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Google’s UX staff take a vacation, return to horror and destruction

So Google made an RSS reader.

Wait, let me back up: what is it about RSS readers which make people’s frontal lobes turn off?

An RSS reader is a way for people like me to manage our infOCD tendancies by–y’know–aggregating information to reduce the amount of time needed to monitor a wide variety of sources. Your RSS reader is the thumbnail view of your daily web readings.

So why the hell make one which forces you to cycle through each story, one by one? Well? Yeah, I can’t think of a good reason, either. It’s like trying to scan a hundred newspapers through a microscope. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Backwards, even.

I try to keep track of the various postings on Craig’s List SF in the bicycles section. The information for each post on RSS is the title–that’s it. There’s probably a thousand posts a day, and the vast majority of them are crap crappity crap crap. Now Google would have me blipping through each one, one at a time, looking at a single line of text and about 250,000 blank-ass pixels.

What an amazing user experience that would be.

Focus on functionality–from the user’s perspective–instead of buzzword compliance. Bloglines, despite their clunky Web 1.0 look, works. It lets me choose how each feed is displayed. Boing Boing shows the full story, and the BBC and Craig’s List just show the titles. It helps me work, it doesn’t try to wow me with its Web 2.0-y goodness. Not everything needs tags, not everything needs Ajax, and frames can be useful.

RSS readers need to make a visual gestalt of the user’s feeds. They should be able to look at their feeds and know, at a glance, which ones have been updated. They should be able to choose how much of each feed they see, because not all feeds have the same importance. Don’t try to out-think the user; help them think.

So, uh, yeah: a Jabber client and a myopic RSS reader. Google’s supposed to be the future, right? Yikes.

Top Ten Most Totally Bogus Web Design Mistakes of 2005

From Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005 (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox):

1. Don’t make fields mandatory unless they truly are.
2. Support autofill to the max by avoiding unusual field labels (just use Name, Address, etc.).
3. Set the keyboard focus to the first field when the form is displayed. This saves a click.

emphasis mine

I’ve got a place in my heart for usability curmudgeon Jakob Nielsen, but “to the max?” Yikes.

Usability advice for 2005… in hammer pants. Badical.

Basecamp needs a wiki

From Elegant Hack:

If I could do one thing to basecamp (having been using it for the first time for a couple months now) I’d add a tiny wiki. Projects need a place for permanent links & lists. basecamp doesn’t seem to offer an place for that.

Wow. Having spent the past 3 months working on a large project using Basecamp with about 8 other people, that is so damn true.

It wouldn’t be as much of a problem if the project had its own source control, but it’s not a design or programming project. Hell, it’s not even really a project–it’s running the Conflict Resolution & Transformation Center at UC Berkeley, and a small, Instiki-esque wiki would go a long ways towards making Basecamp the end-all, be-all of lean project management.

BloglinesReader v0.1

I’m pleased to announce the first release of BloglinesReader, a new WordPress plugin. It allows you to display your Bloglines feeds on your WordPress blog, formatted exactly how you want them. It also caches that data, so it doesn’t take forever to display your page (and both your bandwidth quota and the Bloglines servers stay safe).

Check it out: BloglinesReader v0.1

A lot of credit goes to my friend, Peter Dolan, who worked on this plugin first and talked me down from making it Ajax-y (”Why does it need Ajax?” “Well… umm… man, just check out Dojo!” “Yeah, but why does it need Ajax?”). He’d be the one making this plugin, but he’s got a day job.

Live searching done right…ish

From Library clips:

Basically it is a search box for your site, that auto-suggests search terms as you type…these suggested search terms are actually subject terms based on a thesaurus or lexicon that you have programmed into your LookAhead site search tool.
If you don’t have a controlled vocabulary to import into the tool, they also have a service called Lex-It which will generate a lexicon for you (obviously not as effective as human indexing or thesaurus construction).

Check it out.

It’s exactly what I was talking about. Only really, really clunky. Really clunky.

So who’s the WordPress wiseguy who’s going to one-up this for free?