Results tagged “web design”

I've been playing around with some radical minimal design ideas lately, and it occurs to me that I'm not so sure that we need HTML, at least for "normal" work.

Think about what most professionals do all day. You're an accountant. You're an insurance agent. You're a policeman. You're a manager. You're a factory worker.

What do you need HTML for? As an accountant, say reviewing a ledger, you need to look a couple of lists of things and compare them. The idea of a displayed list certainly predates HTML. As an insurance agent, you need somebody to complete a claim. Modern voice systems can certainly interview the person, make a stab at word recognition, and you can easily outsource the quality control overseas at pennies per form. Bingo presto, not only do you have your form completed, the system is beginning to learn the spoken word of the customer, and it was a natural question-and-answer format instead of plugging through some long form on-screen.

In fact, I've spent the last day trying to think up some combination of activities that can't be done with a blinking light, a pushbutton, and a list/text/image display.

I can't, and that's strange.

I have no idea what hyperlinks accomplish, for instance. I mean, I understand the point. And they are awesome creatures of the internet. But who's job requires a hyperlink? Sure, things need to be linked together, but the physical construct of an underlined piece of text that, when clicked, takes you somewhere else? Nobody has a need in their normal job to go to random places depending on which text is annotated. Most jobs are not that free-form.

It sounds nutty, I know. And pay attention: I am not saying that HTML shouldn't exist, or that things shouldn't be linked together, or that the semantic web isn't a good thing. What I'm asking is: simply because something makes sense in hypertext markup, should it appear on a screen somewhere?

I'm a policeman accessing a list of recent crimes. Here's the dirty little secret from systems design -- there are only a couple dozen activities for any one job that take up 99% of your time. Sometimes there is only one or two activities that you do all day long. So I push the "recent crimes" button, perhaps a physical, real button, and there's a list of recent crimes. No links, no tables, no bold text, no flashing or jumping bunnies. No fonts. Just a list. Of stuff I need to know. mirabile dictu

How far we've come.

HTML was started with the idea that the display of information would be a completely different problem than the structure of it. But look what's happened since then: it's all about display. How big the screen size is in pixels, what kinds of fonts you have (or can install), whether or not you support flash, etc.

All of this is great from a one-system-must-conquer-the-world standpoint, but completely wrong-headed from a I-need-to-separate-different-parts-of-my-life department. We're trying to invent sort of a universal generic display language. Wonderful concept, but that's not where we started out going. Or if it was, I missed it. I thought the display aspect was secondary, not primary.

But then came advertising. And money. Lots of it.

My thesis is that at some point in the last 10-15 years, the HTML web has crossed the line from being an information structure and became an entertainment medium. That's cool, and I wouldn't want to take away the goodness of the net for anything. I'm simply asking if using an entertainment medium to do your job is such a good idea. For most of us, I don't think so.

Of course, there will always be a place for the arts -- painting, writing, movies, games, music, etc -- and HTML and computers are wonderful tools for the creation and enjoyment of the arts. Most of our jobs though, however sadly, are not art.

Advertising has created wonderful general-purpose devices that can switch from balancing a checkbook to flying a F-15 in a split second. One browser page can have your investment information and the next one Facebook. And world opinion. And lolcats. Strategic investment advice. And porn. It's all one of the same. Sometimes barriers are good things. A site that pulls you in with messages from your friends can then get you to click one link -- it only takes one click -- and you've lost 30 hours playing Farmville. These are all the benefits, and drawbacks, of hyper-text markup language the way it is being used today.

And we really don't need it all that much.

I was watching the remastered versions of the old 1960s Star Trek TV show the other day, and while the new graphics were great, I couldn't help but think how god-awful the instruments and displays were, compared what we are using today.

But then -- being the contrarian I am -- I thought: Doesn't this actually make a bit of sense?

I'm building a new startup -- it allows people to collect and share quotes from books and web articles. As you add each quote, you tag it. When people vote up or down your quote (or comment on it), the system trains itself to learn which tags each user likes. I may like quotes from American History. You may never want to see any quotes about politics. Over time, the system learns this and acts accordingly. That way you can have a broad range of subjects with a large user base and the app still has the feel of a private forum.

A while back, Paul Graham wrote a language called Arc. After he wrote it, he challenged other languages to create a simple set of web pages in as few tokens as possible. In Paul's philosophy, the fewer tokens a language has (or needs) the more robust it is. Therefore the more likely it is to last a hundred years

I've been thinking about Paul's assertion for over a year now. I've programmed in lots of languages -- to me they're just tools. Old friends. I can't say I am crazy about one language or another, no matter how many tokens it has.

As I and others pointed out, you can make a computer language do almost anything in as few tokens as you like as long as you've set up a DSL (Domain-Specific Language) for the problem domain.

Since I'm building my product almost from scratch, I thought I would take you through a quick tour of how you end up with powerful "languages" that have maximum expressiveness and minimum tokens, no matter what tools you are using. For this discussion, we'll stick to a (mostly) .NET stack, with some major modifications, but the stack is really not important.

I've been busy working on my startup for the last month, and as an agile-big-corp guy, many of you are probably wondering: how am I doing in the micro-team startup field?

Very well, actually.

Here's a brain dump of things I've learned over the last month. As always, take what you can use and leave the rest:

I'm amazed at the number of businesses, small and large, that have lost their hunger.

Over the last two months I have been looking for a SCUBA instructor. We're headed to the Great Barrier Reef. I've always heard that you should dive it if at all possible.

I found a local shop about six weeks ago and started a conversation with the owner. I say conversation only in a loose term -- although he had a yellow pages entry, was on the web, had a store, and sold lots of equipment, he was rarely around. It took days for him to respond to my voicemails, and getting the paperwork and everything else settled took weeks. By the time we were ready to train, our instructor had an aunt die and was unable to help us. Seeing as how there was no backup instructor, and the owner was away from the shop (again) we simply ran out of time. So sad. Too bad.

I'm not writing this to quibble with one shop owner. As part of this same trip I've had the opportunity to contact little hotels and shops all around Australia and New Zealand. Most of them were very cordial. Some were downright friendly.

But others weren't so much.

Ever since I wrote the article comparing technology to heroin, I've been been thinking about mind and body-altering things and how morals, standards, and mores build up around them to contain the damage and maximize the benefits to society. As we get more and more integrated with technology, I'm waiting for some new standards to emerge about what is acceptable or not -- I think this is a vital next step to maintain some kind of vigor in the species.

Since nobody else is doing anything else along these lines that I can see, I thought I'd create a few standards or morals for myself. A "standard" is just a better way of doing things: standards change over time. A "moral" is something that I personally do not do because I find it harms myself or others. You create standards and you discover morals. I apply the simple rule of discovering morals by asking "If I made this moral a universal law, would more people be helped than harmed by it?"

So let's get with it.

How many times have you visited a blog or read an article and wanted to reply or comment but didn't because of these issues:

• There was no facility to comment
• You were confused and had a question and wasn't sure anybody would respond
• You didn't want to go through the hassle of having to subscribe or revisit the site all the time just because you were interested in one article
• All the existing comments were jokes or one-liners that added no value, and you had something serious to say
• You really wanted to start a conversation about a topic that was related to the article, but a little different, and was afraid nobody else would be interested
• There were obvious flaws in certain parts of the article, although some parts were good, and you didn't want to have to take the time to point out which parts were good and which parts you agreed with
• The tone of the board/article is very serious, and you thought of a great joke that nobody would appreciate, but it'd be a shame not to share it
• The traffic on the site is so low that any contribution you make really won't get many readers, making it worth much of your time

How about this idea as a response to these problems?

I was finishing up work on one of my microsites (shameless plug: Neuropathy is a serious condition and you should be aware of it) when I came to the decision about badges.

Badges are those little graphics you see on some web pages that assure the reader how safe the page is. "Scanned for viruses" or "Member of the BBB" or "HackerSafe" or "Endorsed by Dr. Phil"

We've all seen them. I looked into how to get some of these. Some are very expensive! Some just require you to fill out an online form. One page had a bunch of the buttons and said to complete the application to receive one. Only there wasn't an application anywhere. So I just lifted one of the images.

One guy was making his own badges. "Approved by Chuck!" it proudly said, with a picture of Chuck (I presume) in the middle of an ornate circle.

So from a web owner standpoint, these badges are valued all over the place, and what do they really say? That you had money to pay somebody? Do the badges actually serve a purpose?

I've been exploring an idea for the last several weeks: creating small websites (microsites) geared for little areas of the internet that are underserved.

Actually it's a little more complicated than that (isn't everything!). The trick is to find a three-way balance: things that people search for that advertisers pay for that there isn't a huge amount of information out there already.

And of course there are no black-and-white answers. Ideally you'd find a topic that a million people were searching for daily, that advertisers were paying million dollars a lead, and that no other sites existed on the internet.

Ideally I would have my own lunar base and be declared emperor of the solar system. Unfortunately, we live in a world where we don't have universal perfection, simply local optimization.

My new microsite Neuropathy.me is about seven pages of the common things people search for when looking up neuropathy. (Neuropathy is a condition that affects the nervous system, causing tingling or numbness. If you've ever had a foot fall asleep, you get the general idea)

I've made about 40 pages in all for this general area, all spread out among various related domains. I will probably mention them here over the weekend as they come up just to get some link juice. I'll be sure to put them in the title, so you can skip them if you want.

Lots of questions remain, and this is just an experiment to try something and see if it works. What's the smallest number of pages that makes a useful microsite to a user? Is it better to split your information up into 3 or 4 domains? Or have everything in one domain? What types of advertising would work best for such a system? How long does it take to get working?

So far, this is a lot of hard work! I wouldn't recommend it for people looking to get rich quickly. It's more for patient people who want to make a little money slowly. Search Engine Optimization is just a smoldering pile of dirt -- search engines control this huge amount of cash flow represented by eyeballs. So games are set up between people wanting to rank highly on search engines with minimal effort and the engine-makers, who don't want "bad" sites ranking highly. What's bad? I guess it's like pornography: you know it when you see it. So millions of folks are trying to optimize a system that is actively adapting to not be optimized. It's not exactly a friendly situation to get into.

But still, I'm fascinated. As part of learning all of this, I'm learning why some things are popular on the web and some things aren't, and (maybe) how to make use of that. If nothing else, it's a skill I can take with me to my next adventure.

After all, once you build something -- once you complete version 1 of you killer internet app, if nobody knows about it, what difference have you made? I read somewhere that initial application development is only about a tenth of the total effort needed to get people buying your product. Yet many times we hackers treat the coding part as the important part. Lots of really complicated coding never amounted to anything, and lots of really simple coding made millions. The difference is all about finding a need, filling it, and getting the word out. Kind of those same three areas I mentioned above, huh?

So if you get a chance, take a look at the site! Feedback is greatly appreciated. What would you want, as a reader, that isn't on there? What's wrong with the business model I've described?

Allison Stokke, athlete, college student,
technology consulting maven

I've been blogging over four years. In that time I've written hundreds of articles about technology, technology management, humor, agile, aviation, hiking -- whatever struck my fancy. So of course, when I review my server logs for the past month, one of the main reasons people come to my blog is Allison Stokke.

"Who is Allison Stokke?" you might ask. It's the same question I had last night as I poured over my server logs. You see, I am learning a bit more about web analytics and Search Engine Optimization and I'm using this blog as sort of a guinea pig.

Allison Stokke is a very attractive young lady who does track and field sports. So what the heck does track and field, or attractive young ladies, have to do with technology, agile, management, startups, or any of that?

A while back I blogged on what I thought people wanted to see. In what seemed like an idiotic use of money, studies had shown that monkeys, when given the choice, would gladly pay some of their food to look at -- monkey butts.

I found this to be interesting, so I blogged on it and put in some pictures -- funny pictures, pictures of attractive women. I even made the point that hey, this page will generate views for a long time. I used Allison as an example of this phenomenon as it applied to the internet. Poor Allison -- she became this one-hit wonder simply for having her picture snapped at a track meet.

Boy was I right! The stats tell the story.

I haven't been blogging much lately, mostly because I've been reading up on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and web analytics. As part of that, I've also been in discussions with an acquaintance from HackerNews about forming a startup.

The startup is basically the simplest thing imaginable. Make a web site that people visit. Provide them with things that they would like to purchase. Make a commission on sales.

Since this is the thing that all startups have to do, I figure this is a nice back-to-basics exercise. Solve the general problem.

But wow! This is like saying making a million dollars is easy because you simply need every family in the United States to give you a penny. It sounds easy, but it's really, really difficult.

Ever get a song stuck in your head that you just can't get out?

I do that all of the time -- perhaps because I played the piano so much as a kid, but perhaps it's just some kind of defect. Seems like I read somewhere that having the same song repeat over and over again in your head was a form of seizure.

Let's hope not.

There is a phrase for it, however, as it is such a common occurrence: it's called an "earworm".

Can you get the same thing when it comes to inventions?

Ready for prime time?

I've gotten the functional programming bug lately. Most of my career after I learned my third language or so, I could care less what the language is -- just let's solve it already, ok? But lately I've been hearing the functional programming wonks go on, quite at length, over how great functional and meta-programming is compare to common, pedestrian programming.

I'm not drinking the cool-aid yet, but what the heck -- let's fire up Microsoft's new F-Sharp language and take a quick look under the hood.

Got Kratom? If you do, does that make you bad?

Got into an interesting discussion over on news.yc this morning regarding the question: "Just what is okay to sell on a website?"

A user named "rms" has a site called something like GetKratom.com. And it appears that every so often he's pumping this Kratom stuff on the board to whomever will listen. For those of you who don't know, and I'm one of them, Kratom is, according to Wikipedia:

Kratom (Mitragyna speciosa) is a medicinal leaf harvested from a large tree native to Southeast Asia in the Rubiaceae, first documented by Dutch colonial botanist Korthals. It is botanically related to the Corynanthe, Cinchona and Uncaria genera and shares some similar biochemistry. It is in the same family as coffee, and the psychoactive plant Psychotria viridis. Other species in the Mitragyna genus are used medicinally in Africa, and also used for their wood.

It is used for its psychoactive effects in its native region, with some use elsewhere in the world. In Southeast Asia the fresh leaves are usually chewed, often continuously, by workers or manual laborers seeking a numbing, stimulating effect. Elsewhere, the leaves are often made into a tea or extracted into water and then evaporated into a tar that can be swallowed. Kratom is not often smoked, although this method does provide some effect.

So RMS asked the question (which I prompted) to the group: Is it wrong to have a business where you sell legal, psychoactive plants? RMS claims Kratom is sort of just like a souped-up coffee. Some in the group accused him of being a drug peddler.

Gosh did THAT kick off a firestorm!

Cool! Silverlight will run on linux!

So I'm thinking about my next project, a small app to write over the next few months while I'm filling the piggy bank back up and working on finding cofounders, and it occurs to me that we're on a merry-go-round when it comes to the browser.

Coming soon is the big day where Y-Combinator chooses its Winter teams. Over on the news.yc board, there's a lot of angst and tension.I applied too (for the first time), but I have absolutely no worries at all about my application. Why? Do I have some secret connection into YC? Am I Paul Graham's illegitimate love-child? Have I hacked into the YC computers?

Nope.

Because I have context.

What media do you want to consume today? It seems like a strange question -- obviously you're already consuming stuff so you must know -- but yet are you really consuming the stuff you'd like to?

Whatever time you spend getting information, what is the ultimate experience you could possibly have?

It all gets down to convergent versus divergent reasoning and web experiences.

There's been a terrific discussion around social sites both here and other other parts of the blogosphere. It seems to me that content selection systems swing out of whack after achieving a certain level of growth, as I pointed out yesterday.

You can't have a wagon hitched to two horses pulling in different directions. Likewise, if people will do what you reward them for doing, what you reward them for has to be in the best interests of the user community.

Look. I know the arguments. Let's say you're creating a social web site, that is, a place where people can do stuff and other people can recognize them for what they are doing (even if it is just scratching their elbow). Sooner or later, you're going to want some kind of score, some numerical system where users can find the "good stuff".

So you put in Diggs, or thumbs-up and down, or arrow votes up or down, or smiley or frowny faces. Maybe you add a little score number to show how much cowbell it has.

Hey, the argument goes, people aren't going to have time to do much more than a simple yes/no, people hate complicated interfaces, a simple score can let folks see how well they're doing. What could go wrong with a simple scoring system, a simple number, and an algorithm that's invisible to the user?

What could go wrong? Let's find out.