Inclusive design is really just a name for the positive feeling I have about certain designs. Exclusive, then, describes the opposite feeling. I call design like that which is behind Facebook strikingly limited, for example. I’m astounded that Blogger is still in use as much as it is. In short, I basically can’t stand anything that builds up walls around itself, blocking information in and leaving user control out.
The Straw that Broke…
Not long ago I read a piece describing the way Facebook has built up walls around itself. Nick Gonzalez called it a walled garden, meaning that the spread of your information is limited. He pointed out that Plaxo’s service is approaching the scope of Facebook’s, and that it is doing so in a much more open environment.
“While not as exciting as Facebook, Plaxo is edging in their direction. Plaxo Pulse ties together disparate services from across the web unlike the news feed, which ties together only Facebook’s content. While Plaxo hasn’t launched a platform to a crowded hall of over-eager developers, they have quietly focused on linking to existing applications on the web.”
Honestly, the new Plaxo developments excite me. The fact that it now supports OpenID excites me. (Which reminds me: go see 37signals’ explanation of OpenID and its usefulness. It’s wonderful.) I may actually check the service out now. Until now I only knew it’s name by the subject line of dead emails long delivered to Recycle Bin hell while cries for me to update my contact information were left hanging in the thin dry air.
Okay, maybe that was a little dramatic. You get the point.
My favorite applications are always those that aren’t closed applications. They reach their true potential when combined with other applications.
Some Clarification
Inclusive design embraces other technologies and services with the goal being seamless integration for the end user. A huge feature of an application designed inclusively is the ability to export all of one’s information at any time. Examples that come to mind: Plaxo(duh), Highrise, WordPress, and (maybe a stretch) the iPhone. These inclusive services/apps/products take advantage of standards like iCal, RSS, and valid semantic markup.
Exclusive services have a tendency to lock you into the service it provides. And I mean lock in the cruelest sense of the term. With Facebook, your information isn’t going anywhere (yet). In a sense, it isn’t really yours. Control of your information is the price you pay with applications like these.
Or, for example, I’ve faced the headache of helping friends migrate from LiveJournal EasyJournal to WordPress. Fumbling around in a system that is largely proprietary and non-standard is a nightmare.
Some web applications get it, if not completely. Small steps are taken, every year or two, toward what users really want. Take hosted video websites: you would be hard pressed to find one that won’t offer a slew of options for embedding your video in a number of different places. At some point they realized that offering the data in one place wasn’t good enough: it had to be where it was wanted, when it was wanted.
But that isn’t good enough anymore either.
New Developments
Independent developers are now stepping in where the big guys aren’t. Facebook won’t allow us to get our information back, so we (in the we-the-people sense) found a way to take it back (sorry, for Mac only). In a related story, other developers fed up with constraints decided to start downloading YouTube videos on their own.
We (again, the people) are an impatient bunch aren’t we?
Now, neither of the stories above are recent nor are they the worst that’s been done. But knowing that that has happened, and that it’s become so commonplace (especially in the case of YouTube downloading) one can’t help but wonder what’s next.
So what’s the answer? Best as I can tell, new companies (web, specifically) have to start being open. And not open as in “we have a company blog, we’re relevant.” I mean open as in “you can have your information back, your files however you want them, and full control of how everything looks.” That time is coming, either by evolution or revolution, and it will be a huge step in the advancement of technology design when it does.
This post was written by Ryan Imel, who also blogs about WordPress Plugins and themes at Theme Playground.
You’re a celebrity addict, and want nothing more than to be the next Perez Hilton, right? And you also love the color pink, and want your celebrity blog to be covered in it. Or maybe you’re just a celebrity renegade that wants to unleash tons of celebrity smut, and make a little money doing it.
So you acquire your domain name, and start blogging about who’s sleeping with who, who’s DUI or addictions are wrecking their life (yet making them millions of extra dollars they really don’t need.) And yes, you post so much the list of celebs that you created as categories is longer than the list of Heidi Fleiss’ employees… that Charlie Sheen alone seems to know.
Traffic is starting to pick up, you have even been buzzed a time or two by Yahoo, and you think you are in the process of developing a killer celebrity blog.
One problem.
You don’t have any images on your site, and celebrity blogs NEED images to succeed. Everyone else is doing it, so why can’t you, right?
Ah, yes, peer pressure, like back in the day when someone told you to drink it because everyone was. What the heck, you do a Google Image Search on Paris Hilton and start saving every image you can to your desktop. It’s like Christmas morning, seeing over a million images of the jailed princess herself.
Can you image the database and photo album you can publish with all of those images from Google? Now before you get all hot and bothered by this, spend a few minutes to check out these fine articles:
Perez Hilton Sued By The Paparazzi
Access Hollywood | Blogger Perez Hilton Sued For Copyright Infringement
Web Host Drops Celebrity Blog PerezHilton.com After Copyright Complaints
Uh oh.
Yes, let me cut to the chase. And I’ll do it quickly, before you get sued, or sent a Cease and Desist letter. Just because your friends drink alcohol (or partake in any other illegal activity) and get away with it doesn’t mean you will be so lucky.
You see, a majority (if not 99%) of the celebrity images found on Google, MSN or Yahoo image search are there illegally. Which means if you take stolen property, that makes you a thief too. And to be quite honest, it’s really not worth taking the risk. But if you feel the need to walk on slippery rocks, don’t be surprised if you fall.
Here’s the best part.
It’s preventable, and it can be preventable cheaply. For $50/month you can have access to thousands of celebrity images, and you can place them all over your celebrity blog without the fear of being sued. I’d like to introduce to you one of my bestest friends in the celebrity blogging world…
Friends, meet PR Photos. PR Photos, meet my friends…
My first reaction to the presidential candidate debates was, “Wow, what a cool idea.” I naively believed that people could ask some really good questions that would no doubt be more interesting than the standard, “What are you going to do about health care?” ones. Don’t get me wrong; that is a valid question for any candidate in any country, but that is what always gets asked. I was looking forward to seeing hard hitting questions that struck beyond the norm of political debates. But alas, that was not what I got.
Ask And Yee Shall Receive
Unfortunately, that sub heading is not for the YouTube participants. It was the moderators that got what they wanted. What I am trying to say is that for the most part, we got the same standard questions, asked in a slightly dumber/funnier way. Now, I am not suggesting that the questions were set up. I am only saying that the odds are in favor of some people asking those types of questions. The moderators probably looked for those, and got rid of the toughest ones.
Ground Breaking?
No. Absolutely not. Unless of course asking the same question, but only you record yourself in a chicken suit with wipe effects is considered ground breaking. Seriously, what part of this was ground breaking? That it was YouTube? Big deal. The only thing that was different was that it was kind of funny, but more in a sad way than a “haha” way…
If anything, the debate proved two major phenomena:
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Overhyped Online Services:
Sure YouTube was innovative… 2 years ago. But lets face it; there are far better services now than YouTube (design-wise and content-wise). The mainstream media will unfortunately always be ten steps behind the cutting edge stuff that you and I know about.
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American Politics are a Joke:
Literally, these debates transformed what little seriousness there was left in the American political system. I mean, the banner and flags and strange rallies with people wearing buttons of the candidate’s face is weird enough; I am curious about how the rest of the world is seeing and/or making fun of us…
I suppose I answered my own title here; it is a resounding waste of time. Unfortunately, it appears that the format was a hit and will take place again. Next year, the dramatic hamster will ask a question about social security…
This post was written by J David Macor.
TechCrunch announced the Ustream.tv redesign yesterday, and after having a look at it I’m left with a few questions. The new design is definitely an improvement (I won’t fight that) and looks much more mature than the previous version, which seems great for their target market. But it still seems a little rough around the edges.
First off, a look at the design from a couple days ago along with the new site design:
Ustream.tv Side by Side
Oh, and I’m not even sure what to think about the Validator’s response to the new site. Where to begin?
The Flow
One of the first things I noticed was the way the “About this Show” paragraph is tucked away off to the right of the video it’s talking about. It’s uncomfortable. Then there’s the fact that the tiny two line display (ouch) has little arrows to the right to navigate up and down the description. I guess it goes to show how important the video’s description is, doesn’t it?
A little pet peeve of mine: I should know what your site (especially Web 2.0 application sites) does within two seconds of landing on the page. Make it stand out by describing it in three words if you have to (it’s worked on other video sites). And Ustream’s concept is so much better than other video sites, their edge is sharp, you would think they would want to flaunt it. Instead the “What is Ustream?” bar is so far down the page it’s almost below the fold! I’d be curious to hear their reasoning for 600 pixels down rather than right up top.
Maybe I’m not getting the style choice on this, but the “Popular Streamers/Popular Recorded” bars at the bottom seem…off. Maybe it’s supposed to look like the background repeated in the wrong place, but if that’s the case it doesn’t look cool.
Interactive?
One of the biggest points Nick made in the TechCrunch post was that Ustream made these changes to become more interactive. He references the Shout Meter, the Gallery Mode for browsing, and the Pulse Polls in particular. My criticism is much simpler than all of those things: where are all the rollovers?
In the top navigation there is a heavy rollover effect. Let’s face it, a rollover that actually produces a gradient is pretty intense. But then there are buttons that don’t have rollover features at all, some of which are extremely important buttons. Check out:
- the “Go To Show Room And Chat” button,
- the arrows on either side of the gallery browser, and
- the “Learn More” button,
none of which have rollovers at all. Granted, there are a lot of cool rollover effects throughout the page (the description given for the Shout Meter, for example) but that shouldn’t be an excuse for limiting usability in a much simpler way.
Clashing Corners
On an aesthetic level, the way round edges butt up against hard edges makes me wonder. The page is bound in round edges, and many of the turns on the inside of the page are as well. But then the “Welcome to beta 3” announcement has sharp edges. I wonder whether it was intended or whether it’s actually an oversight.
I also wonder whether there were so many color schemes available they just decided to use a couple of their favorite. The top half of the screen looks like one color set, whereas the bottom looks very different. I actually prefer the bottom half more than the top (has more of a collegiate feel) but I would have liked to see some more consistency.
Compare/Contrast
We can’t help but compare this redesign to Ustream’s direct competition Stickam, which sports a design much more like the old Ustream than the new (especially the login/search area at the top). But Now I think Ustream is trying to propel itself into a different style of video website, moreso that created by sites like Vsocial and Vmix. I wonder which site they took more of the influence from. Also, notice the striking similarities between their search bar and Apple’s classic search. Pretty close, eh?
I’m left wondering whether Ustream wants to be a part of the crowd or stand out. The old and new design side by side are, in my book, pretty much equal.
This post was written by Ryan Imel, who also blogs about WordPress Plugins and themes at Theme Playground.
This week the 2007 International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) Winners were announced. Business Week presented the 81 winners, in 14 different categories, in a rather classically designed slideshow.
Among the 2007 IDEA winners are some stunning pieces of design. From the futuristic looking Universal Toilet, for both disabled and general population, to the already famous split-head framing hammer. Almost every winner is not only a great looking object, but also developed around usability.
Design Is More Than Beauty Only
Beauty is good looking, but good design is more. Good design is developed with the user in mind. Great design is highly functional.
Whether the the highly praised Mobile Clinical Assistant or the LOMAK - Light Operated Mouse And Keyboard, brilliant design serves a purpose, serves its user.
Design Is Also Presentation
But that’s not all. Great design also needs a good presentation. Presentation can ruin a lot. Even terrific design. One of the 2007 IDEA winners is a simple, but IMO brilliant concept: Roll N’ Roll. Chopsticks, but not your ordinary chopsticks. Portable fun chopsticks with an environmental twist.
Roll n’ Roll are portable, personal chopsticks that give people an environmentally responsible, sanitary tableware alternative when in public. They are made of a thin metal slice that can be rolled vertically to form a straw or chopstick, or horizontally into a small cylinder that coils around the wrist like a bracelet ensuring Roll n’ Roll are always there when you need them. Since Roll n Roll are more portable and fun than traditional chopsticks, the designer hopes to reduce the use of disposable chopsticks, which in turn will lessen the consumption of precious natural resources.
I love the concept. Really simple but brilliant at the same time. Brilliant until I saw the picture Business Week used for its slideshow.
Suddenly I was reminded of all the shortcomings of the portable fun chopsticks. Minor details, details such as hygiene. I was reminded of all the germs I’ld carry around after having enjoyed a lovely Indonesian meal. Sweat taste flavoring my next Bourbon Sour.
And all that because of… one anorexic arm. An arm reminding me of a movie. A movie and a sin, a deathly sin: Se7en and Sloth.
Some days ago TechCrunch acquired InviteShare, a new platform where members can share invitations to closed betas. Will the acquisition by InviteShare create a new test for those platforms?
Can TechCrunch Quick Start Platforms?
Michael Arrington and TC are a respected tandem in the tech scene, daily asked by many start-ups to feature their product. VCs read TC.
Often reviewed sites are in closed beta invitation phase and TC readers can’t access them unless they know someone who has invitations. Sometimes even the TC crew has no access to featured sites.
As user the only option is to submit your email address and wait until you get an invite. Often only months later.
InviteShare and TC’s community might soon change this and lead thousands of new members to a site within only some days.
Is TC Creating A New Test Benchmark for Web Sites?
If the combo TC-InviteShare takes off and the TC users play the game, this could become a new benchmark for platforms.
First test for startups will be to get featured on TC, hopefully with a positive review. Second will be to show that the presented platform useful, accessible and stable is. I bet VCs will observe this evolution rigorously.
Does InviteShare Fit TC?
InviteShare surely can be compatible with the TC community. If the platform can be stabilized and regularly new sites are included, new platforms could quickly go viral and InviteShare is set to become a popular place in the tech world.
Neil Patel, TC’s SEO consultant, many positive reviews and direct links on the TC Network sites are a warrant for lots of SE-traffic.
Success will depend on the fast integration of new platforms and the community’s participation though.
How Will InviteShare Be Named?
Arrington hinted in his entry that the site might be moved to a crunchier domain. Some guessing took place in the comments, but of course nothing was disclosed.
At the moment of writing this, CrunchShare.com hasn’t been registered yet, but both InviteCrunch.com and CrunchInvite.com were registered July 19th. CrunchInvite.com is registered at Schlundt & Partner - 1&1, which is what Arrington used for TechCrunch.
CrunchInvites.com was registered on July 21st. Michael wrote his entry July 19th, my money is on CrunchInvite.com.
The fine folks over at ManagerAssistant.com came to me and asked if I would help them with a critique of their two year old site. They have a strong product, yet conversions from their website seem to be dropping so maybe I can help them out some with my keen designer eyes. While I will cover the whole site in general the main focus will be on the homepage because that is what you are going to see first.
First Impression
Now quick, when you look at the site what is your first impression? While a couple of years ago I could easily see this site as being looked upon as being profressional there are just too many flaws that show how dated it is.
Site Alignment
While there is nothing wrong with left-aligned sites, I don’t think it works on this site because it leaves you with a feeling of emptiness. Centering the site will give it a little more polish and add more options to what can be done with the background and color scheme.
Logo and Typeface
Almost everyone recognizes Google as the king of the internet. But, as far as I see it, there is someone that is challenging Google for the crown; even if they don’t know it yet. In my opinion, Facebook has positioned itself to become that go-to website; the one that everyone uses as their homepage. You may think I am crazy, but it would not even take that much to accomplish this.
What does Facebook have that Google doesn’t?
Maybe the more appropriate question is, “what does Google have that Facebook doesn’t?” Well, from a business perspective, Facebook is missing a lot. Namely, the whole suite of Google Apps. But let’s put aside the business perspective and focus on the personal one. Because this is where I can see Google being replaced. On Facebook, you can send and receive messages from your friends, schedule events and post your photos. Now that sounds a lot like Gmail, Calendar and Picasa Web Albums. So getting back to my original question, it seems that Facebook has the social networking advantage.
“But wait,” you scream. There is Orkut! Well, you have a point. That is a social networking site that is owned by Google. But it is not integrated with the rest of the Google programs. In fact, the Google programs are barely integrated at all, save for a link bar at the top and a few odd features. With Facebook though, everything is tightly integrated and can be easily consumed on one unifying page. When your friend sends you a message, you can see who it is from, and click through to their profile. You can be tagged in a photograph and be notified about that. If you are invited to a party, you can see if some of your other friends are going too.
The Profile is the Key
The Facebook profile is what allows it to go beyond emailing and scheduling. It facilitates a more intimate connection with your contacts; in fact, they are not contacts, but friends. You don’t have a dull address book, but a vibrant collection of those friends. And speaking of friends, connecting to people is easier too. You don’t have to know some cryptic address; just their name. It is a simple but refreshing concept.
Even within your profile, you are connected to like minded people. All of your interests become links that you can click on. You are then presented a list of people with similar interests who you can in turn, ask to be your friends. With a profile, socializing on the internet becomes more intertwined.
How Facebook can challenge for the Crown
The UI design is already fantastic (as has been discussed on this site), but they just need to add some functionality. By my estimation, the focus should be on the messaging feature. By enhancing this aspect, Facebook would be taking leaps and bounds. It should be able to accept and send emails from off of the network and basically function like any other good email app. As it stands now, you need a separate email address where you receive these redundant messages telling you that you have a new message.
The photo uploads could also stand an improvement in the resolution, but other than that, it is already one of the best photo sharing services (thanks again to that profile connectedness). They also need to expand the calendar’s functionality, to include private and public calendars. And now with Applications, Facebook may have moved over that tipping point.
Will this really happen?
These changes are not that overwhelming. The features are already there in Facebook; they just need to be exploited. Now whether they would do this or not is another question. Would it be wise to challenge Google? If any company can transform itself to meet new competition it is Google. My point here is that Facebook does have a chance; it can move beyond the MySpace social network classification and become a new all encompassing service.
This post was written by J David Macor.
Note from the editor: These next few days, we will be re-publishing note-worthy content from the Wisdump archive. This particular article was originally posted by Paul Scrivens on November 10th, 2006.
The Web 2.0 world seems to have a problem regarding traffic. It seems to be the measure of success for a website and because of this many sites either get unnoticed or their true value doesn’t really show. On the other hand you have sites the receive a large amount of traffic yet really do nothing for anyone so how does traffic play in these situations? Finally, there is no end-all solution for measuring traffic so anyone can throw out some numbers and who are we to call them out on it or not because it wouldn’t be too hard to find a program that makes those numbers look realistic.
Let’s explore a couple of scenarios.
1. You have a site that gets 10,000 uniques per day, yet you generate no revenue and almost no discussion. Does the site have the same value as the person doing 5,000 uniques per day and making $1500 a month along with having some great discussions?
2. 2 million uniques a month is nothing to sneeze at, but what if you breakdown what those 2 million uniques really mean? What if those uniques were distributed over 150 sites? When you first think about it, it still seems like a big number but look a little deeper.
- 2,000,000 / 150 = 13,333 uniques per month per site
- 13,333 / 30 = 444 uniques per day per site
Now how many sites do you know do at least 444 uniques per day? I was able to make the 2,000,000 into 444 through two simple calculations. That doesn’t mean the 2M isn’t an important number, but you have to be careful of how you use it.
3. One site does over 2 million pageviews a month. That is a ridiculously high number for a single site whether your ego wants to admit it or not. However, what if I were to tell you that over 1 million uniques visit the site every month as well, would you still be as impressed? Again, 1 million uniques is nothing to sneeze at, but you would hope that a site can do more than 2:1 ratio when it comes to PVs and uniques.
Now take into account another factor with example #3. There are plenty of sites that do more traffic, but do those sites pull in an average of $60,000 per month? Looking at that stat would you take a site that does 2M uniques and 5M PVs or the site above that does half that and pulls in the money?
9rules isn’t known for throwing our members millions of visitors a month, but we are known for giving them quality traffic that sticks around and many times subscribes to their sites. You can get on Digg one day and jump up 20,000 pageviews and the next day its all back to normal again because the quality of the traffic is meaningless.
Traffic should be used as a metric to view how well your site is doing against your own expectations and how it can be improved. Throwing out random numbers doesn’t always mean they are worthwhile, yet we have put ourselves in an age where the size of your traffic is the only thing that counts (insert size isn’t everything joke). Traffic does have meaning, but don’t make it the theme of your site.
In May ‘07 last.fm integrated video clips. The video hype was little because there were hardly any clips and soon the Last.fm centered around the acquisition by CBS and the absence from the Day of Silence project.
Even today there is little video content: a quick search for the [UK] iTunes Top 10 Songs and Top 10 Albums only returned 3 video clips (The Chemical Brothers, My Chemical Romance with an older clip and MIKA with a remix track).
But Last.fm might be on to something and could become the new MTV, the MTV2.0 with a personalized video clip streams. But much improvement needs to be made to the actual offer.
- More video content.
- Integrate video in to the last.fm client and a pop-out video player to the website.
With the growing amount of wide screen monitors, video can become really popular when the user can watch the clips next to the browser window. A resizable video player lets the user watch video clips on every free real estate area, without having to lose focus on the open window. If you only have 800*640 monitor width, it’s time to upgrade. ;-).
- Allow only high quality videos: who can be bothered to watch clips if a 300*200px large video is pixelated? Full screen view shouldn’t be considered as long as low quality clips are offered.
- Make videos embeddable.
- Videos must be scrobbled. Last.fm is all about scrobbling, building your profile and getting targeted radio, recommendations.
Once all this implemented, I can perfectly imagine a new music revolution and many users watching non-stop video clips instead of only listening to last.fm radio.
A good start would be to offer every new video clip. Only remaining question is if the user base will wait until there is enough of video content.
Update: Last.fm videoclips are now scrollable and embeddable.
