October 21, 2002, 12:31 PM ET
The Google user-interface perspective
In a goodexperience.com interview, Google product manager Marissa Mayer describes her philosophy on Google's usefulness:
I think Google should be like a Swiss Army knife: clean, simple, the tool you want to take everywhere. When you need a certain tool, you can pull these lovely doodads out of it and get what you want. So on Google, rather than showing you upfront that we can do all these things, we give you tips to encourage you to do things these ways. We get you to put your query in the search field, rather than have all these links up front. That's worked well for us. Like when you see a knife with all 681 functions opened up, you're terrified. That's how other sites are - you're scared to use them. Google has that same level of complexity, but we have a simple and functional interface on it, like the Swiss Army knife closed.
This absolutely nails how I think a news site should function. Don't scare me away with hundreds of headlines and links. Do make it easy for me to find the news I want, at a detail level of my choosing.
October 21, 2002, 12:26 PM ET
While I was gone...
The Columbia Missourian's Web site, columbiamissourian.com, redesigned its home page in a completely CSS-based layout. Not a single layout table to be found. Bravo! More on this later; I'm told they're still fixing some kinks, as is to be expected.
Web design guru Jeffrey Zeldman also redesigned his site in all CSS. And Opera's site (home of the Opera Web browser) made the CSS leap last week -- as did Wired News, in case you haven't heard.
Wired News designer Douglas Bowman wrote about reaction to the site's redesign and how easy it is to make design tweaks now that the site is CSSified.
In "All the News That's Fit to PDF," Robin Sloan of Poynter.org examined those awkward newspaper "electronic editions" we've been seeing -- digitized versions of print-edition layouts. (See my previous thoughts and reader discussion on this topic.) Robin concludes that PDFs are a fine way of showcasing print designers' work, and an easy way for smaller newspapers to put at least something online. But they're no substitute for well-designed Web pages in their own right. (Disclaimer: The article quotes me.)
Federal Computer Week reported "only a handful [of government agencies] have spent the energy necessary to make sure their Web sites are accessible and useful. And so far, they haven't had a lot of help."
MSNBC.com made a few navigation changes, uh, sometime in the past few days. The announcement isn't dated.
Craig Saila, an outstanding journalism/technology blogger, agreed to ping weblogs.com regularly. Thanks to that, I've added his weblog, Living Can Kill You, to this site's blogroll (which uses data from weblogs.com and blo.gs to order sites by last-updated time).
Mozilla 1.2 beta was released. It has a new feature, link prefetching, which will automatically download and cache the "next" page, as defined by the Web page's creator. I have mixed opinions on this; more later.
Information architecture expert Louis Rosenfeld presented several "effective, low-cost techniques for making the case for investing in user experience design." My favorite: Show decision makers a videotape of confused and frustrated users. That's bound to get them thinking about user interfaces.
