I know, given his god like authority in the area of Web usability, it’s almost blasphemy to disagree with Jacob Nielsen. His Alert Box is certainly one of the best sources for usability questions and answers, and his research results are invaluable when it comes to the evolution from Web sites to Web applications.

I find Nielsen’s research results interesting and I agree to 99% with his conclusions. However, that is not always the case, especially when it comes to jumping to conclusions based on raw viewer data, such as the results for “how many users tend to look at this part of the screen”.

This gathered data may be correctly reflect user behavior on tested Web sites, but then again it also depends on what these Web sites were about. Where they news pages? Blogs or magazines? Corporate Web portals? Intranet solutions? And how does this affect the trend of Web apps, which are more and more replacing “regular” Web sites?

In a recent article called Horizontal Attention Leans Left, Nielsen presents data that clearly shows a tendency towards left of the middle, inside a regular browser window (I assume it was tested on standard 1024 pixels width resolution).

Nielsen concludes, that because the user’s attention leans towards the left area of the screen, it means that navigation side bars should always be placed on the left side of the screen. I value his observation, but I fully disagree with his conclusion.

The data shows that the highest peak of attention starts around the 400 pixels area, counted from the left side. That is where the content of a regular blog or magazine starts. That is where most pages have main content. Sure, there are still quite high bars even further to the left side, around the 100 pixel area. Now, it may be true this is a result of links or navigation elements placed next to the main content on the left side. But does it mean that all navigation systems need to adopt this behavior?

Clever enough, Nielsen points out the correlation between user behavior and existing layout patterns. That may be the case, but I question his conclusion for various reasons.

For one, Web applications require more action and interaction than regular presentation Web sites. The majority of people is using a mouse with their right hand. Even with an iPad they are probably using their right hand more than their left hand. And even if all that is not the case — the right side is still second in order to the main content.

Why put something above the main content in hierarchy, when content today is the main driver of interaction? Thinking in left-sided navigation bars is retrospective Web design, it isn’t fit for modern Web applications.

Contrary to popular belief, I don’t join every new Web service there is, and I don’t need to get an invite of everything Twitterati seem to have a blast with. I really don’t, for various reasons.

For one, living on the island of Switzerland, I cannot access a service if it is relying on locality (Foursquare) or if it’s based on the entertainment industry’s content (Spotify, Pandora). These sites and services are blocked, depending on where your ass is located on this planet.

Secondly, I want to invest my time wisely. Forementioned services appear to be excellent and I’d love to get my hands dirty with them, but since I cannot do that, in the meantime, I am checking out the apps that aren’t so restrictive. The Web is all about open communication in all directions; it’s about connecting, merging, learning and organic growth. And I just love it when a new service relies on that principle at the heart of what it does.

All on one

OnePage is such a service. Now, I could say something like: It’s Friendfeed meets Twitter meets RSS meets all your life. But that would be the way everybody else describes it, and that’s not really telling you why you should be looking out for it.

OnePage lets you unify most of your Web activities in a single stream.

OnePage is currently in beta. It was founded by Joel Gascoigne and Oo Nwoye. Lead developer is Daniel Gafitescu and the Design was created by Laura Kalbag. I’ve been following Joel on Twitter, so if you want a beta invite too, you should contact him there and let him know that you really need to join this awesome Web app.

OnePage is that kind of site you want to add to your e-mail signature. Not because it does more than Facebook, but because it does less, and that it does very well. The average reader of my blog knows what I’m talking about. We are on Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, YouTube, Delicious, Vimeo, Digg, LinkedIn, Picasa, Brightkite, even Last.fm (although their service is currently overrun by competitors who remain to offer their services for free).

Hassle-free

OnePage doesn’t force you to add more friends than you actually have. Neither does it suggest that you must add another super-poke app, or join the supposedly hilarious mafia wars. It does something else, something a lot of us wanted for a long time. It brings everything you do together, on—you got it—one page.

I’ve tested OnePage for a while, particularly by adding it to my e-mail signature, and responses have been good so far. People like to get a single link where they know they can follow everything you do online.

Room for improvements

OnePage seems almost perfect. If you’d ask me what I would improve, I think I would add a personal v-card option, but not an automated one like the one on LinkedIn. And I would definitely add an option to post to all my services on OnePage, so everything that supports a status format like Twitter or Facebook would get the same post, sent from OnePage, similarly like Ping.fm and Hellotxt are offering it.

Another thing I’d like to see is RSS output. It seems to be a natural extension to add someone’s live stream from OnePage to an RSS reader, such as Google Reader or the free NetNewsWire (Mac OS only).

If you want to learn more, have a look at the video clip on OnePage, or check out its feedback channel.

In February 2008, I wrote about Safari 4.0 when it was first launched as a beta. Back then, I focussed on the learnings Apple had made by being inspired by the innovations introduced with Google’s previous release of Chrome.

(Image by Apple Inc.)

All that glitter

I don’t know how much Apple changed under the hood, but the most obvious rip-offs were the tabs which were now placed above the address bar. Apple changed that back to the original design with the release of Safari 4. The second UI copy-cat was what Apple calls “Top Sites”, a page that displays your most visited pages in a gallery—in all Apple-glory—with lots of shadows, glossy surface mirror-effects and of course presented in a concave 3D-view.

I had my doubts about Safari’s innovation factor, but it didn’t really matter. Apple’s Safari 4 update was clearly an attempt to impress the average Mac user, not necessarily to please the geeky audience of Web app developers.

Safari 4 later introduced a set of developer tools that are pretty impressive, including a nice data-flow chart, catapulting Safari 4’s value as a developer tool in line with Firefox and its combination of popular developer plugins.

Never the less, the new innovator in the browser business seems to be Google. While it is apparently struggling to finalize a release of a non-crashing version of Chrome for Mac OS, Google Chrome’s innovation factor and its influence on the industry cannot be denied.

Apple brand versus Apple innovation

Apple has a great way of glossing things up. If they continue with this pace, they will have to be careful not to lose focus of real questions and needs consumers may have.

I know it is hard to be the leader in what you do, and the constant need of living up to high expectations, appearing as innovative and fresh as Apple has always been perceived, is probably a lot of pressure. Apple has managed to withstand this pressure well in the past, repeatedly emerging as a victor over various attempts to diminish its great spirit.

The problem with focussing on being the best is, you cannot focus on being really good at the same time. With your eyes fixated on how people may perceive your brand, the foundation of the values that make this brand are an endangered species.

Why Safari 4 has privacy issues

In the past couple of weeks I tried to revive my love Safari 4 again. Playing around with Firefox 3, Chromium (an Open Source version of the upcoming Chrome for Mac OS), I always ended up being frustrated, be it over Firefox 3’s continued memory leak (600MB of constant RAM usage are not normal for any application) or Chrome’s incapability to handle Flash. With hanging head and remorseful feelings I returned the open arms of Mother Safari 4—only to get slapped in the face. So what’s wrong with Safari 4.0?

Simply put, Safari’s glamour feature “Top Sites” cannot be turned off. Try it, you may turn it off for one session, but you cannot turn it off for good. The preferences interface suggests you can, but that is an illusion. Once you startup Safari 4 again, every new tab will show Top Sites again, until you set it back to open new tabs with an “empty page”. You can play this game for a few times, but it won’t change the fact you cannot change the Top Sites setting to “empty page” for good.

You may say that’s not such a big deal. It looks like a minor flaw Apple oversaw when it changed Safari’s beta status to “release”. I would agree, if I didn’t have second thoughts caused by serious privacy issues.

Let Safari decide what you like best

Let me explain.

Every time you create a new tab with Top Sites, Safari consults a database that is hidden in your system. This database was created by the Top Sites feature and it is constantly updated as you are surfing the Web. Its content is never completely deleted when you reset Safari. Selecting “Reset Safari…” from the application menu may give you a warm, secure feeling, but it is nothing but an illusion. There are a number of things Safari claims to be erasing, but in the case of Top Sites it just resets the sites to the default set (Disney, Monster, C-Net and other sites you may or may not want to make your favorites).

I for my part do not consider Disney.com one of my favorite sites, and I am also not on a steady job search. I actually never visit Disney.com or Monster.com. Yet, this is what my browser stores about my surfing behavior.

Again, let me be clear about the issue: You reset Safari, but Safari doesn’t let you. You may also try resetting it first and then changing it to open new windows and tabs using an empty page, or any homepage you define. However, the database of Safari’s Top Sites remains intact in your System Library. Resetting Safari’s Top Sites is futile. You may as well try cooking an egg in cold water.

It doesn’t take a developer to figure out that anything that remains on your hard drive can be located by third party software, some way or the other.

Apple’s lack of care

You can try establishing your own set of Top Sites, by pinning them on the wall. Resetting them using the “Reset Safari…” menu though will reset them, but it will not not empty the database. All it does is putting you back to what Apple thinks are your favorite sites.

I am sure, somebody at Apple’s Safari team is aware of this situation. This is naturally not something they are going to talk about publicly, but I still find it surprising that, two or three updates later, Safari still has this bug. So is this actually a bug?

My theory is, this is less of a technical concern for Apple than more of a marketing- or branding issue. Apple wants to be popular, and it assumes that the most popular sites must be the best option for a default set that never changes. A default set wouldn’t be an issue if you could actually get rid of it.

Technically, having Top Sites actually erase all previous top sites and never adding or changing anything unless you choose to do so, wouldn’t be very hard to do. It is actually the normal way for all other browsers, including Google’s Chrome.

Apple is messing with its Brand Stream

If you think this is about making an elephant from a mosquito, think twice. Think of your bookmarks, by they locally stored or on a social bookmarking service, like Delicious. Would you like someone to mess with them? Sure, a fresh installation of any browser introduces a number of bookmarks you may want to get rid off as soon you opened it first time. But the point is, you actually can get rid of these default settings. Your browser won’t reinstall those bookmarks after you chose to erase them.

I am just one blogger who wrote about this issue. I have read stories about privacy issues of Safari elsewhere, but they were mostly about the beta version. Safari 4 as a release is not that old really, so Apple still has a chance to correct what went wrong. But if they are waiting for too long, it might be too late. Google’s release of Chrome for Mac OS is not so far away.

From a Brand Stream perspective, Apple’s ignorance is not helpful. Again, it is a really, really small issue. But to me, it is symptomatic of an Apple that seems to care less about the core of what made its brand rise above the level of average tech brands.

Recent history taught us, if something is simple, makes sense and it is easy to use, it will most likely become a standard. Nowhere else has this more proven to be true than on the Web.

Through the increasing expansion of Twitter, the at-sign (@) has become a standard reference for a sender’s name. It is the first time online, that the @-sign finds public usage outside of email addresses, where the @-sign is used after a name and before a domain name. Never the less, for everything that is posted online, this is going to become the new standard.

At my job we use Yammer. People at my office recently started to use the @-sign as a reference for people, as if it had never been any different. Chances are, this standard will become status quo in a couple of months from now, and other services will seamlessly adapt to the new pattern. I even predict that any online service who doesn’t use it, will be forced to use it, by the people participating in the service. This is one of the memes that is simple enough to actually break through on the lines of mass adoption.

Emerging standards: @ for user names, # for tags

Another change (introduced 2007) was the usage of hashtags (#). This change feels so obvious, it makes me scratch my head why no one had thought about it earlier. Hashtags are the natural semantic reference for tags, another emerging standard on the Web and other online media. Again, I expect more services to adapt to the situation and seamlessly integrate hashtags in their reference-system. And again, if they won’t do it, people will start doing it anyway.

So we have @ for people, # for tags. Is that all we need? Maybe it is. But from my perspective there is one thing missing, and that is the source. But the source has always been the URL, the actual link, you may say. This is true from a technical perspective, and of course, on the Web, hyperlinks are seen as the standard reference to a source. But semantically, they link to something but they don’t automatically refer to it as a source.

Do we really need a semantic reference for source?

Isn’t anyone posting something, the sender (@name), automatically the source of information? True in many cases. Of course if I make a personal statement online, I become the source of that particular bit of information. However, in many other cases I quote someone (often using quotation marks), or I refer to a source, where I found that particular part of information. When I quote Wikipedia in a paper, I put a footnote at the bottom of the page, along with an asterisk sign.

There you have it, the natural usage of asterisks for reference sources. It didn’t start today, it started long time before the Web was born, and long before # stood for hashtags and @ stood for user names.

Traditionally, the asterisk has always been a sign for birth. Look at old public birth-notices, and their counterpart, the public death-notice. The *-sign stands for birth, the †-sign stands for death.

The asterisk as a reference to a source has always been used in books, articles, papers and blog posts. An adaption on Twitter and other Web services would only be a natural continuation of this usage.

The format

To help distinguish the source of information from a person, I propose we start using the following pattern:

1. @name
2. #tag
3. *source

Here is a usage example:

I’m interested to hear your opinions. Please leave your comments and start spreading the itiative to broaden the discussion.

With all this talk about revolutionary Web applications, Web 2.0 and transitional Web, I am always baffled to find how many new sites, as good as they are looking, are running into classic design mistakes.

Take Mindmeister, for an example. Or Gifttagging or Apple. Technorati looks great, but the user experience is inconsistent. Wis.dm is not there yet, but they have improved greatly after I had consulted them a couple of months ago.

All these sites do something wrong, while Flickr, Twitter, Amazon and ZDNet Blogs are doing it right.

What am I talking about? The user experience. Namely, what is active and what not. Or in old-school terms, the links.

Click here

Links are much more these days than they used to be. The original HTML specification saw links as a core action element of hypertext markup language. Links are only one gear wheel in the whole set of Web functionality, but they are at the heart of everything. Without links, there is no action, no behavior, no “going somewhere” no “coming back”, no tabs, no context, no visitors.

If links are such a relevant element of the Web, crucial for good Web design, one would assume that anyone who creates a website (let alone a web application, which creates a lot more interaction), would have a decent look at links. But apparently that is not the case. Simply put, a lot of web designers and developers are sloppy about this factor.

The mantra

Let me be clear about this:

Designing a website and failing to incorporate interaction properly is like building a home and forgetting to put windows in it. Seriously, it is that bad.

You may use that when you talk to your designers, developers, project managers and clients. Just remember it. Use it as a mantra, stick it on your screen, put it on the backside of your office restroom door. Just think of it when you create a website.

But what does that mean actually? Incorporating interaction properly, sure; you know what that means, right? It is indeed quite simple. Which is probably one of the reasons why most people fail doing it right.

How bad is it?

What if you don’t do this right? Is it really that bad? Yes it is. But you won’t find out for a long time. Or maybe you find out through excessive user testing, but you are unlikely to find those flaws yourself. Simply because when you build something, you click on links and buttons for a thousand times. And you simply forget that little fact, that if you wouldn’t know where to click, you wouldn’t click there.

Links, buttons and anything that triggers any sort of action is what “incorporating interaction” is all about. There are hypertext links leading to a different spot on the site. There are links leading away from the site. There are links that open form masks to send emails or leave comments. There are buttons to confirm, send or post. There are buttons or links that trigger JavaScripts. If you make a list of everything that calls for action on a single web page, you might end up with a very long list. But luckily, there is only one thing you have to remember: Which are my action triggers?

Here is a step by step guide. It’s not all you need, as it doesn’t releave you from creating a concept that is clear about what your website or Web app is about. But it’s a great check list for your prototypes.

1. Use one color for links, and one color only. For all your links, no exception.
2. If you don’t want to use one link color only, at least use underlines as a significant design element to differentiate links from regular text.
3. Make a difference between what is a link that leads somewhere, and what is a button that triggers a form action.
4. Use only one kind of a button and use a consistent graphical language that makes apparent which are the buttons on your site.
5. Choose link- or button colors that signalize activity.
6. Use a clear and simple icon language that works self explanatory.
7. Use arrows to indicate direction (you can go somewhere) and not only as a neat bullet point.
8. Stick with your design choices throughout the site, and use them as a design pattern.

Trust me, as simple it may sound, sticking with this isn’t that easy. Throughout the design process you are always tempted to make something look just slightly different. You want to change the link color. You want to make it look less obtrusive perhaps, by dimming the colors a little bit. Or just to use a link instad of a button. Just because it looks neater, or you think it “works better”. It might look better, but it’s questionable if it actually works better for the users of your website.

User comes from “to use”

You always have to remember that your site visitors are users, who want to do something with your website. The main point of surfing websites is to do something with them. To get information, shop, go somewhere, return, or contribute with your own content. Today’s Web surfers are a lot less passive than they used to be a couple of years ago. The whole reason why there is a Web 2.0 movement in the first place is its users. It simply wouldn’t exist without them.

Sticking with consistent design patterns and providing clear indicators for interaction may not be important for contributing your design to CSS Mania. It may not even be noticed by your client, or even by most of your site visitors. And that is the best sign for good design, because that means it simply works.

Boy, did I want to write this post. For a long, long time. But I never got around to do it. If I wasn’t working, you guessed it, I was twittering.

Expect “twittering” to line up next to “googling” as a new word in the dictionary any time soon. It’s not just a new social Web app, it is a rocket booster of a pop phenomenon.

It is hard to tell when exactly that point emerges, when a product, person, brand or name reaches this point of critical mass. But it has typically reached that point when literally everybody is talking about it. It is that moment when you can read about it in mainstream media, and when your dad calls you and asks you if that is what you’re doing. That’s the moment when you know, something has been taking off really.

It was like that for terms like Web 2.0, Myspace, Google, Amazon and the iPod. And it’s undeniable now that all these names, companies, brands or things have settled deeply in the mindset of the average consumer. Ask anyone on the street, and they will know what Google is. They don’t need to own a computer to know it.

A number of smart people have already talked about Twitter, written articles and essays, and elaborated on what Twitter what Twitter is and how it works. Most conclude in unison that Twitter is easy to use and a lot of fun. But try explaining it until you really used it. You can try, but it will always be a blurry image of the actual experience. Twitter is a lot about the experience.

No one, not even Twitter’s founder, could possibly estimate or explain beforehand how Twitter would pull off, and why. My guess is, they just had a hunch about doing the right thing, and Twitter prove them right. If something is proven this way, by people using it around the clock, and numbers of users growing exponentially, what better way do you know to demonstrate this was a brilliant idea?

Twitter is not used by individuals only. You will find companies like Adaptive Path, Technorati and even the Bay Area’s BART have started twittering. Among its most famous adopters are Steve Jobs, Jeffrey Zeldman and iJustine.

Aside of all the hype, joy and simple fun people get out of Twitter, I made a couple of thoughts on my own. I too can enjoy Twitter without analyzing it too much. It simply works, and it works beautifully. But I wouldn’t be me if I wouldn’t want to know why it actually works. What makes this a brilliant idea?

1. In my opinion, Twitter hits the nerve of what makes a good Web application. Why?
2. Because I think for now, in our time, it is just the right balanced amount of aggregating, delivering and consuming chunks of information
3. These chunks are consumable bites, small enough to create a constant flow of get and give
4. With our habits and behavior patterns changing, maybe this alone won’t be enough for Twitter to remain attractive in future, but for now it is
5. What makes Twitter work at its core is its unobtrusive push- and pull effect, which is carried by your existing network of real life contacts and friends
6. Twitter doesn’t stick to a website, it is a lot more interactive than most social apps are
7. It isn’t a social website that makes you fill out lengthy profiles or forces you to adapt to a given grid of content offerings
8. It doesn’t define what you do with it, but restricts your data format to 140 signs
9. It can do one thing only, but does this quite well
10. It has an open interface that works with multiple communication channels and devices

In 2000 I worked for a Swiss web company for a very short time, a couple of weeks only. It was a contract job, in between some advertising jobs I was working on. The web company had just found out that their Flash site wasn’t doing anything. Still, their customers wanted Flash sites, but it dawned to this company, that Flash wasn’t ideal to deliver real content. It was pretty, but that was it.

So they found their new credo. Right out of the Cluetrain Manifesto: Content is king.

Of course that wasn’t new, but it didn’t matter. The whole point for a lot of companies like this one was, they didn’t get it, and now they did.

The interface of my MT 3.2 installation was getting old. Its fonts were too small and it looked cluttered and cramped together on my 1280 px screen.

Aside of Comic Sans, I would say Trebuchet is likely the worst web font available. So I first replaced it with Lucida Grande, followed by Arial.

The original idea was to adjust the overall size of the layout, to make it work better with the resolutions of current computer screens. I didn’t place elements differently; I just gave everything a little bit more space, adapting some of the look and feel of the core website.

It’s interesting. All of a sudden, removing some elements, cleaning it up and making it look less cluttered, can give the whole thing a Web 2.0 feel.

In my effort to improve the usability of the core website, I have added social bookmarking to the articles published in Theory. You can now add your favorite article to your Google Bookmarks, your My Web from Yahoo!, or Del.icio.us, NewsVine, Digg and Furl. I had planned to add Magnolia as well, but the Movable Type plugin I use doesn’t support Magnolia yet.

Resources

Promote This

Theory, the blog page of core, has been the #1 magnet of this website. I get a lot of comments from people finding core through Technorati or other websites. So far not many have chosen to leave a comment on articles, but I get some emails occasionally.

Why are only a few people commenting? Consulting my visitor statistics, I can see there are a lot more people visiting, but few are actually writing something. I think the answer lies in usability.

It’s pretty clear for me that layout issues may have played a part in 9rules’ decision to not include core Theory in its recent update of accepted entries. These issues displacing boxes and creating visual havoc only appear in non-standard compliant browsers, namely Internet Explorer 6 for Windows. I haven’t had a chance to check it myself, but I heard that the pages display fine (also with PNG alpha transparency) in Microsoft’s upcoming update of Internet Explorer, version 7. However, I also read that Internet Explorer 7 introduces a number of new issues that haven’t been solved yet. While its developers are closely working with the Web Standards Project, it is unclear whether they will address these issues.

Of course I’m looking into fixing the issues on corebasis.com anyways. For one, it’s a matter of pride to have a fully standard compliant website that will also work with outdated browsers like Internet Explorer. But there’s more to it. Still, at the time when I’m writing this article, around 85% of web visitors use Internet Explorer 6, and this number is not going to change greatly after the official release of Internet Explorer 7. (You can see it is already changing slowly, but it will take a year or two to replace Internet Explorer 6.)

It has been over a year now since I started out redefining web business as I see it. The result was core, my web venture in usability and experience design. According to Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, you won’t find too many people calling themselves “experience designers”, due to the fact only very few people on this planet combine skills of all fields involved. But it is exactly part of what core is about: an understanding of design that goes beyond the visible.

Growing from the core

Personally, I feel this is where I belong. Core has been difficult to start with, and it continues being difficult to run it as a business every day. The market I am working in is in flux, it is changing in pace with the Internet, and almost everything I do in this field needs a lot of extra work. The market for specialist companies like core is almost inexistent in Europe, let alone Switzerland, which always lags a little with every type of social development. It’s not technology that keeps things slow, it is the mindset of company heads.

I think there is only one way to be successful with this all. As experts, we need to educate this market and make it want what we have to offer, and that is through demonstrated excellence, through showing what we mean by doing it.

In many ways, I made this website behave and function like any ideal case I propose. I believe this is the way all websites should work; something I wholeheartedly recommend to any company in any business. Core is in the process of becoming a true conversation website.

How do you navigate through a website? By logics or intuition? Are you only fishing for the one thing you were looking for, or are you the type who wants to be surprised? A little bit of everything? That is exactly how humans behave.

This portfolio boils down to the simplest but most intuitive user interface. I am a fan of purist concepts, and in this case, I like how clear and direct the presentation follows its function. No wipes, fades, transition effects. No fuzz, no sound in background, just pictures and it is pretty clear what you do with the thumbnails below. In one sentence, it serves its purpose perfectly.

Important note: The following offer is a contract job, it is not about fixed employment. We are not looking for Flash Designers, Fireworks slicing, static table layouts! If you don’t know what Web standards are, do not apply. Please read the whole post and send your applications to core.

In the past few months, a new term has emerged on the net. Do a Technorati or Google search for Web 2.0, and you will be swamped with blog entries and articles around the subject. The high number of websites trying to explain what Web 2.0 actually means, indicates that even experts aren’t very clear about the definition of Web 2.0.

There are two characteristics of Web 2.0 most people seems to agree with. One, Web 2.0 is more about experience and usability than it is about technology. Two, it is about people interaction.

In Tidbits, Adm C. Engst writes:

“The Mozilla Corporation has released Firefox 1.5, the latest version of the popular open source Web browser for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Important new features include an automated update capability, improved navigation performance, drag-and-drop reordering of tabs, improved pop-up blocking, a one-step method of clearing private data, more-descriptive error pages, automatic RSS discovery, better accessibility, a wizard for reporting broken Web sites, enhanced support for Mac OS X (including profile migration from Safari and Internet Explorer), and numerous security enhancements. Firefox 1.5 requires Mac OS X 10.2 or later and is a 9.4 MB download.”

Firefox is the browser I recommend to all our clients. Unlike Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox is based on open standards and provides a safer and more consistent browsing experience. The technology behind Internet Explorer is totally outdated, it hasn’t been brought up to the current standards in years. But it is its low security level that is causing the greatest concerns.

Microsoft Touts Vista’s Restart Manager Feature:

Microsoft Corp. is working on a significant new feature for Windows Vista, known as Restart Manager, which is designed to update parts of the operating system or applications without having to reboot the entire machine.

BBC News writes in The Secret Of Making Things Work:

With thousands of products and services to choose from, ease of use is still a bonus factor rather than a norm and those that possess this elusive quality often go on to dominate markets.

Google, Amazon and eBay are successful brands not just because of their financial models but the ease with which their users are able to achieve their goals on these sites, be they searching, buying or selling… …Such examples of good practice are invisible to most consumers, but the bad stick in the memory.

How many people, while trying to book a holiday online, have got one detail wrong on the form, only to see that it has deleted all the details and dumped them back to the beginning?

A company’s “brand” does not just mean their logo or icon, but the gut feeling a customer gets from their products. This gut feeling is communicated by many elements including what the company says about itself, its advertising and, of course, the ease of use of its products…

…Positive experiences with products and advertising seek to remind you of a brand’s good qualities, and this responsibility has shifted away from marketers and advertisers, thanks to work done years ago by the pioneers of usability.

The Nielsen Group announced the User Experience 2005 Conference, which will run the same program simultaniously in Boston and London. One of the more interesting of the listed topics is How design patterns can increase usability.

While American Apparel is making efforts to become the new GAP, small venues like Defunker do more with tees made by American Apparel. T-shirts that make you happy is their slogan.

It’s unclear to me what American Apparel wants to be. It’s like a brand with an identity crisis. American Apparel’s brand design reminds me of the purism of London based designers: slick, cold and very reduced. But the brand experience you get by visiting their site and when you’re actually buying something online, is way different: Lots of cluttered elements crunched into small space. There is no consistent use of elements, no design language (icons compete with links in different colors) and it’s confusing to get video with some items and only pictures with others.

There’s more to the problem. American Apparel products are as dull as it gets. Some call them boring, others say they are refreshingly simple. It may be part of the success story that clothes by American Apparel can be combined with everything. But not all of it is equally boring. Some of the items feature nice cuts and interesting combinations of colors and materials. It seems obvious that American Apparel is a label that wants to break out of its own dullness. It’s almost like a couple that’s been together for a while and now they want to freshen up their sex life.

A closer look at American Apparel’s website reveals severe problems with usability and user experience:

1. 11 global navigation links
2. 35 marketing entry point links, that is 32 too many
3. 1 site map link
4. Slide shows of Bangkok bikes and Hong Kong housing mixed with fashion shoots are sexy to art directors, but confusing to customers

You may know this feeling. You’re at a house party and you go to refill your glas of wine. When you’re back the people you were talking to are gone. You look around and join a new group of people. And they look at each other and go silent.

It’s not your odor or your tipsiness. It’s because you’re late. They were talking of a hot topic, but no one wants to introduce you to it, give you a short summary of what they were talking about. But hey, it’s just a house party. It’s all cool.

Sometimes when I read about new trends on the net I feel like being late to the party. It’s like everybody else already knows what they were talking about, only I am asking questions. Being the geek I am, despite my efforts to dissolve that image, this is something that bugs me. I admit it. It’s less the fact nobody told me about the new hot topic. It’s more like “How could I not see it coming?”. Because of course I did see it coming. I was just not paying attention. If you’re going with the flow on the internet, if you dig really deep into it, then it’s almost impossible to not notice any movement in the developers scene. Still, you may oversee something that’s going to be the next star, especially when you don’t know what it actually is.

Ajax is the new kid on the block. It’s just like that with Ajax: on every blog you read, everybody who is talking about it already seems to know more than you. Some act like they are experts, but don’t look for links in their blog entries. Frankly, some of these experts have no clue what they’re talking about. I told you, it’s just like on a house party.

Children around the age of four have a hard time seeing a button and suppressing the powerful urge to push it. At that age children have learned about action, cause and consequence. A child knows that some things do certain things by the push of a button.

This is something a human being learns once, and it will never forget it. It goes so deep down in our evolutionary roots, that even some of the less intelligent animals can learn this pattern of cause and consequence. This is right down to the bottom line of usability. It’s about sensing something, being able to touch or pick it up and applying it for a certain purpose.

The same is happening to us when we’re surfing the web. Every day, every moment when we look at a website, every time we use the keyboard or mouse to type and click something, we are following the same natural behavior.

The web isn’t the first media demanding those usability qualities.

No doubt, the Web is booming again. Users have finally taken over and are now driving the industry with their demands. However, economy is still hesitant in picking up what is necessary to meet the dynamics of user demands.

When I’m talking about people here, I simply refer to them as users. I don’t restrict them to be computer- or web users exclusively. My view of the web is a holistic one. I’m taking other parts of life in account and I look at people as users—people who want to do something useful with the web. Because that’s how people are: they don’t look at the web exclusively. They don’t regard themselves as computer users only. That would make them a minority of geeks. What people really do in life is, bringing it all together. They use the phone, a computer and a tv at the same time, and for both, business and entertainment. In social perception, peoples jobs and private lives become more and more one integrated experience.