Zach Beauvais

Wordpress

// July 29th, 2008 // Comments // Uncategorized

Some of my long-term readers (hi, Mum) might remember that my original blog was a Drupal install, and that my less-than-lovely ISP dropped my connection as I was uploading some new files—therefore borking the CSS. If you don’t follow, that’s OK. The point is that my old site was Drupal (a heavy-duty Content Management System, which is fantastic) now it’s Wordperss (cause it does blogging, and does it well). Well, WordPress has won my geeky heart (it’s smaller than my cynical heart, and not as strong as my music heart, but probably the most covered here).

They have done one thing in the past month which has really, really impressed me. They’ve got a plugin which lets you upgrade to the latest version of their software (which you install on your webserver yourself) without any complicated, difficult-to-remember steps. This is why I lost Drupal: upgrading, and it killing itself in the transfer. Now, I have the latest WordPress, and I’m very impressed.

Its WYSIWYG editor works better, and the media manager is fantastic. As you probably know, I stopped using a local blogging client because ecto is rubbish, and Vista is worse. So I now blog from WordPress itself through Firefox on my Mac. Three things that make me happy: Wordpress on Firefox running on a Mac… ah!

Another thing which is brilliant is the flickr sidebar plugin I have had for ages. I completely forgot to check out its “view more photos” link. It automatically finds images from the sets I’ve told it about, and uses them to create a page on my site populated with my flickr stream images!

On a down side, I’ve just noticed that it’s impossible to see the bottom of the sidebar if Twitter is down, because I have my tweets (micro-blog messages) being pulled into a widget above it, so if it’s down, it doesn’t load the rest of the sidebar. I think that’s something Wordpress should sort out. Oh, well. I’m just going to switch my images tab over to flickr.

Future of Web Apps

// July 22nd, 2008 // Comments // Semantic Web, Web 2.0, tech

I’m planning to attend this year’s Future of Web Apps conference in London. Their list of speakers sounds fantastic, and I’m really looking forward to meeting some folks in real life.

I’m particularly interested in this conference for its stated focus on the web community. Just have a look at the Agenda:

• How to grow and nurture your community
• Work/life balance or Blood, sweat and tears: Which is the startup way?
• Colliding Worlds: Using Jabber to make awesome web sites
• Startups live – An interview with three new European startups
• How to survive outside of Silicon Valley

New BBC iPlayer Layout: What were they thinking?

// July 5th, 2008 // Comments // review, tech

Sometimes I come across a site and have to wonder what the designers, consultants, marketers, management teams and everyone else involved were thinking when they signed off on the project. The sting is that much worse when it’s a re-design of a well-loved site.

Well, the brains behind the new BBC iPlayer layout have failed, miserably! The new design is cluttered and lacks the wonderful functionality of the older sidebar. Its ease of use is completely gone in favour of… something? I have no idea what benefit the new layout brings. There is no additional feature set. It doesn’t DO anything different.

I have two major concerns with it:

1. It’s cluttered.

The benefit of the original iPlayer was an ease of use and elegant design. It was simple to find a programme, easy to play it, and easy to find related content. They have now juxtaposed radio and television programming, littered the screen with unfathomable boxes, and made the filtering by category bloody difficult. Its main content doesn’t fit above the fold, making its screen real-estate poorly-used even though there is much more content on display at one time. The wonderfully-simple method of sidebar filtering is gone in favour of some myspace-esque scatter-box setup. It’s complicated, un-elegant, and supremely difficult to use.

Poor effort, badly done.

2. It’s ugly. I know this is subjective, but the actual player doesn’t fit well in its space. For all the seeming effort to splash content across the screen, the player itself doesn’t use enough of the screen when it’s in viewing mode:

You wouldn’t guess that the better-looking part of this screen is below the window scroll line, would you? Instead you get terminal-esque white text below a plain box which doesnt fit.

When I went to the forum to see if anyone else had noticed, I was pleased to see the top-most comments were all complaints about the bad layout. The boards were closed (I can only hope because of overwhelming viscerole being poured out!) but I did note another poor design feature: the background gradient repeats both horizontally and verticaly. What this means is that on a wide-screen layout, you see a tiled gradient instead of a smooth black-to grey.

I hope the BBC Design team heeds the forums, this plea, and countless others waiting to occur. Please fix the great iPlayer. This revamp’s rubbish and it feels like something pushed out to tick boxes rather than satisfy user needs.

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• Owen Gibson on how the BBC iPlayer is to be revamped

Aesthetics and Applications

// June 12th, 2008 // Comments // blogging, tech

Image by . SantiMB . (too busy) via Flickr

I grew up in a Mac family. My dad used to programme accounts recievable applications on an old, black and white Macintosh, and that was my first encounter with any sort of GUI. Since then, I’ve used both Mac’s and PC’s and have a MacBook for work and a poorly-running, but still brand-new Vista box in my home study. I’ve even dabbled with Linux several times.

However, I’m starting to realise something: an aweful lot of applications (on every platform) get aesthetics completely wrong.

There’s a balance between looking nice, feeling comfortable, and aiding use. I think that the appearance of an application is as important a part of the design as the application itself. It’s a part of the usability, it’s not ‘eye candy’ slapped on for gratuitous reasons.

This is something Mac’s understand, and their GUI is gorgeous. Vista’s pretty good-looking itself, but that’s it’s problem: that’s all it is. The operating system is huge, heavy, slow and unpredictible. It crashes, hangs, and takes minutes to load. I bought a brand new (though admittedly budget-conscious PC) from a manufacturer who shall remain nameless (cough! Dell! cough…) which barely runs just the OS. I’ve had to triple the RAM and will be re-installing this weekend.

So, what Can I do about it? I can switch Aero off… leaving me with a huge, heavy, unpredictable and slightly-less-slow OS which is now ugly. So there’s Vista, tipping in the balance with an “eye candy” approach at aesthetic design.

I see the visual layout, graphics, and overall presence of an application as part of it’s feature-set. It should be intuitive to interact with it somehow. I fine OS X much more intuitive, and aesthetically pleasing. Some apps written for it, however, fall far short it it’s high mark.

ecto is a blogging application for OS X, and it’s plain. It’s not minimalist-chic. It’s not “sleek”. It’s boring and plain. It also isn’t intuitive, unfortunately. It’s got loads of features, but it misses its greatest asset: the fact that it’s built on the most advanced Graphic User Interface ever developed.

Strangely, I much prefer to blog using Windows Live Writer! Its design works well, it’s interesting-looking (without being LOUD, like the rest of the intrusive Vista package) and it does what it says it will. It interacts very well with images (unlike ecto!), videos and links. It also has the ingenious feature of dowloading your site’s CSS so you can actually see how the post *should* look in situ. (Granted, this doesn’t always work…)

The point of this slightly oblique and poorly-thought-out rant, is that the point of software is to make peoples lives better. Designers completely miss that. Window’s OS designers seem to have thought: “I know, they want pretty. We’ll give ‘em pretty. It’ll be so pretty, it’ll need 3GB RAM and a high-end Graphics Card just to run… that’ll show ‘em!”

Well, it’s rubbish.

However, whoever was heading the design team for the Live suite (Writer, Mail, Messenger et al), was clearly desinging from an end-user’s perspective. Their thoughts were probably more along the lines of:

“hmm, when I blog, I like to be able to do that with images. Wouldn’t it be good if we could see how it’d look on the site before we publish? Yeah, Hey! I think people will find this useful… ooh, that looks good, too.”

I’d love to hear how you get on when designing or using software. Being me, I don’t think it stops with software design, but is actually a feature of how we live and interact. Let me know…

Selfish Web Users

// May 27th, 2008 // Comments // Semantic Web, Web 2.0, interesting, tech, travel

The BBC reported a few days ago that:

Web users are getting more ruthless and selfish when they go online, reveals research.

The idea is that people are using the web to get things done, and don’t seem to notice that service providers want them to stick around. They even get tetchy with intrusions or ‘widgets’.

I agree, to a certain extent, with this statement—that people are impatient with adverts on sites. However, I’m not sure if I feel this article is that well informed. Yes, it is backed by Jakob Nielsen (so-called “Usability Guru”); which means it’s founded on stable research etc…

But, what’s a widget if not a short-cut to a result? An Amazon widget on a site is basically a way to buy a product without the need even to visit Amazon.co.uk. I don’t think it’s helpful to lump all widgets together on this one. Most widgets are functional—In fact, I’d go so far as to say that a non-functional widget is just a banner-ad.

It IS annoying when your browsing is interrupted with a flash game or advert placing itself over your text or form. It doesn’t help me make a decision, and actually puts me off that particular site. The Times Online had a long-running Land Rover ad which drove over the page, stopping me from reading. Since when is a Land Rover Discovery 3 an impulse buy?

What this article fails to notice is that users are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do: use. The internet is usable now. People can think to themselves: “I’d quite like to buy an iPod, right now.” Within a minute, they can have a confirmation email and estimated delivery date in their inbox. This is using the web, and I think it’s not so much a ‘ruthless’ thing or a ‘selfish’ thing. You expect to buy what you’d like in a supermarket, and no one would call you ruthless for not setting up camp there for the afternoon. I know I like to spend as little time in Tesco as possible, and I don’t think anyone who considers me selfish or ruthless does so on account of that.

This is actually an issue of usability and confidence. People are more confident in their ability to purchase, find information, and network online. The majority of my book, electronic, and increasingly household purchases are done on amazon.co.uk. I check my calendar on Google before confirming appointments, and I even check people’s statuses on Facebook to see how they are. This is confident, comfortable use. I don’t need to spend an hour on a site when I can get the info I need in my RSS reader (Vienna, it’s brilliant!), but I still want the content.

I’m also still open to relevant advertising… If I’m after an iPod, I don’t mind being shown iPod accessories, especially discounted ones. I don’t mind being recommended a new book by a previously-read author. But, I do mind being shouted at by banner-ads and I tend to ignore them.

Having worked in online marketing, I couldn’t imagine a less-useful tactic than plastering your content with splashy ads and irrelevant content. It’s not helpful or usable, and goes against the grain of how the web works. It’s an open garden, and it’s rude to litter. This does not mean we’re ruthless, we’re just getting better at keeping our spaces clear and useful.

There’s the bin, put your Flash-ads in on your way out of our park, mate.

Image: “Rubbish!” by dogbomb from flickr

I’m a researcher…

// April 10th, 2008 // Comments // Semantic Web, Uncategorized, blogging, tech

Well, since blogging about Talis several times, I’ve taken the plunge and accepted their gracious offer to become a researcher for their Semantic Web Platform. That means I’ll be blogging a lot about the Semantic Web and it’s cool features etc. over on one of Talis’ blogs, especially ‘Nodalities’ where you can see my first post: Hello World–really original title, that.

Hopefully all my blogging here will put me in good stead to encourage discussion and facilitate dialogue (fancy words!) over there, and I hope everyone likes what I write… we’ll see.