In honor of the craziness today surrounding Microsoft’s opt-in IE8 rendering announcement, I bring you an opt-in/opt-out comparison list.
Things that should be opt-in:
Things that are better as opt-out:
I found this snippet from Anil Dash while coincidentally cleaning out my Google Reader backlog today:
Adding features like comments from sources in a news story to Google News is an admirable attempt to bring unique value to aggregated news stories. But tasking a technology team with the duty to solicit and manage these comments ignores the fact that verifying, recording, and reporting a source is fundamentally an act of journalism. By trying to shoehorn a work of research into a primarily technological process, the news team faces the chance of fraud, abuse, error, or most likely, low participation and eventual abandonment.
An awareness that some types of information gathering require judgment and reasoning that’s not well-handled by even the most clever algorithms would help Google make its transition into being a company that creates original content.
Preach on, brother. This is why I love reading Anil’s stuff — he thinks like a journalist and a supergeek.
I just got this pic in under the wire. I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating — thank you, web standards!
For perspective on accessible web code from a blind web developer, check out Aaron Cannon’s recent North Temple post, “The Accessibility Cookbook: A Recipe for Disaster.” After all the talk about alt attribute text, it can still be easy to get wrong, and Aaron highlights the importance of finding a balance between being descriptive when the image adds meaning and knowing when to leave the attribute blank.
He also mentions Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance by Andrew Kirkpatrick, et al., which I am slowly working my way through. One thing that I’ve already taken away from the book is that “skip navigation,” which has unfortunately become an industry standard, is not all that helpful to text-only users. In my redesign of the Mizzou Graduate School website, I opted for the recommended 〈a href="#main-content"〉Main content〈/a〉, which more directly tells people where the link will take them.
I removed North Temple from my RSS reader a little while ago because I found that many of the posts were not relevant to me, but luckily Cameron Moll (who works for the LDS church) pointed to Aaron’s post.
Must learn how to do this for the B-town Public Library and the IU Libraries:
As has been mentioned before, I’ve produced a Greasemonkey script to add notification to Amazon surfers if the currently displayed book is in the Cincinnati Public library.
(source: Mark Mascolino)
The results of the ALA Web Design Survey 2007 are out, and I was especially excited to check out the fancy PDF report b/c I was a respondent.
Interesting (to me) notes:
I found myself doing a large amount of head-nodding while reading Jeff Croft’s recent short post about the difference between knowledge of web code and software and knowledge of design principles.
. . . I think employers often value knowledge of tools too much when it comes to hiring web designers. . . . So what is valuable? Judgement. Logic. Creativity. Ability to learn quickly. Ability to work under pressure. Experience. Empathy. Design theory. Design history. Opinions. Decisions. And so on.
I look back at some of the first sites I created after learning XHTML and CSS, and although I was proud of myself for tackling these new languages, I soon realized that just knowing them would not make a site’s type readable, the navigation comprehensible, or the layout well organized. It’s taken a whole lot longer begin to develop those more abstract skills than it did to browse a few books and websites to figure out the difference between an ⟨h1⟩ and a ⟨p⟩ element.
I would not call myself a member of the “any idiot can create well-formed code” camp because I believe that it does take experience and analytical thought to use the right code for a given situation. However, I agree with Jeff that a vast difference exists between interface-design knowledge and design-tool knowledge. In fact, since I’ve been studying design principles, I feel that I have a better understanding of how to use the tools in my kit.
For example, until about six months ago, my use of line-height and margin in CSS was somewhat arbitrary and based on little more than eyeballing. Now that I’ve investigated the vertical rhythm principle, these properties have more valuable meaning in my work.
I would add to Jeff’s list of potential employee desirables that a person should not only be a quick learner, but should also have the curiosity and drive for self-improvement that will lead them to reach beyond their base skill set, whether it be in design principles or code/software chops, to seek complimentary knowledge. Figuring out how to express that in a job posting might be tough, though.
I am proud to announce the unveiling of the new University of Missouri-Columbia Graduate School website today!
Unfortunately I will not be in Columbia to celebrate — I left to start a master’s in information science at Indiana University just before the final user testing phase of the project. Steven Richardson, my supportive supervisor at Mizzou, is the one copying all the new pages onto the server and taking care of the inevitable little fixes today. A hearty thanks to him, as well as to Janey Osterlind, our talented graduate assistant, for their contributions to the project. I would also like to thank the Mizzou central Web Communications team, who offered advice throughout this redesign process that has greatly improved the final result.
This project took me the better part of a year to complete, from initial research, to information architecture, to content editing, to hand-coding XHTML (including microformats), to visual design prototyping and CSS coding, conducting as much user testing along the way as possible. I truly believe that this version of the site will improve the user experience for applicants, students, staff, and faculty.
I hope to write more about particular details of the redesign in the future — I’ve learned so much working on it!
I recently completed one colossal step toward the information redesign of the Graduate School’s website—overhauling the way we list our academic programs.
I hope to write more about the background of this redesign, including details of the new information architecture I built, but for now I’m skipping ahead.
In the process of the creating the content inventory for our 500+ page site, I noticed a disturbing situation: three separate lists purporting to be the official “Fields of Study” index existed. And they were all different! Gulp.
Even among the first three items in each list, the inconsistency is apparent.
In several cases, a program would be called a different name on each list. For instance: is it “Biomedical Sciences,” “Veterinary Medicine - Biomedical Sciences,” or “Basic Biomedical Sciences”? Is it “Learning, Teaching and Curriculum,” or “Curriculum and Instruction”?
As far as I can tell, the three-list disaster was rooted in two major issues: a failure to see the three lists as connected content, and a focus on ease-of-use for the staff at the expense of usability for our audience.
Early in the process of conceptualizing a redesign of the Graduate School website’s information structure, I recognized the disconnect in the minds of our staff between the Graduate Catalog (fully online for several years now) and the rest of the site.
I will probably talk more about this in another post, but in this situation, as in many others, this mental separation had been the impetus for a repetition of information on the site—once for the Catalog entry, and at least one more time in an area of the site outside the Catalog. Rarely were all instances of these originally identical bits of content updated at the same time, and the result was a mess of conflicting information.
So that accounts for two lists (one inside the Catalog and one outside), but this problem was compounded by our need for a content management system that we didn’t have. We were putting a teeny tiny bandage on this gaping wound by housing a third list (which linked to admission requirements for each program) within a database that could be edited directly by our admissions supervisor.
I chose to work toward the creation of one master list—an official part of the Graduate Catalog—that would include all relevant information about each academic program, including a link to the program’s website, admission requirements, faculty, courses, degree requirements, and all the other details that were currently listed in the Graduate Catalog entries. As with the rest of the Catalog, any mid-year changes to the entries would be made using the <ins> and <del> elements, an idea borrowed from the way I had once seen amendments to the U.S. Constitution presented.
Luckily for us, we will be moving our site into the University’s new content management system after our redesign, allowing our admissions adviser to have access to our ever-changing admissions requirements for each program.
One of the first steps was to figure out how to make the index of programs easy to browse. Each degree or certificate program has an official, registered name—but we weren’t always using it, because sometimes the official name didn’t actually describe the program very well. Some of the academic programs that administered the degree and certificate programs were also engaging in some creative (but unofficial) renaming, which meant that prospective students would not always know the official names.
Luckily for me, I had recently learned quite a bit about the principles of indexing through a freelance job in which I indexed a book edited by one of my former professors. The professor had introduced me to the indexing instructions from the Chicago Manuel of Style, and I decided to use its guidelines for cross-listing entries as a starting point.
After I separated the official names of the degree and certificate programs into broad categories based on those used by U.S. News & World Report and alphabetized them within the categories, I added cross-listings anytime I thought prospective students might look under another name. For example (Note: The hyperlinks don’t actually go anywhere.):
- Curriculum and Instruction (M Ed, PhD, EdD, EdSp). See also Teaching Fellowship Program (M Ed)
- Learning, Teaching and Curriculum. See Curriculum and Instruction
- Mathematics Education emphasis (M Ed, PhD). See Curriculum & Instruction
- Music Education emphasis (MA, M Ed, EdSp, EdD, PhD). See Curriculum & Instruction
- Teaching Fellowship Program (M Ed). See also Curriculum & Instruction
Figuring out the index was easy compared to the task of combining the content attached to each of the three lists, which had never really been edited and formatted for the web before. After four weeks of solid work, I finally added all the necessary subheads, combined conflicting information about admissions requirements into accurate summaries, and managed to fix most of the other grammar and factual errors.
Next week I hope to conduct some user testing to make sure that my work has really resulted in a more usable framework for our poor students, who have been dealing with some confusing content for far too long.
If you’re a web professional and haven’t taken the survey over at A List Apart, hop on over and give it a go. It only took a few minutes for me to complete, including the diatribe about ill-fitting job titles that I wrote in the comments section. No word yet on when the results will be posted.