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Posted by Richard Ziade on September 29, 2006, 09:55AMAnother Attempt To Invent RSS: Google Reader Refreshes
Anyone who follows this blog knows of my belief in the power of RSS and feed syndication. RSS is a great antidote to the information overload crisis we all suffer from today. Yet, as I've mentioned before, RSS has failed to break out of the tech savvy niche it enjoys today. Ask your uncle or teenage cousin what RSS is and they'll most likely respond with a stare.
RSS is a data invention. It is a ludicrously simple technology. It's one of those technologies that, once explained, garners a response like "Um. Ok. So?" As we look at HTML and how the web works today, it looks ridiculously obvious in hindsight. HTML, like RSS, is also a data invention. It's a way to connect assets on a network. So why did HTML explode into the mainstream consciousness and RSS continues to languish?
I think there are couple of reasons for this. First, RSS has no killer app today. HTML would have suffered the same fate if not for the web browser. The web browser is one of those rare zero-training applications that leveraged just about everything we already know about personal computers without caking on all sorts of new switches and levers to learn it. RSS doesn't have that today. While there are a slew of desktop and web-based tools for RSS, all that stuff just makes it all the more confusing. In effect, HTML was "invented" and introduced to the world with the web browser.
The other challenge RSS has today that HTML avoided is that all-important first step. Everyone remembers their first browsing experience. From the first click, you're in motion and accelarating. Web pages, by their very nature, connect to one another. RSS, on the other hand, relies on all sorts of orange boxes, icons and "Add to this..." and "Add to that..." buttons. It is a proverbial mess.
Walk through the thought process of someone who clicks on an "Add to Rojo..." link. First, what the hell is a "Rojo"? After clicking, they end up...somewhere. Somewhere new and strange and utterly unexplainable. The curious may dig a bit. But most will just move on with a lingering "hmm, that was weird" thought in their minds.
The Google Reader team (bless their hearts for trying) is taking another crack at it with a new refresh of Google Reader. There's even a great little video explanation of what RSS is. The new Reader looks pretty cool and feels pretty intuitive, but I'm afraid the leap is still a tough one. The grass may well be greener on this side, but the fence is still pretty high.
So who will save RSS? It may well be MIcrosoft. With IE7, which, whether we like it or not, everyone is getting, RSS subscription and management will be baked into the browsing experience. We'll just have to see if this tips it or not.
And so, people are still trying to "invent" RSS. We'll just have to wait and see.
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 28, 2006, 09:54AMDesigncharts
Designcharts is sort of like a Billboard Top 10 of (mostly Flash-driven) web sites. I'm not sure how the rankings are gathered, but the top 10 seems credible.
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 25, 2006, 01:16PMDeveloping Stories, Breaking News And The Abuse Of Design
Blame it on Fox News. Since their rise a few years ago, they have handily beaten CNN & MSNBC in ratings. There are a few reasons for this but I'd like to focus on the one that deals with the display and presentation of information on these news channels.
Fox News knew full well that news, above all else, had to compete with and captivate viewers to compete. Is there enough news to show 24 hours a day? Probably. Is it all exciting and entertaining? Probably not. Issues like the political wranglings in some far off nation or global warming don't exactly make for captivating entertainment and Fox knew it.
They also knew their audience very well. They knew that in this age of the Internet, and bite-sized pieces of information, our threshold for attention has gone way down. As we flip through the 300 channels cable offers us, you've got about a fifth of a second to stop us in our tracks.
And so, the perpetual state "Breaking News" was born. Everything is either a "Developing Story" or "Breaking News" or "This Just In..." Stop reading this blog right now and flip to either MSNBC, Fox News or CNN. There's a very high probability that something is "breaking" right before your eyes.
Now of course, CNN & MSNBC had no choice but to join the party. Fox was eating them for lunch with this slimey little tactic. And so they soon adopted the practice. Today, we're not really sure where or when real breaking news happens. These stations have cried wolf too many times already. It's not clear what's important or what really matters at any given moment.
Without getting into the moral or ethical aspects of this, as an information designer I can't help but think that this is an abuse of design. Good information design both conveys information and provides good context for what we're taking in. What's more important than what? How does this bit of information relate to all the other bits?
Fox, CNN & NBC have replaced this goal with another: grab the viewers attention, however way you can, and try to keep them around as long as possible. It's like walking down the path of a carnival as the various booths try to entice you with prizes, bright colors and a deceptively easy game to play. The major news networks have resorted to billboard advertising tactics to get their ratings.
This all of course raises larger issues of ethics in journalism. Good design - and Fox has proven that this in fact is good, effective design - is a means to an end. The end here, disappointingly, is ratings. The motive isn't a more "usable" design. It's just marketing and advertising tactics applied to news. Unfortunately, news isn't often good. In fact, news is often bad, and sometimes scary. I'm not sure if enough is given towards how delivering information in this manner not only affects what people know but how they feel. In a post 9/11 world, how information is conveyed can shape sentiment as much as the content of the information.
Which raises a question I was pretty sure I would never ask of information designers: do we have a responsibility to not only present the right information but to also present it in an un-biased manner? I suppose it would depend on the business context. If you're designing an ad, then bias is welcome and obvious. But if you're presenting what is supposedly news information, how far should we go to captivate viewers or readers?
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 20, 2006, 08:41AMSizeasy - Because Size (*cough*) Matters
Say it with me..."Sizeasy" (yeh, I have no idea how to pronounce it either). Sizeasy is a neat little tool that compares the size of...umm...anything to common objects like a deck of cards or a piece of paper. Kind of cool (kind of).
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 16, 2006, 01:17PMMiniature Earth
Miniature Earth is a website that displays a simple 3-4 minute Flash movie that envisions the world if only 100 people lived on it. The movie outlines a handful of statistics against world's 100 inhabitants - e.g. there would be only 8 North Americans.
The site uses these "miniature" statistics to shed light on the global poverty problem. What struck was how compelling these numbers appeared. I've read numerous articles on poverty in the past and I often glaze over the statistics that throw percentages, "millions" and "billions" at me. They're harder to conceptualize quickly as I'm reading - and thus their impact is dulled.
By working against a number like 100, the site is able to better convey the gravity of these statistics. Or in other words, it takes my brain less work to fully appreciate what's being said.
Which leads to a good self-auditing mechanism for information designers: what are you doing to your data representations to make it easier for your audience to digest and appreciate?
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 15, 2006, 02:04PMRide On Those RSS Rivers
Dave Winer has been trumpeting the virtues of mobile rivers for a bit now, and at Arc90, we have to agree - they make a lot of sense. In a nutshell, mobile rivers are simple, rolling headlines with brief blurbs - idea for checking out what's happening on your Treo or Blackberry or any other mobile device with a browser.
There are already mobile rivers for the New York Times, BBC and Digg and they work nicely on mobile devices. The guys at Arc90 have created a generic river generator so now you can take virtually any RSS feed and make it readable on mobile devices. Just append river.arc90.com with ?rss=yourFeedURL and you're good to go. The Arc90 lab has much more on this. It even converts the clicked-thru articles for mobile reading (via either Google or Skweezer).
So get on that river of news. It's a fun ride. And all you bloggers out there, it's now easy as pie to add a "Mobile View" link to your blogs. Slick.
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 14, 2006, 09:11AMYes, Apple Copies Microsoft
With the debut of iTunes 7, Scoble asks if Apple copied Microsoft. The interface enhancements, most notably views of album cover art and more space (mmm...space) takes a page right out of Microsoft's Windows Media Player 11. Hell, it was just last month that highlighted this exact deficiency in iTunes 6.
It's good to see Microsoft's work copied by Apple. Above all else, it shows that Microsoft is really starting to care about the end-user experience. Media Player 11 is a seriously impressive piece of software. As the saying goes, "imitation is the best form of flattery" (or something). Their upcoming Office 2007 product is all about a completely new interface - and it's also very impressive.
Is Microsoft a good design company? Weird.
Six Tips For Searching Privacy
Wanna avoid those gosh-darned laser-guided missiles? The friendly folks at the EFF provide six excellent tips for searching privacy.
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 12, 2006, 11:10AMNeave.tv
Paul Neave, a Flash wizard by any measure, has completely outdone himself with Neave.tv. A truly immersive video viewing experience. It's amazing what you can pull off with Flash if you're willing to look beyond the paradigm of web pages and hyperlinks. The transitions are just awesome. (Found via Waxy's Links).
Windows Live Search Goes...Live.
Microsoft has released their flagship search engine to the world. It's an important step for a company that has committed a lot if its energy to get into the ring with Google.
Will Microsoft's search be good? Probably. As good as Google's? Probably, eventually. Will users really stop using Google and start using Live Search? That's the tough one. We can make a strong argument that the game is already over. That Google, left unchecked for nearly 5 years, has sunk its hooks real deep into our lives.
The inertia of deeply engrained habits is an extremely dififcult thing to undo. Just good enough is not good enough to do it. While people gawked over Google Maps, they still use Mapquest. I've played around with the various services they've put out. Without a doubt, their image search knocks the socks off of Google's. Yet I still find myself consistently going back to Google's image search.
Google has reached the Holy Grail of adoption. When a product fades into the background of your daily life because its so pervasive, the party is essentially over for the competition.
How can Microsoft unseat Google? I'm not really sure they can. It's a big market and they're probably going to be perfectly happy with a nice chunk of it. They do own the desktop (which Google is trying to redefine) and they will no doubt tightly tie their services directly to the desktop - bypassing the browser altogether. By dispersing the services away from the browser, Microsoft pulls Google into its battlefield. A battlefield that has seen other casualties.
Google Desktop is a pre-emptive strike against that battle in my opinion. It's an early entry that has a two year head start on Vista. And I have to confess, it's very good. Their search has been a huge time saver for me (especially with Outlook email).
It's fun to watch all this go down. Google ain't no Netscape. That's for certain. They've got money and brains to give Microsoft a good battle here. In the end, we'll all hopefully reap the rewards with better products and services.
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 11, 2006, 11:10AMMmmm....Free Stuff
Man, I love free stuff so very much. And in this case, "stuff" means software - a lesser known list of some useful freeware apps. Have at it.
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 7, 2006, 12:18PMDots, Lines & Good Design
Way back when, I was reading about the process a well-known game designer (I believe it was Peter Molyneux) goes through to designing a good game.
What intrigued me was how he described his "protoype" phase. In essence, he and his team would map out the constraints, rules and characteristics of the game and then create a very crude implementation of the game with practically no graphics. The various elements would be represented with very basic shapes and objects like lines, dots and boxes.
The rationale behind such an approach is that the game should be engaging and fun without all the bells and whistles. Sure, there is a visceral satisfaction that comes with great graphics and sound. For example, realistic graphics and sound coupled with simulated physics can make for a very satisfying feeling when launching a shoulder-mounted rocket. But that satisfaction is short lived. The real enduring enjoyment that can come from a good game is derived from its most basic elements that make it fun. And as the theory goes, those elements have little do with great graphics and sound.
Nintendo's upcoming Wii game console is a practical counter-argument to the super-charged game consoles that flaunt powerful hardware to deliver a good gaming experience. Nintendo is betting on good game design to trump sheer horsepower - and they're probably going to win.
There's a great lesson to learn here. In an era, As we design applications, their truly long-lasting value will be derived from their...well...value. Their value stripped from the skin and whiz-bang effects (*cough* gratuitous Ajax *cough*).
Think ebay. Think Craig's List. In an era of Web 2.0 aesthetics, prove out your value before you apply those seals and shiny buttons and fade and slide effects. First make sure that there's more to your product than good looks.