Jenny Levine: Web Design

Design Criteria for Children's Web Portals: The Users Speak Out
Andrew Large; Jamshid Beheshti; Tarjin Rahman. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology V53, 2, JAN 15, 2002, p79-94.

"Four focus groups were held with young Web users (10 to 13 years of age) to explore design criteria for Web portals. The focus group participants commented upon four existing portals designed with young users in mind: Ask Jeeves for Kids, KidsClick, Lycos Zone, and Yahooligans! This article reports their first impressions on using these portals, their likes and dislikes, and their suggestions for improvements". [ia/]

Unfortunately, this article isn't available online, but it's a perfect example of why interlibrary loan was invented. Oh, Ka-a-a-te....

Inside joke: if only the sombreros were animated, they'd be dancing! Actually, the Flamenco Project sounds interesting, so you should check it out even if you're not spitting Coke through your nose right now. It "investigates how to effectively incorporate large category hierarchies into information access user interfaces" using categorical metadata. [via Peter on SIGIA-L]

Book Review: Hot Text: Web Writing That Works

"Every place you use text on the Web is thoroughly explored. From headlines to links to menu design you'll learn how to make your text stand out from the crowd. In addition to conventional writing wisdom like using the active voice and one idea per paragraph the authors urge readers to adopt an object-based approach to writing for the Web." [WebReference News]

Andy King gives it a thumbs up and it sounds interesting, so I'll be ordering this one today.

Joel speaks the truth in an essay about The Iceberg Secret, Revealed. Although the first half isn't as applicable to libraries, the second half is music to my ears, and I'm going to pass it around at SLS. Choice quotes:

"If you show a nonprogrammer a screen which has a user interface that is 90% worse, they will think that the program is 90% worse."

"If you show a nonprogrammer a screen which has a user interface which is 100% beautiful, they will think the program is almost done.... And then when you spend the next year working 'under the covers,' so to speak, nobody will really see what you're doing and they'll think it's nothing." This is a big problem for me in the type of work I do at the System level.

"Don't, for a minute, think that you can get away with asking anybody to imagine how cool this would be. Don't think that they're looking at the functionality. They're not. They want to see pretty pixels." I'm still trying to learn this one, because I always think I can convince based on the potential outcome.

One final post for the night. I've been talking to the folks at Macromedia because I'm trying to determine the potential for ColdFusion at SLS, and today they pointed me to iHotelier as a sample of what can be done with Flash. You can read about the case study at the Macromedia Showcase, or you can go directly to the Broadmoor's online reservation form. I have some concerns about this type of implementation, but Kristy and Colin have been great about answering my questions.

I'm mainly posting this for my Flash buddies from last week, because I'm hoping that they'll pass along to me any cool tips and tricks they learn at the second training session next month since I can't be there myself. I'm at least hoping to get a copy of the manual. Please-oh-please-oh-please? I'll be your best friend. :-)

"Dave Polaschek: Why avoiding tables is important." [Scripting News]

Dave Winer has started an interesting discussion about using tables vs. CSS for layout in Web pages. Lots of people are responding, which is only making me feel that much worse about procrastinating in regards to this issue. Here are some of the links coming out of the discussion:

Fellow Flash trainees, take a gander at Macromedia's Flash Inspiration site. Ooooh. Aaaah. Ohhhh.

The Intro to Flash training I was at last week was excellent. Trista was a great instructor, and she did what I consider to be the most important thing a trainer can do: she used humor to keep us awake! I'm totally bummed that I won't be able to attend the second session. I understand its potential a lot better now.

At SLS, Kate and I have what we call "revolutions" every so often. When we took Crystal Reports training a few years ago, we had a lot of "A-ha!" moments, and afterwards we wrote a manifesto about the coming revolution. (It passed us by, but that wasn't our fault.) This same thing happened after our SQL and PL/SQL training, and for me it happened again after I saw a presentation by Alison Atkins Denton about GIS. I felt this way again on Friday, but unfortunately I won't have any time to play with Flash until at least March, and that's if I'm lucky.

Don't worry, though. I won't be turning the SLS sites into a big honking Flash swf, but I will have some fun with it, especially on the SLS intranet.

Over on Evolt.org, Marlene Bruce gives some numbers to help you Design to Realistic Window Sizes. "It is my opinion that with the increasing number of surfers now surfing at 800x600 one can possibly design safely at 741x404. However, to really be on the safe side (15% at 640x480 can add up to a lot of visitors), design to 581x284." [via ia/]

This sounds great in theory, but I'm still having problems balancing 1) one-window designs that 2) contain meaningful navigation links that have a modicum of breadth and depth 3)with text that is legible. And I'm still working out how to best implement liquid designs. It will be hard to get what I want using Oracle Portal for SLS because I can't control table widths, but yet I can't put the whole thing in CSS for layout. As Mr. Dylan says, "stuck in the middle with you again."

Layout and Content of Popular Sites. "This study by Steve Kangas, CTO of NetConversions compares common attributes in 87 sites including use of JavaScript, fixed layout versus liquid, file size, number of images used, and more. For further comparison of attributes of popular sites, you might also be interested in WDVL's Ten Top Sites Compared, which looks at elements such as fonts used, page width, background color, link location, and more." [ia/ - news for information architects]

"The “average” home page has 80 links, 11 (about 1/8) of these are through images." Can you guess that almost all of these sites are big .coms? I'd like to see this type of study done for small- to medium-sized public library Web sites. It would be interesting to compare what works well and what doesn't for this type of site.

Flash 99% Good. "A site devoted to making usable Flash movies. Includes tips, case studies, tutorials and links to articles on Flash usability." [via ia/ - news for information architects]

For those of us taking advantage of Lori's Flash training next month! (Did I say thank you yet? Thank you!)