We have talked before about how we are so susceptible to falling into the trap of thinking "everyone" lives, works, acts and reacts as we do. The most common manifestation of this in Web work happens when a developer gets a new wide screen monitor, or a faster connection, or learns some new technology like Flash.
Suddenly their Web pages only look good when displayed at a skillion-pixels by another skillion-pixels. Or suddenly every page has some Flash content (or JavaScript, or whatever). The thing to take away from this is that it is rarely a conscious decision to do this. It is rare that someone says "Well, I was the last person stuck with a 15" monitor at 800x600, so now the sky is the limit!" Rather, it is a matter of doing what they have always done: Making pages look good (to them, and at the time). As good as they can, in most cases.
But this is of course why we check our pages in other browsers. It's why we re-size browsers to see how content flows around the various fixed page elements, images and graphics, scrolls into and out of columns and so forth. Not everyone uses Firefox, no matter how cool it is. Not everyone uses Safari, no matter how impressive it's new features. Not everyone uses Internet Explorer, even though it ships as the default Web browser for most computers sold these days.
There are other more insidious examples. Not everyone knows all of the Secret Handshake jargon, abbreviations and acronyms that so many of us use every day. Does your navigation actually tell people where they end up if they click on those links? Title attributes can go a long way toward easing some of this burden, but even then we still have to depend upon the users to know or expect this feature and hover over links they are unsure of. Where does SHPS go? Student Housing and Parking Services? Student Housing and Pet Surveillance? Solstice Homeopathic Plant Scheduling? Student Health and Popular Science? Some Help Poor Senators?
Jargon and abbreviations are fine within the walls of whatever group uses and understands them, though I would still recommend using Title attributes and spelling-out the full name on first use, just for the new people. But any time you are dealing with civilians you should not just assume that because you have been online for years, "everyone" has been online for years, and will "just know" how something works. Just because you have a nice new monitor that overlaps your desk doesn't mean "everyone" can see a fixed-width wide-screen display, any more than just because you are on Twitter and understand RTs and @-signs, it doesn't mean anyone else can figure out your 140-character shorthand.
I just got new hardware. And in only a week I have already found myself unthinkingly operating as though "everyone" had at least as much display area. It is a beautiful 24" of gleaming, glossy pixels. It reminds me of the 9" screen of my first computer, and just how far we have come. But yeah, I have had to remember to download new copies of my favorite browsers, just to have them available, and re-size them (within all of that room!) to see how it affects the content. I have had to check pages on my iPhone, to see how they work there, without Flash and with only a few-dozen pixels to work with.
It can be hard to try to see your site with new eyes. But the experience can be valuable. If you can find someone who does not work in your field, someone who has never visited your pages before, and watch them try to accomplish some simple tasks, it can be very rewarding.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Renewal, and Like That.
I am back into it, again, after a little vacation, and hitting the ground running these last couple of weeks, doing much that is New&Improved.
Foremost is probably the work being done on the new Templates. The UNL Web Developers' Network has been at work on a new page since last fall. Seth, Roger, Eric, Vishal, Aaron, Brett, Bob and a host of others have been hammering out details concerning navigation, color and content, but the most important thing anyone has done so far has been in service to answering the question Why?.
Why redesign our pages? Why now? Why did we place navigation here, here and there instead of putting it all here? Why would someone point at this and click instead of pointing at that and clicking? Why isn't this or that area of the page getting more traffic or interest? On and on and on, one of the most refreshing things about this redesign has been the willingness of all of the various participants to challenge one another by asking that simple question. Why?
Why, indeed. And the best part of the exercise for me has been watching it all unfold. These are very creative people, and most of them are very adept at the technical workings of not just a Web browser as we are familiar with them on desktop and laptop computers, but also with the new cell phones and other Internet Appliances appearing with some regularity. The dozen or so neurons responsible for creativity must live very close in our brains to the ones responsible for the concept of ownership, or family, because in my experience it is very difficult to challenge someone's work, someone's concept, someone's vision, without them taking it a little personally. And yet there has been almost none of that, in this entire process.
Back me up against a wall and make me defend my position and I can tell you why I made the design choices that I made. But I have a hard time doing it without getting defensive, or moody if the collective decides to go another way. It has been an inspiration, watching this group of professionals working with only one goal, producing the best Web site we can for the community we serve, wrestling with the various choices involved in going about attaining that goal. We all want the same thing; we just sometimes all want the same thing differently. But we are all still friends. It has been amazing.
I am also about knee-deep in renewing the training that I do here. And again, the question of Why keeps me on track. Why did I introduce this concept here, instead of doing it later? Why would we need to continue discussing this, when that trend kind of burned itself out about 2002? Why mention workarounds for Web browsers that have miniscule representation in our user logs these days?
So I have been going through each course, page-by-page, and making various edits and cuts and embellishments. We have new software in the Creative Suite 4 release from Adobe. That means new Photoshop and Dreamweaver, and we are deploying these on the also-new laptops in the training theater this week, so it is time that our training materials reflected the various changes in moving from CS3 to CS4, as well as all we have come to learn in the years since the original pages were set down. Again and again, I have asked myself Why and I think the new courses are going to be much better for it.
Why has led me to change the way I work quite a bit, too. I am going to cut down on the number of computers I work on, which should mean that more often than not I have the latest files with me at any given time. And I'm near finishing about a skillion different time-sinks that should mean I have time to work on some training I have had to put off for weeks.
I hope you have a good summer, too.
Foremost is probably the work being done on the new Templates. The UNL Web Developers' Network has been at work on a new page since last fall. Seth, Roger, Eric, Vishal, Aaron, Brett, Bob and a host of others have been hammering out details concerning navigation, color and content, but the most important thing anyone has done so far has been in service to answering the question Why?.
Why redesign our pages? Why now? Why did we place navigation here, here and there instead of putting it all here? Why would someone point at this and click instead of pointing at that and clicking? Why isn't this or that area of the page getting more traffic or interest? On and on and on, one of the most refreshing things about this redesign has been the willingness of all of the various participants to challenge one another by asking that simple question. Why?
Why, indeed. And the best part of the exercise for me has been watching it all unfold. These are very creative people, and most of them are very adept at the technical workings of not just a Web browser as we are familiar with them on desktop and laptop computers, but also with the new cell phones and other Internet Appliances appearing with some regularity. The dozen or so neurons responsible for creativity must live very close in our brains to the ones responsible for the concept of ownership, or family, because in my experience it is very difficult to challenge someone's work, someone's concept, someone's vision, without them taking it a little personally. And yet there has been almost none of that, in this entire process.
Back me up against a wall and make me defend my position and I can tell you why I made the design choices that I made. But I have a hard time doing it without getting defensive, or moody if the collective decides to go another way. It has been an inspiration, watching this group of professionals working with only one goal, producing the best Web site we can for the community we serve, wrestling with the various choices involved in going about attaining that goal. We all want the same thing; we just sometimes all want the same thing differently. But we are all still friends. It has been amazing.
I am also about knee-deep in renewing the training that I do here. And again, the question of Why keeps me on track. Why did I introduce this concept here, instead of doing it later? Why would we need to continue discussing this, when that trend kind of burned itself out about 2002? Why mention workarounds for Web browsers that have miniscule representation in our user logs these days?
So I have been going through each course, page-by-page, and making various edits and cuts and embellishments. We have new software in the Creative Suite 4 release from Adobe. That means new Photoshop and Dreamweaver, and we are deploying these on the also-new laptops in the training theater this week, so it is time that our training materials reflected the various changes in moving from CS3 to CS4, as well as all we have come to learn in the years since the original pages were set down. Again and again, I have asked myself Why and I think the new courses are going to be much better for it.
Why has led me to change the way I work quite a bit, too. I am going to cut down on the number of computers I work on, which should mean that more often than not I have the latest files with me at any given time. And I'm near finishing about a skillion different time-sinks that should mean I have time to work on some training I have had to put off for weeks.
I hope you have a good summer, too.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Anglais, por Favor!
Are you overly infatuated with jargon? Do you say things like "We need to reboot this project?" when you mean "start over"? Do you give directions with "Port!" and "Starboard!" or something similar? Are your handwritten notes filled with BCNU and @-sign declarations?
It may be time to back off of this a notch, friends.
I love the shorthand of jargon, and have embraced it in every field I have ever entered, from sales to writing to radio announcing to Web development, but come on, people, as ubiquitous as texting and the Web are, not everyone is everywhere—or wants to be.
We are just coming through a period of about three months where The Media discovered Twitter. By summer they'll be on to the Next Big Thing, but right now we are seeing the service mentioned several times per day, in several contexts and in several outlets. Once limited to technical blogs and Web sites, Twitter exploded in late February and early March and suddenly there were stories about Twitter in specialty magazines and mainstream magazines alike. It was on TV news stories and in TV episodes and commercial advertising even bought into it, literally, paying people to tweet about products.
The backlash will be here in about a week; ten days, tops.
Until then, it might be well to remember the first rule of Web Design: Not Everyone Uses The Web The Way We Do. Just as not everyone has a wide-screen monitor attached to a mighty network, just as not everyone has had the benefit of years and years of Doing This, whatever "this" might actually mean, just as not everyone has JavaScript enabled, not everyone is hip to the grooviness that is Twitter.
People use jargon as shorthand. When I say to a fellow pilot I was afraid I might stall the airplane, I'm talking about an aerodynamic stall, having nothing to do with the engine. But every year some Cub Reporter will ask someone at an airport why a plane crashed, get the reply "He stalled, coming in for a landing" and dutifully report on the news that night that the engine quit. That's not an effective use of the language. You have not effectively communicated what happened to the airplane if someone goes away thinking it was an engine problem.
My grandmother used to pepper our Christmas and birthday cards with medical jargon. She worked at a hospital and understood that et meant and, but nobody at our home did and we came away not nearly as impressed with Gramma's greetings as she might have thought we were.
The whole point of communication is the transfer of an idea from one person to (at least) one other. You're supposed to be richer for having received the message, not confused or left wondering what the author might have had for lunch that would cause them to send such a cryptic, confusing message.
You may know what a re-Tweet is. You may know the meaning of @ in a top-level domain and the meaning of @ in Twitter, but don't assume that anyone else does. Within the Twitter community it's perfectly acceptable, but be careful using that kind of thing elsewhere, because an awful lot of people aren't going to bother looking up what it is you meant, they will just judge you poorly for not having said what you mean.
We don't all have modems. We don't all have skillion-color wide-screen monitors. We don't all have Flash. We don't all have every flavor of Web browser. And we don't all hang out on Twitter, so we don't all know what it is that you're trying to say.
It may be time to back off of this a notch, friends.
I love the shorthand of jargon, and have embraced it in every field I have ever entered, from sales to writing to radio announcing to Web development, but come on, people, as ubiquitous as texting and the Web are, not everyone is everywhere—or wants to be.
We are just coming through a period of about three months where The Media discovered Twitter. By summer they'll be on to the Next Big Thing, but right now we are seeing the service mentioned several times per day, in several contexts and in several outlets. Once limited to technical blogs and Web sites, Twitter exploded in late February and early March and suddenly there were stories about Twitter in specialty magazines and mainstream magazines alike. It was on TV news stories and in TV episodes and commercial advertising even bought into it, literally, paying people to tweet about products.
The backlash will be here in about a week; ten days, tops.
Until then, it might be well to remember the first rule of Web Design: Not Everyone Uses The Web The Way We Do. Just as not everyone has a wide-screen monitor attached to a mighty network, just as not everyone has had the benefit of years and years of Doing This, whatever "this" might actually mean, just as not everyone has JavaScript enabled, not everyone is hip to the grooviness that is Twitter.
People use jargon as shorthand. When I say to a fellow pilot I was afraid I might stall the airplane, I'm talking about an aerodynamic stall, having nothing to do with the engine. But every year some Cub Reporter will ask someone at an airport why a plane crashed, get the reply "He stalled, coming in for a landing" and dutifully report on the news that night that the engine quit. That's not an effective use of the language. You have not effectively communicated what happened to the airplane if someone goes away thinking it was an engine problem.
My grandmother used to pepper our Christmas and birthday cards with medical jargon. She worked at a hospital and understood that et meant and, but nobody at our home did and we came away not nearly as impressed with Gramma's greetings as she might have thought we were.
The whole point of communication is the transfer of an idea from one person to (at least) one other. You're supposed to be richer for having received the message, not confused or left wondering what the author might have had for lunch that would cause them to send such a cryptic, confusing message.
You may know what a re-Tweet is. You may know the meaning of @ in a top-level domain and the meaning of @ in Twitter, but don't assume that anyone else does. Within the Twitter community it's perfectly acceptable, but be careful using that kind of thing elsewhere, because an awful lot of people aren't going to bother looking up what it is you meant, they will just judge you poorly for not having said what you mean.
We don't all have modems. We don't all have skillion-color wide-screen monitors. We don't all have Flash. We don't all have every flavor of Web browser. And we don't all hang out on Twitter, so we don't all know what it is that you're trying to say.
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