing away their work. They know that it is iterative and are willing to get rid of ninety percent of their work.
Stamen: Not much user research but definitely iterate to get it right.
Spool: Really loves paper prototypes and then makes them clickable. All that work of doing this is work that doesn't return value. If you would just use paper and have people point with their finger instead of clicking real things. It gets the idea across without risking hearing "I love it, ship it today!"
You don't need fancy laboratories with one-way mirrors. You just need to see and watch somebody.
Q: (odd question with enormous scope about everything in the universe)
Veen: So you mean, where do we start?
Guy (I wish I knew his name): Know your audience. Use tools and research and try to really understand people and what they need. Getting out and talking to people is always where they start.
Q: How do we drive technology.... (What?) Web is neat but pointless? (Did she really say Web 3.0? Me confused)
Veen: Struggles with that himself. Google is very engineering centric. If something interesting comes up. A prototype comes up with explicit techniques and then an implicit UX and then later asks for a designer. Look at Google Base, it's powerful but not user centered.
Stamen: They get that criticism all the time. But not everything needs to be intresting or useful if they push in a good direction. If you are thinking about usability you shouldn't look to the future, to web 3.0, you should look to the past. Wait for things to iterate before focussing on usability.
Uzuntu: They are a small company but they have found engineers who really seem to empathize with users. Really respects engineers who can see ahead and make that happen. Why don't innovations come from us? We must imagine what the next thing is going to be and work with engineers to make what people want.
Merholz: There is time for two more questions and this is the first. One thing that was alluded to in the keynote is a shift away from page design and container design, a space filled with stuff. How do you design when you are not designing for laying things out on the page, for designing things that people are going to change.
Stamen: Don't like to talk much about a project for an architect. Created a space for lot's of photos to go to. Built it on flickr. Expected a dozen photos per project but they loaded it with content and the thing creaked under its weight.
Uzuntu: Focussed on intention. When you are thinking about moving from space to space the emphasis is about showing what's changed and what you can do with it.
Guy: Start with what you know to be true, with the 80% of what users will put into these containers. This is the type of content you expect for the structure so start there.
Q: Here's a back button idea. If the user can't undo what they did with what they just used to make a change the user will go to the back button.
Veen: One more thing... This can continue at a party Jared Spool is organizing. It will be at Heritage India at six pm.
Who is this guy?
