DiaLOG

March 30, 2004

Google Tools

Google launched a new interface design yesterday. Even though there were some small changes, it looks like they are positioning themselves closer to that IPO. Google’s new design made it alot easier to find their other numerous tools. One tool I found is a tool that alerts you, through email, about any new result from a topic you select. You can select it to be either a news result or a web result. I actually had a client ask me about a feature like this the other day. Now I know where to point him. Google does it again.

• Google Web Alerts
• Google News Alerts

March 23, 2004

Update: Bill Gates to Give Away Apple G5s

We know that Bill is giving away Apple G5s in April but are they really G5s. I did a little research and this is what I found. Back in October, a Microsoft employee was fired for reporting the shipment of crates of G5s to its Redmond plant (See employee’s blog). Second, there was a story about a man who PCed his G5. Is Bill thinking of doing the same thing with these G5s he is giving away in April through Corbis? Either way I still hope to win one, they look great.

March 19, 2004

Bill Gates to Give Away Apple G5s

Corbis Images will start giving away one Apple G5 a day in April. (hat tip: Cameron) I’ll have to wait and see if I am lucky. Did you know that Bill Gates founded Corbis in 1989. So Bill will be giving away Apples. Way to go, he finally got it right.

March 18, 2004

Bracktology Design

It is that time of year again, today the big dance starts once again. College Basketball’s March madness begins. Every year I make my picks and hope for the best. The past few year I have been setting up my picks through online bracket managers. They make it so much easier to follow who has won and lost and keeps a point total for you to compare to others playing around you. This year I am signed up with through two different services CBS Sportsline and ESPN.

Both were easy to use, but designed quite differently. CBS uses javascript to set your picks and ESPN uses flash. So what method do you think is the best approach? I will tell you what I think.

You could have the users make all the picks on one screen but it would be too hard to guide the user through it, especially on a smaller screen size. So both systems have divided the picks in regions. CBS’s design is easy to follow but lacks in guiding the user to what region to pick after they are done with one. What I like about ESPN’s design is that it alerts you when you have completed a region and guides you to the next region. See figure 1 CBS’s design is quick in processing your picks whereas ESPN’s flash manager has to load and that can take some. I was literally waiting for 5 minutes to edit my picks in the flash editor, I finally gave up and tried later.

Now when you are done with all of your picks ESPN will take you to an HTML version of your all of picks in every region or you can choose to view them in flash but you have to drag your mouse around to see all regions. CBS however, never lets you view the entire bracket on one page. See figure 2

If I want to print your bracket, ESPN has a button that will print it right from the your completed bracket page. CBS didn’t even offer me the option to print.

Overall I give the prize to ESPN for best design and usability for a bracket manager. Their interface anticipated what I would want to do next and provided an easy-to-use interface. I think this is a good example of where the use of flash is beautifully executed and presented. So good luck on your brackets this year and may the best guesses win.

March 11, 2004

Relaunching a website this year?

Here are some quick facts about website launches this year. Are you going to be involved in any of them?

• 58% of Websites are planning a relaunch this year.
• 49% of Website managers say usability is their top challenge in 2004.
• 41% of Web sites will be upgrading or deploying a new commerce platform for their site this year.

(Source: Jupiter Research/ERI Executive Survey, 10/03)

I think it would be safe to say usability is getting a lot more attention these days. In the infancy of the internet usability wasn’t looked at that much, what looked cool and sexy was top priority. So we may see a decline in those all-flash websites this year, bummer.

March 09, 2004

More popular websites moving towards Web Standards

Back from my vacation, which was totally awesome. If you ever want to spoil yourself, go on cruise with Royal Caribbean. Their service and quality of vacation was superb.

Now that I am back in the swing of things, I have been doing a little research on the popular web portals providers out there today. Several have now started making the move to CSS standards-based layouts. Here is a list of of recent web portals that have moved to standards-based design or a hybrid design of sorts.

• Lycos Home page - Lycos is probably the most standard of the bunch
• AOL Home page - Notes from earlier post
• MSN - Hybrid table based design, but still very heavy page weight. Uses CSS quite extensively for much presentation.