My favorite usability hero, Jakob Nielsen, has some new results from eye-tracking technology that can help you improve your web site. OK, the results aren’t that earth-shattering (except for the bit near the end about men checking out George Brett’s crotch–and if that’s not worth a WTF?!, I don’t know what is), but they are worth repeating:
Use subheads & bulleted lists.
Make the writing shorter and more concise.
Include more white space.
Write useful headlines (not cute or witty, unless they can also be useful).
Making those changes can help users get through the content in half the time and remember 34% more.
The article also has tips for online graphics, namely make the pictures useful. If the picture doesn’t add anything, it’d be better to have white space. It’s also better to use real people instead of stock imagery, and if your target audience is men it’s apparently good to include “areas of private anatomy.” Again, WTF?! (link via kottke.org)
I realized I switched from Vimeo to YouTube for no reason. OK, YouTube is now backed by Google and has the advantage of a massive audience. That’s tempting. But Vimeo has really nice design. Which do you like better?
Let’s compare. Lexi Combs Her Hair, Vimeo vs. YouTube:
(Keep in mind that the aspect ratios are different. I forced them both to be the same height–187 pixels–but Vimeo has a width of 250 vs. YouTube’s 227.)
We’re in the midst of the user-generated revolution. Content generated by users is skyrocketing in popularity. Which means anyone who can generate that content has much to gain. There’s always the random blog entry or video clip from folks like me who have full time jobs. But then there are the people with the most to contribute and the most to potentially gain from this focus on user-generated content.
I’m talking, of course, about teens. Who else has the free time to create loads of user-generated content and the patience to wait for their payday? It could be articles, blog entries, photos, videos, podcasts, even links. The Wall Street Journal just explored some of the users behind user-submitted link sites, like Digg, and found that one of the top submitters to Reddit is 12 years old. Netscape even pays a 17-year-old $1,000 a month to find links.
I get a kick out of this story about the rise of the word ‘meh,’ thanks to the Internet. The best part is when the writer asks where the word came from and my immediate thought was the Simpsons. Is there anything they don’t know?
So much of our modern culture has been borrowed from the Simpsons with an exclamatory yoink. Just visit the list of Simpsons’ neologisms from Wikipedia (of course the list doesn’t include ‘meh’–doh!). (link via Josh Lewis!)
I enjoy his simple-yet-functional design (check out this riff on too much meta; interestingly enough, I had a terrible time finding the link for the MT interview with Kottke thanks to poorly designed metadata) and would love to do my reviews the way he does his books and movies. I might actually get around to doing them if that were the case.
Here are a few of the money quotes from the interview …
So I’ve been playing around with the social networking sites lately. A while ago I hopped on the MySpace bandwagon, which I didn’t get at the time (I got over the weird protocol and started to add some friends and see some vague usefulness in it, but it’s not my favorite thing on the web), and lately I’ve joined Facebook and LinkedIn. It’s interesting trying out a few different social networking sites and seeing the pros and cons.
My numbers are improving on Craigslist. I’m now 2 for 5. My baseball cards are gone and now the remains of my Star Wars collection are gone (unless there’s another box hiding at my parents house, which I may disavow any knowledge of). A woman picked them up this afternoon for her 8-year-old son who is nuts about Star Wars. If my collection must go, I’m happy to see it go to a kid who will play with it.
I’m still waiting to sell the beast, an old scanner and my racing cards. And if I ever get around to photographing and posting it, my entire collection of Billy Graham memorabilia (Billy-o-bilia) that I scored from the free table in the closing days of the BGEA.
I just sold my entire baseball card collection. There’s a large empty spot on a shelf in the basement where they used to sit. Taking up space. It’s nice to see them finally go, but I am a little sad. Mainly sad because my childhood collecting dreams never materialized. And it’s sad to invest so much time and energy into something just to give it up one day. But I haven’t cared about baseball or baseball cards in a long time.
Yesterday I posted the entire collection on Craigslist with a brief description of what I had and a picture (check it out, you can see the entire collection overwhelming my coffee table). I asked for $50 for the whole collection after seeing larger and better collections going for about that. In a little more than 12 hours I had 10 offers and by 10 a.m. this morning the cards were gone and I had $50 cash in my pocket.
Part of me wants to dread giving them away for such a pittance and wishes I had asked for more. But the rest of me is just happy to be done with it so easily.
OK, mapping my photos in Flickr. That’s pretty cool. I haven’t mapped very many of them yet (seems kind of dumb to map 80% of the photos at my house), but this is definitely incentive to upload vacation pics. Way cool.
Update: Uploaded more pictures, strictly for the joy of mapping. Gosh, this is addictive.
Prompted by my baseball card post yesterday, I’m wondering today if the Internet has killed collecting.
I used to be quite the collector: Rocks, shells, baseball cards, racing cards, racing memorabilia, matchbox cars, postcards, yo-yo’s. Since college I’ve pretty much given it all up and sold off most of my collections (you’d be shocked at how quickly my meager rock collection was snatched up on ebay). I lost interest in collecting, and now the only thing I really collect are books (though limited shelf space has put a damper on that collection) and souvenir yo-yo’s (from places I’ve visited, so it’s rather limited).
I tired of collecting before the web really came into its own, but I wonder what effect the web has had on collecting.
