byJoeyBaker » Web Design

Microsoft Should Kill IE 6 Tonight: Why I Disagree With Leo Laporte

Joey — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 07:19:55 +0000

Listen to This Week in Google #34. Cue to 37:00~ish.

On the most recent This Week in Google, Leo Laporte, in conversation with Gina Trapani and Jeff Jarvis (all 3 of whom I respect greatly) asserts that Microsoft cannot shut down their Internet Explorer 6 browser because businesses are too slow to adapt and the vast majority use Microsoft products. “It’s the price of success,” Leo asserts.That’s bullshit. It’s Microsuck’s monopolistic success that allows to announce that as of tonight, IE6 – hell let’s throw in IE 7 too – are no longer supported, and will not receive updates. A free update to IE8 is at this URL. (Or better: go for a browser that supports standards: Safari, FireFox, or Chrome)They can do that, even with most enterprise environments relying on them because they have every environment relying on them. Where else are their customers going to go!?I was shocked to find that both Gini Tripani who is a huge supporter of open source and Jeff Jarvis who coined the term “do what you do best,” let Leo get away with the statement. If Microsoft arbitrarily decided to do anything their customers would have no choice but to follow. That’s what comes from being a monopoly.

PC vendor revenue.

James Surowiecki‘s latest piece in The New Yorker, Soft in the Middle, addresses this point: produce high end or low end products, the middle road is too mushy. Case in point: It’s better the be Apple than Dell and better to be H&M than Gap. The wide middle isn’t desirable or profitable.Microsoft, in its position of high, low, and middle of the market, should take a lesson from Apple. They should be opinionated, stop trying to please everyone, and make a few firm decisions that benefit us all – even if it’s a bit painful in the short-term. After all, it’s not like they have much of a reputation to defend.

*worth noting: I’m an Apple Fanboi

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Design Says to Shovelware: ‘I Need More Whitespace’ — a Design Critique of TIME

Joey — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:00:58 +0000

I took two lessons from Time’s Q&A with Bill Keller. The first, outlined in Dear Bill Keller, was intended be a short reaction to the piece, that turned into a 1600 word article. This post outlines the second takeaway, and will be 1000 words. Pictures are worth 1000 words right? :) Take a look at the comparison between the print and online layouts of that article below.

click for a larger version

The print layout is clearly, superior. It’s far easier to read, offers a summary of what the article is at an eye’s glance.

Multiple Pages The online version requires the user to click to a second page to read the whole article. Yet, the print version fits handily on one page. WHY!? There is no newshole online! Stop making it difficult for us to get to the end of the article!
Ads Admittedly, the print version shares a spread with a full page ad, but the content remains ad free. The online version feels cramped. There are two, small, intrusive ads, that serve to distract from the content.
Styling is Gone This is a great example of why shovelware is bad for design. The print version nicely separates out questions, credits, and answers with font styles. The online version? Nothing. Someone just copy-pasted the content out of a text document. It’s much harder to read than the article, let alone tell that it’s a Q&A.
The Sidebar is Distracting Even if Google is my homepage, there is far too much content presented to draw me in. The sidebar is full of irrelevant stuff that distracts me from the article. The clean, minimalistic design in print is far more eye-catching.

The Takeaway

Use subheads Give the reader entry points. Especially online where people are used to reeading short blurbs of text are are prone to skimming as they scroll.
Don’t forget the rule about one piece of dominant artwork It’s amazing how truly good design never changes. Presenting one place for the eye to center on that sums up the content is a design trait that goes to the way we think – regardless of the medium.
Leave some whitespace Clutter on the page makes your content hard to read. Just because your CMS allows you to dump in your content and move on, it doesn’t mean you should. Giving this article the same amount of design time in both print and online would have helped a lot. I’d bet that the amount of design time for the web could be much less.

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A Web Design Critique of Google News

Joey — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:49:53 +0000

I recently critiqued the redesign of Newsweek, and was pleased to see the positive response. I sorta promised that this would become a regular feature for me, so I’ll try to hold to that. I’m only looking at homepages. Critiquing a whole site is a lot of work. I’ll do it someone wants to pay me though :]After leading a webinar for CoPress on homepage design, I’ve done a lot of research into mainstream homepages – what works and what doesn’t. For the second go at this, let’s look at Google News. Google has an … involved … relationship with the media industry. Newspapers have accused Google of stealing their content, rumors say Google thought about buying a newspaper, and much to the chagrin of journalists everywhere, Google started linking to Wikipedia in the Google News results.With all the hype, you’d think Google News was an incredible product that attracted a ton of pageviews. (Actually, Yahoo News gets more hits) In truth, Google News reveals itself to have many poor design principals, and, despite some good ideas, to be an eyesore that is really designed for one purpose: act as a search engine for news articles.

Highly customizable: Easily the best part about the design is the amount of control given to the user over the content they want to see. Google throws out the idea that every user needs to see political and world news. You can setup search modules to show very customized content too.
Color coded: it’s trivial, but an important visual cue. This works pretty well in the nav bar, but the execution on the rest of the site is poor. They take a strong visual cue, and tone it way down.
Google Juice: the site is really geared to be used as a search engine, and it shows. From the wonky side navigation, to the really cool “recommended for you” section that uses your search history to find you news, Google News is clearly designed to search your news, not browse to it.
Art? What art? OK, there is some art, but its really small. Visually impressive, this site is not.
Link List: Can you avoid the impression that the page is just a huge list of links? I can’t. It would be nice to have some attempt at styling, design, etc…
Summaries: Google News works because of automation, but the lack of hand-crafted summaries really limits the usability.

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Illustrations & Maps online New Media

Overall, Google News design gets a 2/5. It’s got customization, but it’s really not a friendly UI. The site clearly uses a grid style design, but there’s too many eyelines – I can’t decide where to look.As an execution of the ‘river of news‘ concept, gNews misses one key aspect – you can only have one river at a time, or else, the eye gets lost. Google gets this right with search results, but somehow that design philosphy didn’t carry over to gNews.Perhaps my best suggestion for Google: bigger images. Much bigger. Draw the eye in.

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Google Wave: The End of the Wild Web

Joey — Sun, 31 May 2009 17:00:23 +0000

There will be many – many – blog posts written on Google Wave, and there already have been so many created, that I’m sure this one will be lost in the void, but for whomever keeps ‘The Record,’ add me to it saying: “Google Wave will revolutionize communication.”I’m throughly shocked by the number of naysayers out there. The reaction on Twitter after the announcement, and the excellent review of the event on TechCruch, was mixed. Some were just as enthusiastic as me, but many have the wait-and-see attitude that, to me, doesn’t recognize the pure awesomeness that is Google Wave. There are only two obstacles Google Wave has to overcome to become as widely used as Google Search that I can see: market penetration and standards adoption.

HTML5

The switch to Wave is going to rely on HTML5, a standard that has been 5 years in the making. That’s a really long time coming. The same year the standard got it’s start gave birth to Facebook, Gmail was still new, and IE was still 91% of the browser market. In Internet terms, HTML5 has been in progress since the middle ages.Changing the basic language of the web is a drastic change, and we need to be sure that the standard is right. Yet, surely we can adapt to adding new standards at a quicker rate? Because all “modern” browsers are open-source, and have a track record for continuous innovation, it’s inconceivable to me that was couldn’t innovate on a faster scale.Five years is an awful long time, and it’s incredible how much – of the draft spec – the browsers are already supporting. HTML5 will bring about a friendlier internet – one that feels like a desktop experience. We have the technology to deliver that – why wouldn’t we?

Acceptance

To my mind, the harder part of making Wave successful is getting people to use it. I don’t just mean sign up. I mean, use it.The pure genius of Wave is that it centralizes all communication.

Everything.

All of it.

That means your email (gone for sure), your IM (no doubt), your sticky notes (why not?), your documents (probably), your faxes (people still use that protocol!?), your text messages (not demoed, but why not!?), your blog posts (wordpress plugin anyone?), your blog comments (Hallelujah!), your twitter (likely) …your everything.If you’re going to really use Wave, that means throwing out all of your old tools. Get rid of your email client, forget AIM, loose the SMS plan. They’re not needed.As long as people can write some extensions for backward compatibility to those folks still stuck in the HTML4, pre-2009 era, there won’t be a reason to keep the old communications around.

One Source

Having one place for all of your communication is such a simplification of life that we ought to all go buy Google a beer – scratch that – a nice bottle of wine. You’ll have the time to drink it with all the … time … Google just saved you.And that’s just the first thing Wave will do for you – save you time. It’s going to be easier than ever to communicate with folks. With the email paradigm broken and quicker, simpler, communication the norm, we’ll spend time in the inbox – it just won’t be as painful.

The End of the Cowboys

The other thing I see Wave doing is moving us toward a community driven internet. One of the biggest problems that the web has always had is trust. The Web is still very much like the old Wild West. The Wild West was an era that determined how the western US would be settled. The Western frontier times ended once cities started to become established; commerce settled down, and laws could be written and enforced.The establishment of cities is a good metaphor for building online communities. But, there is one key factor that most online communities lack that new towns always had: trust. Small towns are a place where everyone knows everyone. Small cities are just many of these communities put together – there’s an intricate network of relationships. All of which are built on the idea that people know and trust each other.When people don’t have a personal relationship with a part of their community, they have a trust in certain community institutions. Grocery Stores, for example, are a real marvel of commerce – not because of their business model (which is pretty good), but because they’ve standardized the way people buy food and guarantee a good supply. We’re not worried about food at all in our society – we trust that grocery stores will always be around to provide what we need.On the Wild Web, we’re still learning the ropes. Institutions are still being built, and we’re still trying to figure out how to build relationships with literally everyone in the world.Buying a product online can still be risky proposition. Everything from credit card theft to non-reputable dealers (far more common) puts you at risk. Engaging in Internet communities is a leap of faith too. Who really is stargirl73 answering your tax question on that forum? And what jack-ass is flaming you on your own blog?The solution here? Create an institution that standardizes identities. If everyone uses one tool for communication, then it becomes easy for them to build a reputation. Wave will make it simple to build a profile of who you are. Others can you can get a sense of everything you’ve said and what you think. That’s just like building a reputation for yourself in the ‘real world.’

In real life, you don’t get to create a new identity at every store you walk into, every party you go to, every employer you interview with. You are who you are, and your reputation goes with you. Wave will help bring that concept to the web, hopefully, building trust that will allow us to have real community online.

Videos

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A Web Design Critique of the Newsweek Redesign

Joey — Mon, 18 May 2009 19:40:45 +0000

Newsweek’s redesign/relaunch today revealed a much cleaner, more web friendly site. Many improvements have been made, and you can tell that they’re thinking hard. However, there’s still room to improve. The essential problem with the site is that it still feel liks a newspaper site, not a online newsorg. Check out the embedded PDF for a look at the annotated homepage of the site and a few quick, overall notes below.

The design is nice and clean with a solid red motif, but the widgets are sorta hard to tell apart, they don’t really have a bottom.
I know that Newsweek is a partner of MSNBC, but promoting that connection so heavily may not be so smart. MSNBC should get equal billing (see: Slate and WaPo), or be totally integrated.
The choice to push the blogs so heavily is interesting (They have a widget and a nav bar). Not bad, just interesting. I’m curious to know if that works out.
Serious Fun is all kinds of UI hell. The side arrows to mean neutral is just down right confusing , and it’s got very prominent placement on the F pattern of user reading. I’m all down for turning polls into something more of a game, but rethink the UI here.
Props for having links to other newsorgs. That’s a valuable service that Newsweek is developing. The fact that you get to the other site through a frame is, again, interesting. Cheers to experimentation.

Newsweek Homepage Critique

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A few css issues on the new redesign. I recommend: max-width :)

Update

Looks like there are still some css issues to be worked out too. This is a close up of the top slider section.

Update2

Looks like the content of the change isn’t that great either.

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TV Is Dead

Joey — Thu, 01 May 2008 14:43:25 +0000

This is a great clip about what web 2.0 is – from an academic (but still very exciting) point of view.Similar Posts:

Surfin’ Safari – Blog Archive » Introducing CSS Gradients

Joey — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:06:27 +0000

WebKit now supports gradients specified in CSS. There are two types of gradients: linear gradients and radial gradients.

Surfin’ Safari – Blog Archive » Introducing CSS Gradients

For us geeky web designers out there this is just plain Cool!For those not so geeky, it means this: what could have taken over 20 lines of code can now be done in 1. Oh and when you’re browsing, you won’t have to download all kinds of drop shadow images – which means faster loading times.Similar Posts:

BBC NEWS | Technology | Hackers Exploit Poor Website Code

Joey — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 13:23:59 +0000

XSS attacks were becoming more popular because more and more websites were writing their own snippets of code so visitors could get more out of a site, he said.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Hackers exploit poor website code

Here’s the downside the Web 2.0 – a lot of what web designers are trying to accomplish has never been done in quite the same way before. That means that they’re writing a lot of custom code… and making a lot of the security mistakes that ‘standard’ code had eliminated years ago.So… ’bout time we found a serious downside to Web 2.0.Similar Posts:

Freelancers: How Do You Get Work? | Creativebits

Joey — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:45:46 +0000

Craigslist
Word of mouth.
Referrals from a past job.
My college buddies. (Especially Chris)
My colleges job board for alumni
Comedy Central/MTV job hunt board
Monster.com
Krop
Freelancers Union
Unsolicited resumes

Freelancers: How do you get work? | creativebits

Great idea for freelance work that I never considered: craigslist. Totally free and really well trafficked.Similar Posts:

Cloud Computing Is Well and Good, but It Can’t Beat the Desktop Computer. – By Paul Boutin – Slate Magazine

Joey — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 16:44:35 +0000

One of the nice things about Word and Photoshop is that once I fire them up and start working, I can forget all about the Internet for a few hours. Sometimes, my PC and I just want to be alone.

Cloud computing is well and good, but it can’t beat the desktop computer. – By Paul Boutin – Slate Magazine

I couldn’t agree more. The idea of putting all sorts of applications online is interesting, but not really practical. Photoshop Express is interesting, but it’s no more than a proof of concept to me. Perhaps worth having as a tool on an online picture ordering site (like MPIX) as a means of last minute adjustments.

Similarly, gDocs, is convenient if I need to share text with someone as I type it (and see theirs), but it’s really not a replacement to Apple Pages, which I do use instead of Microsoft Word.

This guy’s basic point is good. Computing through the browser is an interesting idea, but yet to be practical.

The real money will be made when someone figures out how to use these simple apps as they are – not as desktop replacements, but as quick little apps that plugin into simple web apps. The web is about collaboration, make the web apps about that too.

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