I speak usability and developer to make amazing user experiences.
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In writing my last article about the various search engines I came across a fun site called Ubuntu Popularity Content. This site shows the number of downloads and installs for every package in the Ubuntu repository. It is certainly an interesting look at what people are using and if you are an Ubuntu users I suggest you take a look, maybe you will find a great new package.
I just discovered a great way to watch the election results come in while hearing what other techies are thinking. If you are reading this after Super Tuesday I suggest you book mark the link and take a look at it in November.
See what I am talking about over at Google Maps
When I started this blog I paid careful attention to my search rankings at the big three search engines (google, yahoo, and live.com) for the term “Daniel Hardy”. Shortly after its inception I was able to snag the #1 slot at Live.com, #3 slot at yahoo.com and #4 slot at google.com. Today the picture has changed a bit with the most interesting jump coming from Live.com.
It appears that I am no longer listed at Live.com. I am not sure how this works as my rankings on the other two have increased to #1 at yahoo and #2 at google. The conspiracy theorist in me (while small) thinks that perhaps all the discussions of Ubuntu are at the root of this decline. More likely this is a great demonstration of what a difference there is between these search providers.
Personally I find this difference to be extremely valuable. It is like a second opinion or another perspective on a given topic. Unfortunately one of these companies may soon be broken apart and melted into one of the other two. Hopefully this will not be the case but it is a tough world and Google is a monster of a competitor.
Yesterday a friend of mine showed me a great dynamic comment system being used over at deadspin.com . After seeing it in action I decided it would be fun to implement something similar on my site (even if I rarely get any comments). I have whipped up a bit of Javascript and tweaked my template a bit to support it. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think. If it gets decent reviews I can great a tutorial on how to easily implement it on a typical WordPress theme.
As of late I have been having some trouble with HAL(Hardware Abstraction Layer). I finally found the solution and decided I would post it here in case anyone else my need it. The symptoms of this problem are simple. When Gnome boots up you get an error stating “failed to initialize HAL”. There are many problems that can cause this error but the one that I keep running into was tricky to find but extremely easy to resolve.
It boils down to a boot order issue where dbus and HAL are scheduled to boot at the same time. The problem with this is that often HAL requires dbus to be up and running. To figure out if this is the specific cause you can take a look at the /etc/rc2.d/ folder. You simply want to make sure HAL’s three digit prefix comes after dbus’s. For example “S12dbus” followed by “S13hal”. If it doesn’t simply execute something like the following command in the terminal. Make sure you change it to match your system.
sudo mv /etc/rc2.d/S12hal /etc/rc2.d/S13hal
If you have ran into this problem I hope this will help you get it fixed.
Today I received an interesting item from Audi. It was basically a ‘welcome to the club’ type package but done on a completely different level then I have seen before. Every aspect of this mailing was Audi through and through. There was all sorts of handy information included like what items are covered under the warranty, a catalog of features that can be added post purchase and my personal favorite, an experience guide book.
Audi certainly has shown again that they care about user experience from start to finish. The real test will be when I take my car in for its first schedule maintenance. I will be sure to post back how it goes.
It has been a while since I have shown my updated desktop… then again it has looked like this for a long while.
Well, I said a while back that I would be changing the theme. Over the last several months I have struggled with creating a theme that I felt was good enough and fit my personal style. Today I have finally given up. This theme could be considerable better on multiple fronts and doesn’t fulfill the previous statements but I decided it was finally time to just post something. I am not sure how long it will stick around for but at least I got it up.
I have been working on various forum validation techniques lately and came across a simple idea that seems to make a lot of sense. You can read more about it here. The basic idea is that you include a hidden form element. If this element is filled in then it is probably a bot that doesn’t understand CSS or Javascript. When handling this submission you know that you can ignore it.
PC World has a great article highlighting several applications that were better before the manufacture added more features.
The ideas laid out in this article are something I often consider. How many features are too many features? Perhaps more importantly, if you reach the mysterious boiling point what should you do?
The first concept has no definitive solution as is often the case in the development world. Each and every product will have its own point where the application should stop growing. One sure way to elevate this point is to ensure that you have a strong usability and interaction design team working with you. This will hopefully allow you to maximize the experience for a broader range of users.
The second concept is a tricky one. Often an organization has scores of developers working on an application and if there is no more features to add there maybe no more use for the developers. The easiest solution is to roll the developers onto new projects. Interestingly this maybe a great solution to the first question. If the marketplace has room for the features you wish to build then perhaps you application should be divided into two. One for the novice to intermediate user and one for the expert power user.
This is where web-based applications have a great advantage. Because web applications store information about users it becomes easier to have two separate but seamless application views. Advanced uses will see one set of features and interactions while the novice user will see a different set. Either way the data they are working with can remain the same. The application will determine at which point the user starts seeing the advanced view. Generally a decent starting point is to allow the user to choose a more advanced option or base it off of the amount of data the user is working with.
Given enough time every application will experience feature bloat. How the application handles it can make the difference between a great application or just another bloated piece of software that is difficult to use.