I’ve been a longtime user of Google Docs (and Writely before it), mainly because I hate sitting through the three agonizing minutes of “font menu optimization” before Microsoft Word will finally launch (this is on my respectably equipped Mac Pro). Since my MLA-compliant college paper-writing days, I haven’t really needed the advanced editing features of Word, so I’m more than happy to settle for the simplicity of the Google Docs word processor.
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One challenge all designers come across in working with any client is deciding how much information should be displayed on a site’s homepage. Most clients can agree that if the site’s there to sell a product, that product should be prominently featured. The trouble is that the goals of any site are usually more complex than showcasing a single product. When you have a wide array of products, special offers, news, events, promotions, and other featured content that you want to draw attention to, it’s certainly tempting to give all of these things a position on the front page to make sure nobody misses them. From a user’s perspective, of course, the resulting clutter ends up having that opposite effect, and no single message really hits home. One way to think about solving this problem is to think of your homepage as the storefront to your site.Read More…
I just released an upgrade to Wikipop, my WordPress plugin. I had a number of requests for the plugin to support Wikipedia languages other than English. I added a popup window in the visual editor that allows you to select your language, and if you want, search Wikipedia for text other than the text you’re linking. Check out my plugin page for the full changelog and a link to the download. If you already have Wikipop installed, you can just upgrade automatically from the WordPress administration panel.
Online retailers and service providers face an interesting challenge when it comes to their customer service strategy. On the one hand, one of the things people like about buying stuff online is that they can do simple shopping at home in their bathrobes while they’re microwaving a Hot Pocket, and they don’t have to bother with the trivialities of human interaction. While I’d rather buy something like a tailored suit from a brick-and-mortar store with a real live person who can assure me that I’m dropping hundreds of dollars on something that’s actually going to be worth my money, I can’t say that I would really miss the customer service experience I have every week at a place like the grocery store if I switched over to an online alternative like Fresh Direct.
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Living in New York I’ve had the pleasure to get to know a lot of talented musicians. A whole lot. And not just talented in that small pond, listenable-but-probably-still-going-to-be-working-at-the-Fashion-Bug-five-years-from-now kind of way. A lot of these people are people who I fully expect will make real-life paying jobs out of their music, if they want to. Fortunately for them, they’re launching these fledgling careers at what should be a great time, historically speaking, for the self-promoting artist. Given the tools available online, a new artist supposedly should have everything they need to make a go of it, assuming they have the talent to back up their efforts. But something appears to still be missing.
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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about keeping my attention focused, inspired in part by a few things I’ve read recently, and in part by the fact that we’re in our most frenetic time of the year at work, which means attention is a precious commodity. The difficulty of the situation is that I work in a business where the fragmentation of attention is not only common, it’s sort of encouraged. The trouble with maintaining focus in any office environment is that you can’t really escape the fact that you’re in said office to work collaboratively with other people, and those people are going to want to talk to you. This problem is magnified in the tech sector because A) the great thing about the internet is that there’s all kinds of stuff happening all at once, and B) many of our exciting new communication tools (Twitter, IM, etc) are designed to capture your immediate attention, regardless of what you’re doing.
Here are a few things I’ve been putting into effect to maintain my ability to focus at work and at home. This isn’t a particularly original list, as there are a whole lot of very smart people writing on this subject, but this is what’s been working for me:
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I just finished writing a plugin for WordPress called Wikipop. This was my first WordPress plugin, and I was pretty surprised at how straightforward the process was. If you’re thinking about getting your hands dirty, check out the Plugin API page, which is really all you need to get started. Anyway, the point of the plugin is to let you link to Wikipedia articles from your posts without totally derailing your readers. Links open in an inline window like this.
I recently got to spend an hour talking to some representatives from the New York Times, and I was reminded how great some of the stuff they’re doing online is. The basic format of nytimes.com isn’t revolutionary (though it is well-designed and easily navigable, which in general is a revolution in news sites I could totally get behind), but if you keep an eye on those article sidebars and special section callouts, you will occasionally come across one of their understated yet ingenious “interactive features”. The Times may be suffering lately, with their new building mortgaged and a first-quarter loss of $74 million, but stuff like this makes me believe they have a better shot of surviving in the digital age than any of their competitors.
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I definitely don’t intend to be in the business of making posts here that consist only of one quote or link to something else without any commentary or original ideas from me. HOWever, the following is the quote I mentally reference most often in my daily life, and it’s one that informs both what I do every day and what I hope to be covering in this blog. So I’ll post it as a sort of kickoff, and you can do with it what you will. All further posting will consist only of the most carefully crafted original thoughts and speculations from yours truly. Probably.
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One category of blip that seems to be frequenting my radar lately has to do with a certain kind of information design. This subcategory seems like it deserves a better name than “information design,” in that it serves to take great heaps of shapeless data and make something beautiful and interesting out of it. On second thought, maybe that’s what all of information design is meant to do. Maybe it all deserves a less boring name.
In any case, in this sub genre I’m talking about, the purpose is not to, say, take weather data and make cool charts out of it, or creatively show people how they could be saving more on their taxes with a color-coded deductions table — it’s to take a whole category of information that you never would have thought to look at, and creatively squeeze it through a series of algorithms, filters, and visualization subroutines until it becomes something really thought-provoking.
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