Change thrives on me
It’s been a busy couple weeks with lots of BBQ’s and weddings.
Two weeks ago my sister got married.
This past weekend was a great Memorial day party with good friends.
And now I’m with two college buddies on a road trip to D.C. for a friends wedding over the weekend. I’m getting better with my camera and I hope to take some great pictures of that as well.
I wasn’t there, but read the slides from Dan Benjamin’s Railsconf 2007 presentation. In his slides he takes some time to talk about The Fold. This is a really important element in designing interfaces, it’s been a part of newspaper layout forever and often web designers don’t include this aspect in their designs.
The lines are our friends
As an interaction designer I worry about people finding the right things and being able to progress from one area to the next. The Fold is important in your layout because it allows you to lead people into more content which helps them find what they are looking for.
Either your site is going to fit within the fold and look like a flyer or postcard, this is most often the cast with a flash only site where it sits in the center of the page and the flash animation controls all the navigation. Or your site is going to have scrolling and you’ll need to be aware of your fold and how it’s going to be presented.
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| A Generic Site Layout | An Example Site with Layout Applied |
So I create this generic site layout that’s variable to how the site it’s self should be defined. But what I keep consistent in the layout is the use of the The Fold and the classic Z Read Order.
But Z Dagger?
Of course the read order could be F shaped, it could be in a random blob shape, it doesn’t really matter the exact shape. What really matters is that you plan for how you want them to scan your site and know they aren’t going to read your content. White space, headlines and clear, concise sections are what you need to create your scan layout, the Z and the Fold are just guides.
What Space?
White Space
Check out the Away with Applications: The Death of the Desktop video. The first slide shows the simple and yet mighty power of white space and text.
It’s great to see that Facebook is opening up their platform even more for others to develop against. With that people are starting to think of the possibilities of using trust and community relationships to enable an even greater applications. And it’s nice to think that we’re already moving in that direction in a number of ways. Hopefully we can continue to hook more into facebook as that platform becomes more available, but of course we’ll also keep hooking into other interesting systems.
Posted in Mugshot, Online Desktop
A friend of mine, Kelly Davidson, had shot photos of Preacher Jack at the Plough and Stars a couple weeks ago. So last night I went up to Sally O’Briens in Union Square with a couple friends to see him live.
My photos are no where near as good as Kelly’s, but Preacher Jack is a lot of fun to see and take pictures of. He’s awesome! We got to talk to him afterward and I now have a sweet Preacher Jack poster in which his silhouette looks a lot like Willy Nelson. You can hear some of his music at Preacher Jack on Myspace.
Posted in mozilla
I find it really cool seeing parts of the creation process through mugshot. Sometimes I see brad upload videos to youtube, behdad put photos on flickr, and jdub add delicious links before they create a new blog entry.
Some people upload everything at once just before blogging it or they upload things and a while later a blog entry comes along. They are all different and unique in their process and it makes them fun to see in action.
I am Jack’s Geek Photographer
Yesterday I joined the ranks of many other geek photographers when my Canon 400D arrived. Thanks to the recommendations of many I’m really happy so far and can’t wait to take more!
And if you were on Mugshot you would have already seen my creation process in action as I added new albums to my Picasa. I can’t choose which service to use, Flickr or Picasa, so I’ll just keep juggling between them as I have free space.
Walters had an awesome post showing off the cool new stuff on the Big Board Application Browser and there’s even more featuresf in the pipeline for the application browser.
We’ve been continuing to work on improving application browsing and adding some nice searching of applications. The default view from the Application Browser shows the applications you use in your desktop while the rest of applications you don’t use are not shown immediately. If you browse into a category you’ll see the full set of applications you have installed in that category. And searching is performed across all the applications you have installed, not just the ones you use.
Getting what you want and wanting what you’ve got
Searching for applications is where things get especially cool. We’ve essentially integrated the idea of an application install search with the regular application finder. The two actions are so closely related together it just makes sense to have them be the same.
Lets say you search for presentation and you don’t have Open Office Impress installed on your system. A typical application search system would just display no results. However the Online Desktop Application Browser searches not only your local system, but also the application listing to find applications that match your search terms and returns links to those applications inside the window. So if you didn’t have a presentation application installed before it’s about 1 click away now.
Next Steps
There are lots of next steps to improve this system. Already the application pages are wiki like so people who created or use the application can make sure it has updated and useful descriptions and icons.
But we could also allowing tagging applications with keywords, which would help a lot of searches perform better. If Liferea and other RSS readers were tagged with the RSS keyword then someone could easily find it when searching for the term RSS.
Posted in Mugshot
I really like using firebug for iterating web mockup ideas. I’m not developing HTML or CSS, but if I want to try out adding something here or there to mugshot I can just open up firebug on it, inspect the element I want to look at, then edit the area. You’ll get all the Javascript and CSS loading properly and you don’t have to save the web page locally and find the files to edit. It really saves me a lot of time.
After you’re done editing and you like what you see you can take a screenshot of it and copy / paste the HTML to pass along.
Posted in Design
Lots of good comments on my post about informed choices and real security, it would be nice to see some good open source solutions out there. And I’m glad I didn’t bump into david on the street that day, he has more good ideas about the issues of phishing and SSL certs.
To follow up a bit more I spent a little time examining this crazy dialog. I’m not trying to pick on firefox, but it’s an excellent example of where things can go wrong. And in a lot of places they go right, we definitely aren’t at this point.
I couldn’t find a site right away that brings up this issue even though I feel like it happens somewhat often. So I grabbed a screenshot I found and changed the URL, but here’s how the dialog would look if you just found an issue with www.URL.com.
Because I’m like the Lorax who speaks for the users I’ve translated the options available in the dialog so they can be read from the point of view of someone who doesn’t understand the underlying technology. I also added what is a little bit of reality as well.
Unable to verify the identity of www.url.com as a trusted site
The website you’re looking at is not configured correctly. This error is not your fault.
Possible reasons for this error
We used this dialog for a couple awkward reasons, but this error has nothing to do with anything you did
Please notify the site’s webmaster about this problem
Contact the person who runs the web site. You know who that person is, right? You know how to contact them? It might be nice to offer a mailto webmaster@url.com address? Maybe not.
Before accepting this certificate, you should examine the site’s certificate carefully…
Here is a foreign language you never studied in your life, please read it’s message carefully and pick out any grammar errors. Severe grammar errors could indicate a problem, simple grammar errors could just mean it’s a simple mistake. Remember, read carefully!! Fun Fun Fun!
Accept this certificate… [in a number of different ways with different consequences]
After carefully examining and understanding the certificate you should choose the correct option to proceed safely.
Help!
If you’re having trouble with what to do click here. Oh, gotcha! This help is about the dialog, it has no advice for the site itself!
Cancel
Don’t go to the site you wanted to go to
OK
Go to the site you wanted to go to, but risk losing your soul!
And with all that dialog you still haven’t seen the site itself because the browser blocks the loading, however the blocking is probably for security sake and might be hard to work around. One might find a way to use services like Snap which offer screen captures of sites for free at least then you’d know what you are about to look at.
So the real issue here is that this dialog doesn’t help most people to advance, it is merely an idiot light in car speak. We could say The terrorist threat of this web site is at Yellow, do you wish to proceed? and it would be about as helpful. To protect people from phishing you need a more complete solution, and phishing is a serious problem. Warnings about errors in a site configuration could just be done as subtle warnings such that people interested can take notice while others are able to continue without the dialog litter.
Alex Faaborg has some good slides from his Web 2.0 Expo Presentation where I got these other screenshots of interesting dialogs that provide choices, but maybe not in the way we want. The POSTDATA dialog is a tough one to fix and I don’t think I have any real ways to improve that, but boy does it suck.
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David makes an excellent point about choices in a user interface. What David assumes in his post is that I think people shouldn’t be able to make informed choices in their Desktop interface. Well that’s not true, what’s missing my my previous post is that I don’t want to take away peoples ability to make informed choices, however I do want to stop the computer from forcing people into making uninformed guesses.
People who understand SSL and Certificates need to be notified if a site is incorrectly using them so they can choose to discontinue using that site if the situation merits that. Most of the time the issue with these is just a misconfiguration, and for someone who understands those technologies it’s not hard to spot. However most people don’t understand those technologies.
The decision is more complicated than this, but when building a web browser there are a couple paths the creators could take related to handling certificates.
My assumption is that most people don’t understand SSL and Certificates. I think that’s a pretty solid assumption so lets put a number on it, like 90% of people don’t understand the technology; seems a fair number. The assumption of the web browser is that if the certificate is bad ask the user if it’s ok to continue. That means the creators of the web browser have to hope for only a 10% chance of getting the right answer from the user. Those are really bad odds.
There are lots of other people talking about usability and security and several papers like Are Usability and Security Two Opposite Directions in Computer Systems? [pdf] and Usability of Security: A Case Study [pdf] on the topic. My Summary: If you want most people who use your software to have a secure experience you can’t ignore their inability to make certain choices about security. This doesn’t mean taking away the choice from them or from you, this means providing methods for them to be informed enough to make a decent choice. Those methods might also save a person in the know some extra time.
Just as an idea point for a new solution. Digg and other sites like it usually have a very low number of key people who push out most of the news that really gets dugg high. You might speculate that it’s a similar ratio to the number of people who understand SSL and Certificates and if a site is safe or not. So if people in the know about safety of a site could “Digg” it such that others would be informed that a “High number of people believe this to be safe” they could make some kind of informed decision about continuing to use the site.
And remember! Safety is no accident
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