Blogs

I’ll be giving a talk on JavaScript development in Dreamweaver CS4 a this year’s Adobe MAX conference in San Francisco. If you’re in for the conference come by and check it out! We’ll be going over a bunch of new features in DW, Spry, and some debugging stuff.

“Rich User Interfaces in Dreamweaver CS4” – Moscone West 2022 (2008-11-17) 3:30pm.

I recently installed Skitch for doing mac screenshotting after I switched to Mac from Windows. I found it to be cumbersome and not exactly intuitive. Then I discovered a really handy screenshotting tool that comes as a Dashboard Widget. Check this out (Screenshot Plus).

All you designers out there.. if you ever were looking for a font that was clear even at very small PT’s, this is for you. Over at WebSiteTips.com, I found a list of pixel fonts – many of them free! Check them out:

http://websitetips.com/fonts/pixel/#pixelfonts

I wrote a fairly basic but handy JavaScript Object Inspector and Logger that works across different browsers. I call it “NitobiBug“.

Read all about it’s features here. I did a video tour also, which you can see here (turn down your volume – its loud!).

Check out the live demo here.

Essentially, what it does is provide a logging utility like Firebug’s console.log that properly inspects objects and shows you it’s members. If you log errors it formats them nicely too. If you inspect DOM elements with it, it attempts to show you where on the page they are and calculate their widths and heights and positions on the page. You can resize and drag NitobiBug around the page, and it tries to remember where you put it.

I use it all the time while I’m working on RobotReplay so I figured maybe other people would too. It’s certainly not the only such tool out there but I think it’s decent. Anyway, your comments are welcome!

I felt lucky to get on the Viewzi preview invite list. You can too if it hasn’t launched by the time you read this. Viewzi is a search aggregator that tries to present search results in an innovative and user-friendly way. This is achieves quite well, in my opinion, having studied a few other attempts at this over the years (snap.com, nexplore.com). Here is a summary of my experience on Viewzi today.

Launch Page

Nice and simple. I like the invitation to watch the training video. However, then I went to see it in Internet Explorer 8 (running in IE7 mode) and the whole thing went to hell (see screenshot below)

I was also treated to a JavaScript error. Next, I was curious about the footprint of this launch page. I opened up FireBug and watched the download. This page is 113kb, which in my opinion is too much for a search launch page. I recognize that nobody on a dial-up connection would ever use this site to begin with – fair enough, but under high-load conditions this is going to be an expensive page to serve and probably a slow page to download. Certainly when compared to the 12KB of utilitarian sparseness of Google.com. Anyway, the page did in fact come up very quickly for me so I probably shouldnt complain.

Test-Search “U2″

I tried searching for the band “U2″ and was presented with this results-browsing view. First off – it looks great, and the UI is really smooth and intuitive. However, this was not a search-results page. I think I should have been shown search results right away – as a jumping-off point for browsing these other views. Note: If you DO click on a search results view, further searches are immediately presented in this view.

In general I was impressed with the overall speed of everything. Search aggregators have a rep for being sluggish. I didn’t get that impression here.

Next I started exploriing the different views. Since U2 is a band, I was curious what results the MP3 view would produce:

These were all U2 songs and I could play then directly from the viewzi window. Nice! The other day myself and Mike Han were talking about 90’s rock and we wanted to hear some Nirvana. This would have been great.

Next I clicked on the ‘celebrity photos’ view to see if there were any Bono mugshots.

No mugshots, but these were mostly all relevant. The question is what can I actually do with these results? Normally when I’m searching for images I want them to download. for use in some graphic I’m putting together. This isn’t the view for that, but fortunately there IS another photo view:

This is where Viewzi had search-relevance problems. None of these images were of U2. Oh well.

Back to the other results. Viewzi has traditional text-search results that aggregate Google and Yahoo (is that legal?). Anyway, they were spot on of course – and quite snappy. The other view that really caught my attention however was the Video search:

The video search aggregates a bunch of video services in a really cool browser that actually saves you a lot of time. To me this is one of the key strengths of a service like this.

Overall I’m really impressed with Viewzi. I think it had some search relevance issues with the images but I’m sure they’ll continue to work on that as they move towards release. I think what could really help Viewzi is if they in turn opened up their aggregation capabilities in the form of a set of API’s, and Widgets that other people can use on their sites in the way that Snap.com has done. I don’t think I’ll really switch over from google (not until they get their browser search widget to work) – but I’ll definitely be checking back to see how it evolves. In the meantime, I encourage you to check it out: viewzi.com

We use this service all the time. I used it on Nintendo.com, and I’m sure many of you could use it to. If you ever need an activity indicator, and want to be able to customize the background color, etc.. check this out:

http://www.ajaxload.info/

Love the token Web2 BETA logo up in the top right corner.

The people at NetLifeResearch have put together a funny little ‘Bad Usability Calendar’ which is an interesting look at some bad habits in interaction design. I’ve reposted it here (bad_usability_calendar_08_us_english.pdf) for download but you can also get it off their site here (http://www.badusability.com/).

Some highlights:

• Only add personalization where it adds value
• Dont require login where it isn’t needed
• Bigger is better (at least easier to click)

I’m doing some casual research right now on website usability metrics for RobotReplay. I stumbled onto an old but still interesting blog post about the old ‘Three Click Rule’. Don’t worry, I hadn’t heard of it either. Essentially this is a rule of thumb that says that every piece of content on your site should take no more than 3 clicks to get to.

So what does this have to do with pogosticking? Pogosticking is the act of jumping up and down through the hierarchy of a web site, repeatedly hitting the back button to move to the next item in a list. The general concensus is this is a behavior you want to avoid in your users. The two concepts are related but are they both valid?

Turns out, probably not. The UIE blog people did some research that showed that number of clicks was not related to goal success.

The next thing they looked at was user satisfaction. What they wanted to know was did more clicking result in consistently lower satisfaction? Turns out not really.

This flies in the face of conventional wisdom (at least my limited wisdom anyway). Turns out dissatisfied ran the gamut in terms of the number of clicks they made. Satisfaction seems to be intrinsically linked to other factors.

However.. what they did find that the specific behavior of pogosticking could reliably predict low goal completion. In other words.. clicking ok, pogosticking bad.

I wonder if anyone has done research on pogosticking within a particular page. (ie: scrolling up and down, mousing all over the place, etc).

Phil Haack proposed a very interesting method of stopping comment spam on bulletin boards, forums, and blogs. Hey calls this technique the ‘Honeypot’ Captcha.

The basic idea is that comment spam doesn’t generally execute JavaScript and doesn’t evaluate CSS. They also love form fields. So.. the idea is that you put a hidden form field in your comment form, and anybody that fills it out (ie spam bots), throw out that comment.

Its a smart idea. Some commentors pointed out that this might throw off people with screen readers who will have those fields read aloud. I’m not a JAWS expert but I have spent some time with it, and I don’t think it will read hidden fields.. Its fairly CSS aware. Other screen readers may get tripped up on this – not sure. I suppose you could help those people by putting a hidden label right next to the field: “If you are on a screen reader such as Windows Eyes, please disregard the following form field:”

I suppose its also a matter of time before spammers get wise to this somehow too. BTW If you are an ASP.NET user, he’s got some sample code on his site here.

“This is an empty box”. I love it.

This really shows the contrast between a young and aging tech brand.

BTW, if you’re curious about iPhone packaging.. See my earlier post.