Monthly Archives: November 2007

Learning Russian

Here is a good post from Munjal Shah , the CEO and co-founder of like.com, where he talks about trying to get their heads around the metrics of their new site after launch:

“Launching a new site is like becoming the owner of a brand Russian nuclear power plant. You have a ton of dials with labels you can’t read. The only dial you can read is the amount of electricity (in our case revenue) and the temperature of the nuclear core (in our case number of clicks you are sending to merchants). “

– My new nuclear power plant

That’s a nice analogy!

In their case, they used a form of A/B testing to better understand the impact of the changes they were making.

What are you doing?

Whatever it is, make sure you base your decisions on facts not opinions.

Get a Mac

The Mac and PC characters have become famous on the back of the Apple ads. Recently they’ve appeared in some cheeky online ads which have been running on a few tech sites.

The actor who plays PC even appears as a guest star in one episode of the Flight of the Conchords HBO series.

Here in NZ we get the US ads, but in some other countries they have their own local variation, and it’s interesting to see how they transplant the humour.

For example, in the UK they use comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb from the Peep Show. Some of the ads are straight copies of the US scripts, but some are new …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBeuKagEiKk

And in Japan they have these two guys (is it just me or are the physical differences between Mac and PC a bit more subtle in this incarnation?) …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qokrYYDCMc

And, my favourite, South Park …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id_kGL3M5Cg

:-)

(Ironically Firefox crashed with a spinning beachball of death when I tried to preview this post … is somebody watching??)

Living in an Amish paradise

Here is a great Howard Rheingold article from the Wired Magazine archives about Amish in the US and their unique approach to using various technologies in their day-to-day lives:

Look who’s talking

I first read this back in the late ’90s (when, I admit, I was a bit of a Wired fanboy) and the criteria for what technology they adopt vs. shun has stuck in my head:

“Does it bring us together or draw us apart?”

You can agree or disagree with their view of the world, but I don’t think you can fault them for having a values-based way of making decisions about this sort of thing.

I like the idea of being in control of the technology you use rather than the other way around.

(Did I mention that I still haven’t upgraded to Leopard yet? ;-)

Think about this in terms of the technologies you use:

  • Are you in control of your TV?
  • Are you in control of your inbox?
  • Are you in control of your mobile phone?

If you answered ‘yes’ to that last question, do you take your phone with you to face-to-face meetings? And if so, do you answer it when it rings?

(By the way, before I get too self-righteous, I’ll be the first to admit that occasionally I do take my phone to meetings, as rude as that is, and my inbox consumes far too much of the time that could be better spent with family and friends.)

Is your use of all of these technologies mindful, or did you just fall into it?

What criteria do you use to decide when to start using a new technology?

Sometimes, I reckon, it’s good to step back and think about these things.

With this in mind, I wonder what the Amish make of blogs?

Like wearing a shirt with buttons, I suspect they would consider writing a blog much too “prideful”.

:-)

Spring clean

I was catching up on my RSS feeds on Friday and realised that it had become a chore.

I’m not sure when this happened? Probably gradually over the last few weeks and months, like the metaphorical boiling frog.

In his chapter from Blogging Heros, Chris Andersen (Editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail) talks about the problem of keeping on top of his 220 feeds:

“I am suffering from too much information (I realize this is a somewhat cliched complaint), and it is difficult to manage. In the same way it’s taken us decades to perfect inbox management (which we still haven’t gotten right), I think that what I call … ‘feed management’ is going to take us decades to get right too.”

– A free chapter of a book (and a clever marketing strategy)

Decades? <sigh>

So, in an effort to get my “feed garden” in order I’ve spent a few hours over the weekend pruning. I’ve ended up with 99 active feeds + a handful that have been inactive for a while now, but which I will leave there in case the authors decided to start up again (probably mostly wishful thinking, but that’s okay).

That seems like a number I can reasonably keep on top of, but we’ll see.

I think there are two challenges:

Firstly, the discipline to remove feeds when they become no longer relevant. I wonder if a one-in/one-out approach would work?

Secondly, accepting that you don’t need to read EVERY post. I love the “J” key in Google Reader, but it would be even better if I could just quickly mark older posts as read, while leaving more recent posts unread (as previously requested).

Along these lines I was interested to note this week that FeedDemon have added a “panic” button to their feed reader client which pretty much does this exactly.

That’s great!

How many feeds do you follow?

Are you keeping up?

Is it a chore?

400 pixels or less

One of the fundamental decisions for a web designer to make when working on a new site, or updating an existing one, is what canvas size to allow themselves.

At the risk of showing my age, when I first started working on the web one of the key questions was how the site would look for those using a monitor with a resolution of 640×480 (for the younger readers: this wasn’t THAT long ago!)

Thankfully, time and screen sizes moved on.

When we updated the design of Trade Me late last year we increased the standard resolution that we supported up to 1024×768, although with code in place to ensure that the site still works well at 800×600.

If you’re interested load up the home page and try re-sizing your browser window – you’ll notice that, thanks to the magic of JavaScript, at 800×600 the logo and advertisment in the top-right corner jump up above the tabs and the font size on the category links in the body of the page is smaller.

By comparison, Xero, which has slightly more modern browser requirements, uses a fixed-width design which more-or-less fills the screen at 1024×768.

Why is this stuff important?

Well, as it turns out, people are not so quick to increase their screen size or resolution as web designers like to think.

Whenever I speak to a tech crowd I normally ask for a show of hands from anybody who is using a low-res screen (lately that has been 1024×768 or less). It’s unusual for anybody to raise their hand. But, out in the real world there are still plenty of people browsing at that resolution.

In fact many thousands of them…

Using the Neilsen Online stats for September ’07 of the ~3.5 million unique visitors to Trade Me during the month around 15% of them were using a resolution of 1024×768 (that’s 515,000 visitors) and even more incredibly just over 4% were using a resolution of 800×600 (that’s 145,000 visitors). Many of these people will be using a monitor that is capable of a higher resolution, I’m sure, if only they could work out how to increase it!

At the other end of the spectrum there are a number of different very large resolutions now in use. I’m typing this on a screen that is bigger than could have even been conceived of in the late 1990s, which of course makes life difficult for sites like Trade Me that use a liquid design.

Where it really gets interesting is when you look a little further down the list of browser resolutions. For example, the fifth most common resolution, with 1.82% market share is 214×138. That’s pretty small!

After I mentioned these numbers at the WDANZ conference I spoke at in Auckland a few months back Harvey Kane from RagePank picked up the analysis and came up with some even more interesting findings.

He made the observation that what really matters is the number of horizontal pixels available.

He looked at the Trade Me data and found:

Horizontal pixels Market share
400 or less 14%
800 or less 22%
1024 or less 45%
1280 or less 77%

That is a lot of people using little screens! Presumably many of them handheld/mobile devices?

So, there might be a role moving forward for those of us who remember designing for tiny resolutions after all! :-)

The lesson from this…

Design for your audience, not just for yourself, and always remember that they are probably nothing like you.

A new version is available

The surest sign that I’m getting old and cynical is that I still haven’t upgraded to the new version of OS X.

I have no excuse really, other than general apathy.

These days it feels like I’m constantly bombarded by messages like this:

A new version is available

It would be interesting to know what proportion of their time a typical user spends just downloading and installing new versions of the software they are using.

What could be done to make this better?

For a start there are some basic usability improvements that could easily be made.

The message above is typical in that it contains no information at all about the new version or any indication as to why I should upgrade.

And it’s timing is terrible – popping up and interrupting just as I start to use the software, rather than waiting until I’m finished and asking me then if I want to be distracted by downloading and installing a new version at that point.

I would much prefer if it could just download the new version and install itself at a convenient time, and not interrupt me at all with a pointless choice. Provided the changes are incremental and I could easily roll-back to the previous version if I ran into problems I’d be quite happy.

Or is that asking too much?

Of course, the ease with which a new version of the software can be released is a big advantage of web-based software.

Google has never once asked me if I want to upgrade to the latest version of their search engine, yet they make changes to it all the time.

Unfortunately it’s not that simple with software which is installed on the client operating system. But, there is hope …

If you’re a Mac user AppFresh is a neat little piece of software which can scan your entire system, identify any software which is not the latest version and automatically download and install the new versions for you.

On my system it found 87 apps and was able to recognise more than half. And it found updates for 12 of them.

Magic!

Although, ironically, it doesn’t appear to work on Panther Leopard yet, so offers me another reason to procrastinate on that one. :-)

UPDATE (12-Nov): Oops – I had the wrong big cat. Leopard, I’m reliably informed, is the code name of the new version of OS X.

Photo Framr

Here is an idea for a product I would love to buy …

A web-enabled digital photo frame.

In other words:

  • A digital photo frame (see: Coby DP102 10″ Widescreen, for example)
  • Which can connect to the internet, ideally wirelessly
  • And import new photos to display automatically, for example via a Flickr RSS feed

It sounds very geeky, but I’m sure it could be done in a user friendly way.

This is really one for all the grand-parents out there (remember it’s only 53 shopping days until Christmas).

Rather than constantly sending them your latest photos as email attachments how cool would it be to give them one of these!

Does anybody know if something like this already exists?

If not, is there anybody out there who could build something like this for me?