supersonic feet

Brian Oberkirch has been on a bit of a blitz of great posts about social networking today (and I’m not just saying that because he picked up on bragster supporting hCard import yesterday).

The one that I really liked is from “simple to obvious”, in which Brian has a go at the propensity people have for assuming a ‘regular user’ exists and can/should be catered to. You should read the whole post for the detail, but the bit that got me at the end was this:

I think we’ve made a fetish of ’simple’ software… Simplicity is not a value in & of itself. It’s a condition of usability within a given context. Maybe we should start trying to make ‘obvious’ software instead. What’s obvious to someone may not be obvious to another.

This is a really good point. There’s a clear danger of just designing ’simple’ interfaces and interactions where what we really want is something that’s obvious to the user. It may be that a successfull task is not a ’simple’ thing to complete, but if it’s always obvious what you need to do next, success becomes more likely. As Steve Krug would say, “Don’t make me think!”

While you’re at Brian’s site, be sure to read “What PR people should know about social media”.

Tantek Çelik’s slides from his talk on Social Network Portability are a very good, quick read as an introduction to supporting social network portability on your own site/service using microformats.

The slides include real, practical demonstrations of how it can be done and having made a bit of a start (i.e. not a good-enough start) on making bragster profiles support hCard and XFN, it’s pushed me to get it sorted on bragster as soon as possible, both in terms of properly marking up the profiles as well as potentially doing some importing of hCard/XFN info.

A 2-minute play with mofo shows it’s not hard to do the importing bit, so (dev-time time allowing) I’ll be seeing how we can use it to good effect on bragster. Satisfaction’s signup form is a pretty good example of a first step in hCard importing - helping you fill out the signup form quicker by pulling some of the data you’ve already given to another social network.

Yesterday my brother sent me a file through YouSendIt. As the person receiving the file, all I wanted to do was click the link in the email and have the download start. Instead, I was made to jump through hoops by YouSendIt’s website before I could finally download the file I’d been sent.

The email I received looked promising: it told me I could click on the link to receive the file Christian had sent me. So I did. I then got a screen asking me to sign up for an account at YouSendIt. Due to the wording, it wasn’t immediately obvious that this was a requirement for receiving a file - it just looked like upselling - but having looked in vain for a ’skip signup’ link, I had to sign up.

Form filled out, I’m then told I need to validate my email address (so I’m basically back to square one - clicking a link in my email). That done, I can finally log in. I’m a little irritated (why should I have to sign up just to receive a file?), but it looks like I’m getting there. Nope. On login, I’m shown a page inviting me to send a file. That’s not why I’m here and a minimum of session tracking could have told them that.

So I click to go to my inbox and finally, there it is: a row showing Christian’s name and the filename as a link. Click the link and download the file, non? Non. Another page, declaring ” Here is your file named xxx” and a linked URL. A step too many, but they seem to want to show me some more ads as a non-paying customer. I click the new link. By this point, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but there was still another page, promising once again “Your file is available for download”. This time there’s an orange ‘Download now securely’ button which does at last start the file download.

So let’s recap on what I, the receiver of the file, had to do to get that file: Click link in email; sign up; click another link in another email; log in; click to inbox; click file; click file; click file - 8 steps where I was expecting one, maybe two at most from the email that was sent to me.

The basis of this seems to be two things YouSendIt want me to do: sign up (so that I might then use their service to send my own files and perhaps become a paying customer) and view adverts to help them make some money on people who aren’t paying for these file transfers and storage. I can’t believe they have much success on either front.

I signed up yes, but now have no intention of ever using their service again (and I’ve even gone as far as writing this unhappy post for others to see) because of the stupid number of steps they made me go through (all unnecessary in the eyes of someone receiving a file). I also didn’t even notice the ads first time through - it’s only doing it a second time to count the steps that I noticed them and the blocked pop-ups. People have trained themselves to instantly ignore anything resembling an advert on websites.
There’s a clear reason for the person sending the file having to sign up, but why the person on the receiving end has to do anything other than click a link and download the file is beyond me.

With the hype over Web 2.0, it’s funny how many online advertisers are still using the same crass techniques of the web’s earlier years. Within a minute of each other, I just got hit by three of the most annoying advert types while checking two websites.

I loaded up an article on the Sky Sports website along with Blue’s News in separate tabs. Looking at Blue’s News first, there was an irritating buzzing noise.

“Oh look, it’s a Flash advert in the top right corner inviting me to zap a bug and win a laptop”. It’s at this point I could no longer care less about what gaming news goodness Blue might have to offer me and went to close the tab - as I do, a pop-under sneaks its way open. Marvellous. So they’ve irritated me enough with one ad that I’m closing the window without ever getting to the content of the site and now as I leave they find another way to motivate me in looking for a better site to read about upcoming computer games.

The pop-unders have actually been on Blue’s News for a while and I generally work around them, but today’s double-whammy just about does it.

OK, so that was an annoying website that stopped me in my tracks. Back to Sky Sports…

“Goodie, a floating Flash advert obscuring the article content” I think to myself (or is that just what the advertisers and webmasters expect us to think?). I was lucky this time and the ‘close’ link actually did get rid of the ad, but so often with these absolutely-positioned Flash ads the close link doesn’t work properly and you either have to reload the page in the hope the ad won’t show next time or just give up.

Given that both of these sites are driven by their content, why are they allowing adverts to hinder me in getting at that content so much? The Sky Sports one is the only that actually does prevent me reading the text, but the two on Blue’s News do just as good a job in making me leave as fast as possible. When it’s accepted (I’m pretty sure there’s actually proof, but can’t point to it now so I’ll not go that far) that people are much more likely to click on relevant text ads, why are we as site visitors still suffering with obtrusive, irritating advertising? Is there some mad majority of the population that actually responds favourably to having the content they’re trying to read obscured by an advert that they’ll actually change tack (from trying to read the content) to clicking the ad and then buying whatever it sells?

One of the most simple uses for AJAX is to monitor form input and then let the user know whether what they’ve entered is likely to be acceptable/available (e.g. choosing a username at signup). Even so, there are ways to do it well and I just found one.
I followed a link from the news on Vitamin to the new JPG Magazine site. It’s not a magazine I’d read in the past, but it looked quite cool with some good photography so I went to sign up on the site to check it out more.

The sign-up form is kept simple, to the point and with a helpful login form to one side in case you’re already a member and just a bit confused to end up at the sign-up page. Start filling in the form and the AJAX kicks in: enter your email address and once you move focus out of the email input, a little green tick in a starburst appears alongside with the text “It’s cool”.

Make your way through the rest of the short form and there are a couple more friendly messages to let you know you’re on the right track. Get it wrong and you’re provided hints on fixing the problem.

None of this is hugely new, indeed I’ve used it on sites for quite a while, but I felt JPG Magazine did it particularly well in combination with the simplicity of the rest of the form, so kudos to ‘em.

As I mentioned in my previous post, at work we’re moving a lot of clients to new hosting. Due to a very silly system at the old hosts, that means we have to transfer the domain names to a new registrar as well as they won’t let us just point at another host’s servers. We’re using 123-Reg to transfer the domains to, and today I logged in to find a new site design.

It’s quite a pleasant design, but what really got me is that it still uses frames. The layout is such that frames aren’t even a natural thing to use. It looks like what’s happened though, is that while their front-end site has been re-designed in nice tableless code with CSS to handle presentation as should be, the back-end domain management area isn’t so easy to re-code/-style. So they stuck it in a frame.

I’m hoping that is the reason and that they’re working on doing the management area properly, because if they’ve actually chosen to use frames on a fresh build, especially with the new layout they’ve used, it’s madness. It does (hopefully) drive home the point about writing semantic, valid code though. If the original site was written semantically, they could just write a new stylesheet and have their new design implemented much more easily and quickly (aside from any actual content/functionality changes of course).

123-Reg have made a good step forward with their new site, the main ’sales’ part being mostly valid HTML, with ’skip to content’ links, etc. so they (or their designers) do seem aware of the need for standards-based coding, let’s just hope the job gets finished

As part of my work at Net Effects, since Christmas last year I’ve been working on a new online shopping system wherever other client work allows. For a good few years, Net Effects have run an online shopping site called UK Shopability but when I joined the company last year they had already started getting a bit fed up with the old system.

The old Shopability suppliers stopped doing online mail order recently, having been bought out, so the decision was made to start a new site to re-launch the whole thing, working with the main distributor of disability products. And thus was born Disability Warehouse, an online shop for disability-related products.

We opened the site up to orders a couple of days ago and already a few have been coming through despite not advertising the site yet, so it’s looking good.

The site uses AJAX in places (mainly for adding an item to your cart and admin functions), though this is a site aimed at users with disabilities so it degrades properly if JavaScript is turned off and just submits a form the old-fashioned way. Some bits of the site are still being fine-tuned (e.g. product images that are missing), but the site is ready to go which is why it’s now open to sales without much fanfare - we’ll get a low volume of real sales to start to make sure everything really does work (it does so far!) before we ramp up to inviting all the many customers over from the old Shopability site.

Not as easy as you’d imagine.

Today I tried moving my Rails-based CMS code onto my host’s server so I could combine a bit of PHP code with it until I get time to re-write in Ruby (image manager plugin for XINHA). Having run rails on the server to create a default Rails directory structure, I then uploaded the /app, /config, /lang, /lib and /public folders to add the application code and settings, changing the config files for the server DB and .htaccess and dispatch files for running on the site5 server.

Unfortunately that’s as far as I’ve got so far - the Rails app won’t start, logging “premature end of script” errors in the Apache log. Running dispatch.cgi in the shell (.fcgi gives no remotely sensible errors, so just trying to get normal .cgi working for the time being) gives me this:

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-1.0.0/lib/initializer.rb:256:in `send’: undefined method `debug_rjs=’ for ActionView::Base:Class (NoMethodError)
from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-1.0.0/lib/initializer.rb:256:in `initialize_framework_settings’
from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-1.0.0/lib/initializer.rb:255:in `initialize_framework_settings’
from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-1.0.0/lib/initializer.rb:252:in `initialize_framework_settings’
from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-1.0.0/lib/initializer.rb:91:in `process’
from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-1.0.0/lib/initializer.rb:42:in `run’
from ./../config/environment.rb:10
from ./dispatch.cgi:3

I’ll be honest, I’m still new to Rails and the error doesn’t mean a great deal to me (other than it having decided there’s no ‘debug_rjs=’ method in existence - I’m not using any RJS!). I have a feeling it might be a versioning problem - site5 seem to be running Rails 1.0.0 while I’ve been developing on 1.1.2 so I’ve sent them an email to see if it’s possible to get 1.1.2. Other than that, I’m pretty much stuffed at this early stage of my Rails experience. If any Rails experts happen to read this and can think of a solution, please let me know!

The one thing I do miss from PHP is clear, explanatory error messages at pretty much all times. Yes, it’d sometimes tell you line 34 when the problem was at line 31, but it usually does a very good job of pointing you close enough to the problem and with enough info to quickly track down what’s happening. With Rails I get a page just telling me the application failed to start (it’s in development mode, not production, so there’s no reason not to give more info on what went wrong).

Anyway, I still love Rails from a development point of view - I’ll just love it more if I can get it to work on a live website!

UPDATE: Yup, it needed to be Rails 1.1 - running ‘rake freeze_gems’ on my local install to dump the rails code in /vendor/rails and then uploading that got it working.

After flickr finally adding pages to see comment activity on your photos from one place as part of their swish ‘gamma’ re-design, all was looking good.

Then tonight I tried to get back to the ‘create a flickr badge‘ page and found that their information architecture ain’t all that good. It’s taken me eventually searching flickr’s forums in order to get the link to the page I was after, where the link used to be on your main photos page.

Granted, it perhaps didn’t deserve to be on a user’s main photo page all the time as it’s something you only use now and then, but they seem to have gone from always available to extremely hard to find. I tried going through the various drop-down menus at the top of the page; looking at my account and profile pages; I even looked at the page with the link once and didn’t notice it (the Help > Tools page).

It really doesn’t stand out anymore. For such a handy feature, you’d think flickr would want it very easy to find. One reason I didn’t spot it even when on the right page (aside from the link not standing out in the least) is that the Tools page is under the Help section. To me, help sections are where you go for FAQs, support, etc. and not generally where I expect to find application functionality. Yes tools help you, but in a more functional than advisory way.

Anyway, I found it in the end, just a bit miffed at how awkward I found it.

Via Vitamin, I just read a very good blog post by Matt Mullenweg about the beeping in his house. He came back from a trip to find an irritating beep every minute or so, but didn’t fix it for days.

The gist of the post is about how engineer-types are able to block out irritating noises or problems after a short period of getting used to them. Matt put up with a smoke alarm going off every minute for three days, happily getting on with his work and simply taking calls in another room, before finally getting that new 9-volt battery.

He ends his post by suggesting everyone go and check through their blogs/web apps/whatever and find the ‘beeps’, then concentrate on them and get them fixed. The point here is that we tend to start blocking out small irritations along the way when developing code (in order to concentrate on the important stuff) to the point where we’ve forgotten they were problems in the first place. That’s obviously not good for your finished product, so going back through and re-finding all the beeping noises will allow you to properly polish your system.

We’ve all seen these kinds of little irritations in either our own apps or others’ (e.g. flickr’s previous lack of a page to just find the newest comments on your posts) and Matt’s post provides a great analogy and reminder to get them sorted and improve user experience.