jhardernet

So, I’ve just downloaded Windows LiveWriter and I’m thinking about using it as the editing tool of choice for some DNN powered websites.

We’ve found that the rich text editor hooked up to Text/HTML modules is weak. It writes awful looking HTML full of garbage < font > tags, the WYSIWIG display rarely matches the published content and applying styles through it is a pain.

Re: DNN

LiveWriter is supposed to be a handy way to get robust editing capabilities hooked up to your DNN modules. Of course, it’s not easy or free because LiveWriter doesn’t have DNN support built in. You have to pay for something like metaPost or digMeta. Which leads me to a complaint about DNN… maybe not DNN itself so much as the way it is talked about. Two things:

1. DotNetNuke is not a content management system. (it’s a framework)
2. DotNetNuke may be “open source” but it’s not supported by an open source community (and I’m not going to bother to learn how to build my own modules because dot net sucks)

I’d elaborate more, but this is just a test of Live Writer. Back to work.

This website was hacked recently. The attack left the site disabled for a number of days. Fortunately, my hosting company was able to restore a back-up version without any loss of content. Phew.

Why me? Who knows. I was running my site on an older version of the WordPress content management system that had security vulnerabilities. Since that attack, I have updated to the newest edition of WordPress which is secure. The silly thing is that I was aware of this vulnerability and had updated other websites that were running the old release.

Still, this is a good reminder that open source software – despite all the benefits of a community of developers – should be used with a bit of caution. Keep your eyes on those development blogs.

Months ago I registered an account. Yesterday, I finally filled in my profile. My friend coined a new acronym after accepting my networking request, WTYASNS: Welcome to yet another social networking site. And although I agree that my tolerance for social networking is nearing critical mass, LinkedIn is really, really sweet.

If you’re not familiar with LinkedIn, it’s basically a social network for professionals.  Rather than getting sent surveys from everyone you’ve known since elementary school (which Facebook seems to have become), LinkedIn takes a more sober approach. You can connect with current and past colleagues, find people in your area for professional networking, search for jobs, and it goes on.

Why am I so excited? Because this is how I prefer to network. Meet-up groups are fine if you know someone who will be there, or are very outgoing. But a lot of times it’s just a group of people looking for drinking buddies. LinkedIn lets me target exactly the kind of skills and experiences that I would like to draw upon.

In my first 24 hours on the site, I’ve made eleven 1st degree connections, 500+ secondary connections, and received an invitation to discuss possible design improvements for one of my connection’s websites. As someone whose career may eventually go the freelance route this is an invaluable tool of involvement.

Here’shoping it pays off.

Oh, and if you’d like to join my network just visit my profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyharder

After spending more hours than I care to admit writing CSS overrides for IE 8 it seems safe to declare: Miscrosoft has lost another battle in the browser war.   Sure, IE8 is slightly more standards compliant than its predecessor, but it still requires tweaks and hacks to make everything look and work correctly. Further inconsistencies are created depending on the security settings of the user. For instance, a “High” setting blocks some dynamic HTML effects but does not alert the user, thus leading to some “broken” looking websites.

Microsoft has built in a “compatability view” button which basically re-renders the page through an IE7 emulator and makes use of the CSS overrides you had to put in place for IE7… That’s right, Microsoft has hacked IE to go back in time to be hacked by your previous hacks – it’s a METAHACK. I know, it’s confusing. And annoying.

Plus as it stands right now only about 14% of IE users are on the latest version, the rest are on IE 7 or even IE 6. It’s time Microsoft belly up to the Internet standards bar for real, and stop releasing half-hearted efforts in the meantime that will become legacy headaches for programmers.

Last week I met with the folks at Progress Michigan re: an internship opportunity. They’re a non-profit whose mission, as the name suggests, is to push an agenda of progressive political/policy goals in Michigan.  Causes include things like environmental policy, health care reform, anti-smoking legislation, etc.  Their tactics usually involve press releases, online petitions/email alerts to their mailing list, sometimes event planning, and they often team up with other similar groups. 

I first heard of the group at an Ingham County Young Dems meeting where their executive director was a guest speaker. He discussed the various types of media campaigns they’ve run and my ears perked up when he started talking about content management systems and the use of New Media to coordinate and advance public opinion.  Politics is a logical setting for rhetoric (in the good way) and technology to cohabitate – especially as traditional media sources fade quickly into irrelevancy. Anyway, I thought this sounded like an interesting group using innovative, still-developing modes of communication and I wanted to get involved… non-profits are always looking for competent and cheap help so it wasn’t too hard to gain an interview.

After talking over why I was interested in PM, and what their current objectives include we moved on to discussing how I can help in a way that would be mutually beneficial to both of us. Obviously I’m not looking for an internship where filing or copying is in the job description. I’ve done that in the past.  They were quite interested in the possibility of a usability study geared around their website.  PM is just gearing up for a full site redesign so getting feedback from their audience would be especially useful at this moment.

I explained how such a study would not only address low level concerns of the site but can also reveal general perceptions of the organization itself.  It’s an exciting study to consider. For example, PM wants their audience to not only complete the click-thru action being promoted online, but help spread their broader message… how do you measure future actions once the audience leaves the website?  How can you measure whether an audience finds the information published by PM to be timely and credible?  

The thing that makes an usability test for this type of organization tricky is the unseen (perhaps even unarticulated or unconscious) goals that take place.   It’s a huge difference from, say, e-commerce design where you can usually boil everything down to one thing: Does it make more money?  Here you’re talking about questions that revolve around nebulous concepts like community building and social change. Another reason why e-commerce design is easier is because people are more familiar with it as a genre.  If you’ve bought something online from Amazon, you can probably figure out how to order from just about any other online retailer. It’s a very well defined genre.  Design of political action tools? Not so much.  The Obama presidential campaign has a huge and sudden influence, both in how digital communication efforts are conducted as well as how they look.  They did a lot of things right but I don’t know that their visual style should be the standard for everyone.

The next step is to write up a proposal of what I want to do and explain what I think will be beneficial to PM.  Should be interesting.

The newest edition of A List Apart is online and there’s an interesting article by Patrick Lynch about visual design and usability.

Lynch points out that although eye-tracking studies seem to show that aesthetic graphics (as opposed to information graphics) are irrelevant, that is not necessarily the case.  The brain processes these images and uses them to make inferences about an interface’s personality and usability almost instantaneously, imperceptible by the eye-tracking studies. Aesthetics graphics matter in forming a gut reaction.

It’s that visceral reaction that I’m hoping to improve with the recently launched homepage test.

Wow. Quite an exciting week for me as yet another test that I designed has gone live. This one redesigns the Women’s Interest category pages. Two weeks ago a redesign of the Men’s Interest category was tested. Although I put that test together, it was in protest as I did not have any control over the design decisions being made.

Here’s the old control page, and the ugly Men’s Interest redesign (I could go on for hours about how bad of a page this is). Now, here’s my Women’s Interest redesign. This one was pretty easy, as I just tried to follow best-practice genre conventions of category pages: Easy sorting options, paginated views with product photos, and a list view without covers.

The biggest change may be removing the “Buy” buttons. On the one hand that means a user has an additional click to get through to a detail page where they can order. My theory was that someone on a category page is more interested in browsing and is still in the decision-making process, so the added clicks aren’t an interference.

Time will tell – this test has only been up for a couple hours. So far it is converting at 28% vs. 0% Go test, go!

As for the new homepage design, after 24 hours the conversion rate is slightly higher on the test page but average sale is substantially higher on the control. Also, bounce rate is up on the redesign which is a real disappointment as that will be our main indicator of success for this test. My plan is to tweak the redesigned page a bit to make the product layout a bit less overwhelming. As long as the conversion rate isn’t falling off then there’s hope.

More updates to follow.

An excerpt from the homepage test

Today at work I was given the green light to start testing my “radically different” homepage design.  I’d like to say this design is based on a bunch of user research, or some sort of participatory design methodology but … it’s not. It’s pretty much just me making some guesses.  At this point I’ve stared at it and tweaked bits and pieces for so long that I don’t even know what to think of it anymore. This is the point where I wish there were other designers here, or a culture of usability testing to get more feedback.

Here’s the test page and the control.  If they look the same you’ll have to clear your cookies and reload the page because it will have pulled you into the test. Check them out and then I’ll break it down.

What (I think) it gets right:

1. Fluid layout accommodates different resolutions while maximizing use of screen space. A much bigger improvement over the former table based layout.
2. Text wherever possible and graphics only when necessary make improvements in accessibility.
3. Graphics and colors have been updated and white space increased for a more modern look, while still in keeping with the brand image. My goal was to make it look current and friendly.
4. Pared down the navigation, getting rid of little-used buttons at the top of the old site, and decluttering the left nav bar.
5. Inclusion of Twitter stream to show that there are real people here working hard and to generate some social networking mojo.
6. Took two small search boxes and replaced them with one big, centrally located box; also, focus is on the search box so you don’t have to click into it before your start typing.

What (I think) could be better:

1. Not sure on the scrolling feature box.  Could be clunky to use and create alignment issues when re-sized to an extremely narrow width.
2. The Mags by category, combined with the scroll box, create a big wall of  products that may be a bit overwhelming.
3. Something about the design still doesn’t quite say “E-Commerce website” to me. Not sure if it’s the color scheme or what.

There it is. Traffic is getting split 50/50 between this page and the control. So far, with approximately 30 visitors each the test page has 3 sales and the control has 2. Obviously it’s too early to tell.

Hopefully this test either wins big or goes down in a blaze of glory. The worst, yet most common theme is for the conversion rates/sale to be even in which case you’ve proved nothing without learning anything.

I’ll keep you (my imaginary readers) posted on the results.

So. This is it. My new website, complete with portfolio, resume and blog.  But why? What is the raison d’etre?  Potential future employers is one audience; friends and strangers who have a reason to Google my name another.  And, if I write this blog correctly, then I may have a wider appeal to designers/researchers in general.  This entry will get the ball rolling, but in future entries I hope to reflect on triumphs and tribulations I encounter in my work.

In particular, I’m interested in figuring out how user research can influence (Web/software/UI/etc) design decisions.  How can we get the best information from users? How do we know what even is the best information? This involves drawing distinctions between things like user-centered design, and participatory design. Sometime these terms are used interchangeably, however they are different.  User-centered is a more generic term applicable to any situation where user data is involved while Participatory design means that at some point users and designers are actually in the same room working together.  Different situations call for different methodologies, but I tend to favor some face time at some point in a design process.

So that’s it for now. The ball is rolling and I’ve greeted the world.  I’ll be back in the next post hopefully discussing more specific issues.