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This week's theme is the web itself. That's fitting, because we've
just rewritten our publishing system and streamlined our HTML to make
Positive load faster.
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Volume 4 Issue 1
useit.comDecember 13,1998 Usability engineer Jakob Neilsen tells us that web sites should be designed to be easy to use, rather than to pop our eyeballs or impress other designers. The wonder of the web is that, even though pages are made by different people with different visions, the user interface is sufficiently consistent that anybody can learn to surf it in an hour. useit.com features Nielsen's biweekly Alertbox column as well as other articles: here you can the recent findings on human interface research and the growth of the web. The lesson? Test your designs on innocent users before unleashing them on the masses. Frozen According to Frozen, the problem with the web is the intrusion of commercial interests on the web such that "All roads seem to terminate in an order form with actual content deliverable on payment." Spam, ad banners, and useless animated .gifs pollute the internet experience -- and we should fight back. In the section "Transmission" we enjoyed articles advocating the text web browser Lynx and denouncing Swatch's ad campaign based on Nicolas Negroponte's McLuhanesque rantings. Frozen has links to fellow travelers to enjoy, as well as the graphical adventure "Hell." Information Activism Internet researcher Wendy Murdock got a fantastic domain name for Information Activism which declares "We want information that is up-to-date and actively maintained, be it daily, monthly or quarterly" and "... information that has been abandoned and no longer actively maintained is fair game for ridicule and subject to become a target for Information Activism's educational campaigning." This simple and well-designed site calls on us to take responsibility for the information we keep online so that the rest of us don't get lost. BITE Our own experiment in Dynamic HTML, BITE is a piece of web art with floating bouncing colorful words over a starfield background. We got it working with Netscape 4.0 a year ago in a bit more than hour, but kept it under wraps until we could make it work with Internet Explorer. This took three times longer than it took to create it -- no thanks to Microsoft's Site Builder Network which is devoid of serious technical documentation. Wouldn't want to sour the market for those lurid, oversized, and overpriced computer books which go obsolete in a week... |
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