Tag: design

Clean & Hackable URLs

Post ImageA week ago, Roland Tanglao reiterated his love for clean URLs. Or perhaps more accurately, his hatred of dirty (?) URLs. Here’s what he wrote:

URLs with question marks, ampersands, etc should be banished to the Web 1.0 h*ll where they belong. I’ve been preaching the clean URL gospel for years but if I see one more WordPress blog with “?p” or one more Drupal site with “?q”, I’ll scream 🙂 Seriously if your webhost or your tech gal/guy can’t figure out how to use clean URLs, find somebody else. It’s 2007!

I couldn’t agree more. Here’s an example of what he means:

Dirty: http://example.com/articles.html?articleid=123&tag=rss
Clean: http://example.com/articles/123/rss

Clearly I prefer the second one, and I’m guessing you do too. I’m going to go one step further though, and say that not only should URLs be clean, they should be hackable! What does that mean? Let me give you an example:

http://mastermaq.podcastspot.com/episodes/FF7962/license
http://mastermaq.podcastspot.com/episodes/FF7962
http://mastermaq.podcastspot.com/episodes
http://mastermaq.podcastspot.com

The first link is for the licensing information of an episode. All you’ve got to do is “hack” off the end and you get the episode itself. One more hack and you get all the episodes. And finally, you’re left with the entire podcast. It’s pretty logical right? And it would be trivial to replace the episode ID with another one, or /episodes with /tags, etc. That’s what I mean by hackable – they are easily modified to get you where you want to go.

Here’s another example:

http://mastermaq.podcastspot.com/episodes/archive/2007/02/24

That will show you all episodes for February 24th, 2007. The URL is readable, and immediately you understand what it is doing. What if you want a different day? Replace 24 with something else. Just the month? Hack off the 24. You get the idea.

Clearly I am drinking the clean & hackable URLs koolaid, and as a result Podcast Spot has nothing but clean, hackable URLs. If you’re working on a web project, consider doing the same – your users will thank you for it.

Am I the only one who cannot open a box of KD?

You might think that is a funny question to ask, but I am serious. On the side of every box of Kraft Dinner, there is a little tab with a message that reads:

Press in tear back top/Enfoncer et tirer vers le haut

Problem is, it never works. I can never get the tab to push in. I have even tried using a knife to cut the edges of the tab in order to push it in, and it still doesn’t work properly. As a result I always end up fighting with the top of the box.

  

What’s the point of having the message if it doesn’t work?

Expression Studio and XAML bring markup to Windows

Post ImageOver the years I have designed my fair share of user interfaces. Sometimes they have been decent, other times they have sucked. I’ve taken a few courses on design and have picked up many tricks along the way. For the last few months I have been primarily working on web applications, though I have created a number of Windows applications in the past. The most important thing I have learned?

Markup is awesome.

You can’t appreciate this completely until you have designed both a website using something like ASP.NET and a Windows application using something like Windows Forms. The website job wins every time. That’s why the new Expression Studio from Microsoft is so important:

So, could Flash ever be “force fit” to be the UI of Windows? Not according to the engineers who’ve studied the problem.

They needed a system that could be used to design real pieces of Windows, if not the entire UI, and handed off to a developer, or team of developers, without having to have the developers touch the UI at all.

The rest of Scoble’s post is quite good – he explains exactly the problem that Expression and XAML attempt to solve. I’ve seen some demos of Expression Designer, and I came away truly impressed. Finally the ability to create Windows interfaces using markup. I can’t even describe how excited I am!

Markup has lots of advantages. It is XML-based, and therefore it’s human readable. Being XML-based also means we can validate, transform, and extend it. Markup is extremely easy to write and to parse. For interfaces, markup allows us to separate the interface from the underlying logic. There are a lot of reasons to like markup.

XAML brings the power of markup to Windows, and Expression Studio will make it easy to work with. Everything else (like cross-platform support, targeting Flash, etc.) is secondary.

For more on Expression Studio, check out the official press release, TechMeme, and the Expression website.

Read: Robert Scoble

Joel is wrong about Windows Vista's off switch

Post ImageNormally I agree with what Joel Spolsky has to say, but not today. His latest article, Choices = Headaches, smells like a lame attempt to bash Windows Vista just for the sake of it. He takes issue with the “fifteen” ways you can shutdown Windows Vista, though only nine of those apply to non-laptops. Here’s what he says:

I’m sure there’s a whole team of UI designers, programmers, and testers who worked very hard on the OFF button in Windows Vista, but seriously, is this the best you could come up with?

Joel apparently doesn’t think you can just press the power button – yet that’s exactly what I’d bet most people will end up doing. You can read all about the power button in this CNET News.com article which, by the way, was published over a year ago. Here’s a choice quote:

And with Vista, Microsoft plans to make it so that a PC seems more like all the other consumer electronics out there. Pressing the power button will give users the feeling they are either turning the machine on or turning it off.

So it really is as easy as Joel would like. And for crazy people out there like myself who want all the shutdown options, they are still there, tucked away neatly in a little menu.

I guess Joel’s main problem is having too much choice. Personally, I’m a fan of choice. The research I have come across is pretty divided on whether choice does more good or more harm. That said, Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail certainly makes more choice seem like the way to go. His newest catchphrase – the economics of abundance – conveys this idea really well too.

Note: I haven’t tried Windows Vista since the early betas, so I don’t know if the power button functionality has changed or not, but I haven’t come across anything to suggest that it has. Joel doesn’t say anything about it in his post either.

You can read more about this story here and here.

Read: Joel on Software

Website Changes

Unless you read my blog in an aggregator of some sort, you probably noticed an updated color scheme and picture on my website today. I was getting bored with the blue so I decided to change it. I also tweaked things a bit so that it’s easier to change this sort of thing in the future. Thanks to everyone who has commented on the look already – some of you like the changes, some of you don’t. The picture is a little too formal for my tastes, so my Dad has agreed to take some new ones for me when he’s in town in a couple weeks.

I also added a find me online feature recently. Basically it’s a list of links to my various profiles around the web. I haven’t done it yet, but I am going to clean up the sidebar as well. It’s horribly out of date, and I think I could be using the space better.

Any other feedback, suggestions, or requests?

Visualizing Information

Post ImageOne thing that really interests me is the different ways in which you can visualize information. Most often, text is simply not the best way. A picture really is worth a thousand words! Audio and video or animation of some sort can also be quite helpful in trying to comprehend something that may be difficult using just words. A good example is this post put together by Matt at the Signals vs. Noise blog:

Science presents some of the most interesting challenges for information designers. How do you help people grasp sizes, distances, and ratios that are nearly unimaginable?

You’ve got to check out some of the images he found, especially if you’re a teacher or parent. There’s some really interesting stuff! My favorite is the image of our solar system.

Read: Signals vs. Noise

Flickr Gamma

Post ImageFlickr launched a new redesign yesterday, and upgraded the site from Beta to Gamma. I heard the redesign mentioned at Mesh by Chris Messina, who wasn’t exactly ecstatic about the changes. I for one love the new design, and think it is long overdue!

  • The menu at the top has been simplified and now contains dropdown menus to access various areas of the site. I found the old, two-tiered menu structure kind of confusing, so for me, this is a welcome change.
  • Search has been improved, and no longer just looks in tags.
  • There’s a new person menu on buddy icons.
  • Your Photos now shows to columns of photos instead of just one.
  • The Organizr is vastly different, and I haven’t really had a chance to play with it yet.

Great job Flickr, keep it up! I hope the site does eventually leave it’s greek editions to go final, but at least they are not stuck on beta forever. Perhaps a lesson (and new model) for others to follow?

Read: Flickr Blog

Judging websites in a flash

Post ImageThere’s a very popular article (according to NewsGator) at Nature.com today titled “Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye“. Even though you think you’re giving a website a chance by taking a good, long, hard look at it, chances are you’ve made up your mind in less than a second:

We all know that first impressions count, but this study shows that the brain can make flash judgements almost as fast as the eye can take in the information. The discovery came as a surprise to some experts. “My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds,” says Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa, who has published the research in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology1. Instead they found that impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing.

Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny.

The research is particularly interesting for website designers like myself. And students of visual design, for that matter. Chances are if someone likes your design better, they’re going to like the content better too. I know I am guilty of that. I hate reading a plain black and white HTML page with only text, but I don’t mind reading something that is styled attractively, even if the content is the same.

What’s your flash judgement on this site? Be honest now!

Read: Nature.com