Below is the latest roundup of useful reader responses to my recent columns. If you have a suggestion or a comment, please send it to poynter@sree.net.
My column last week praising Furl.net, a site that allows you to save articles onto an online filing cabinet, drew several comments and questions.
• Ann Monroe writes: I have become addicted to a bookmark manager called Linkman, by Outer Technologies (http://www.outertech.com/). It works across all the major browsers, and has an IE toolboar which lets you save, rank, and annotate URLs on the fly, as well as a very fast search function for finding a URL among the hundreds you’ve saved. It allows you to choose a default browser, but also to specify the browser used with individual URLs, in case there’s one that doesn’t work well with your default browser. It can import and export to all browsers — but I use it instead of browser bookmarks. It will also check all your bookmarks – either when asked or on a regular schedule — to see which ones have died. It’s very flexible, fast, and powerful … and I like having all that information on my computer, not on the Web somewhere.As with any new-ish technology, some readers are rightly cautious and posed questions about safety and other issues. I posed those questions to Furl founder Michael Giles.
• Jerry Zurek of the English & Communication Dept, Cabrini College writes: “Thanks for the tip on Furl It. There, I discovered this information about how to establish a permanent link to articles before they go into the NY Times archive through their RSS feeds. Perhaps you know this already.”
A reader sent me the following comment: “Over the years I’ve saved web pages to my own hard drive, but the ability to attach notes is attractive. One concern though: what if Furl’s business plan fails? Not sure I want to trust my files to a start-up.”
Mike Giles responds: You definitely raise a valid concern. I will add this information to the FAQ, but let me try to answer it in two parts:
- Failure – with any new business, failure is certainly more likely than success. Obviously we think we have something special, but that doesn’t mean the market will agree. However, we understand that the data we store on our servers is very important to our users (I know I’d be really pissed if I lost my 600 documents). So, we are working on completing our export functionality. If you look at the export page today (http://www.furl.net/export.jsp), there is a way to turn your entries into bookmarks and also a way to export all your entry data in XML. The next piece which will be up later this week or early next, is the ability to export all your saved documents (i.e. a big zip file). Then after that (and this is farther out), the ability to export your entire search index (and search off line). And beyond those things, there is an element of trust. We honestly care about making users wildly happy with our service. If you want some data off the server that you can’t get through our site, just let us know and we will happily send it your way.
- My computer vs the Internet – When it comes to saving files on your machine versus on our server, people have a range of opinions. However, we see the following major advantages to saving things in Furl. First, we back up the data frequently (multiple times a day) and those back-ups are geographically diverse in case disaster strikes (main servers in N.Y., backups in Texas). Few people can say as much for their home machines. Second, if you want to access the data from more than one machine (i.e. home, work, or phone/PDA), you are either out of luck or need to run a server (yuck). Third, every time you upgrade your computer (typically every 2-3 years), you need to move your data around and try to keep it intact.
A newspaper reporter writes: “After reading your column, I checked out Furl and then asked our paper’s tech guy if I could download it. He raised some interesting things in his response.”
Here’s his response:
This has enormous potential for abuse. It allows an unknown third-party complete access to your list of information that you found important enough to bookmark in a detailed way.
Spyware generally is delivered as a free utility that performs some helpful activity on your system but simultaneously watches your browsing behavior and, when you go to sites that contain certain key words, it notifies subscribing advertisers automatically. Together, they use that information to target you for browser and email advertising.
While I can find no evidence that Furl is spyware, it collects all the same kind of information, further qualified as being important to you. Together with the information they get automatically from your machine and browser, you’re putting an awful lot of confidence in the hands of someone you don’t know much about.
Is this true? Does this have that sort of abuse potential?
Mike Giles responds: I’m sorry you got such a scare from your IT guy. Furl is NOT spyware and is in no way associated with any spyware vendors. It is true that your articles and sites of interest will be stored on our servers, but that is your personal data and we respect that. At some point, will we show you an ad based on the topic of the article you are looking at? Perhaps, but that is no more spyware than ads on Google or on any newspaper site.My column praising design guru Jakob Nielsen’s guidelines for web design drew the following note:
We are not tracking your behavior. We are not notifying advertisers, and in fact you don’t even need to install any software on your machine at all (instead of the IE toolbar, you can just use a “button link”). You are doing the right thing to be cautious, but you have my assurances that using Furl will not expose you to any such risks.
All of that said, I think as a journalist, you will find it wildly useful in your day-to-day life so I hope you take the initiative, sign up, and try it out. If you have any more questions or concerns along the way, don’t hesitate to contact us.
• Rohn Jay Miller of Minneapolis writes: Jakob Nielsen was an important first step in usability, but he totally dismisses the importance of branding and emotional experience in website design. If Saint Jakob had his way all websites would have 14 point type with dense text everywhere, a few rules, bright blue underlines, and absolutely no graphics, since they take time to download.In a follow-up message, Rohn writes:
I have a feeling that Jakob Nielsen will be remembered as one of the most important information architects … of the 1990s.
Please visit American Institute of Graphic Arts for a more current discussion about website design.
Just so you don’t think I’m just one of those whiny “curse the darkness” kind of people, please let me recommend two outstanding online design resources:
- Steve Krug has written, hands down, the finest book on web design and usability, entitled “Don’t Make Me Think.” I’ve bought 10 or 12 copies of it so far to give to friends and business clients. You can read more about the book, including an online version of chapter 2 of the book, on Steve’s site. Steve does workshops around the country, and if you’re looking to improve your game in site design, or that of your staff, these are the best seminars in the field (including Jakob Nielsen’s).
- Believe it or not, the folks in the federal government have done a fine job of establishing a clear — if overly-detailed — structure for web design, one that builds in requirements gathering and human factors testing. It was created at the Department of Health and Human Services, and released just before the end of 2003. It’s free — you and I paid for it with our taxes — and available at: http://usability.gov/pdfs/guidelines.html.
I hope this adds more constructively to the discussion.
• Jakob Nielsen responds: It is not true that I recommend “14 point type with dense text.”Your turn: share your thoughts – and useful sites – at poynter@sree.net.
Item #4 on my list of “top ten web design mistakes of 2002” was “fixed font size”1, so I would never recommend 14 pt. I do recommend having flexible font sizes to support people who need big text in order to read2. (This means almost all senior citizens; a big and affluent market that’s overlooked by a lot of glamour-oriented Web designers who love fixed-size tiny fonts3.)
Item #5 on the same list of mistakes is “blocks of text,” so I don’t recommend that either. In fact, I have recommended scannable text since my early studies of how users read online in 19974.
It is also not true that I recommend “absolutely no graphics,” though it is correct that I have found again and again that users are highly in favor of fast download speeds. It is too easy for people in the industry to forget about the two-thirds of Americans who are still on dial-up. Thus I advise restraint in the use of big images and other elements that can slow down users. But that doesn’t mean “no images.”
My book on Homepage Usability contain 13 guidelines on graphics — one more than the number of guidelines on content writing in the same book5. My book on E-Commerce User Experience contains an additional 9 guidelines for how to use images to show products.
And many of my other studies and research reports have identified cases where even pretty heavy-duty graphics work well, for example in terms of video demos of complex products or downloadable high-resolution photos in PR sections of corporate sites.
My main point is simply that in considering the emotional impact of a website, the experience of *using* it is much more personal, and thus has greater impact, than the simple appearance of the static page. People don’t sit and admire Web pages; they interact with them and *move* through the site.
In the debate between “look and feel,” both elements deserve attention, but “feel” is vastly most important.
A shallow understanding of branding is often used to defend bad design. But a deeper understanding of branding is not “what does your image look like” but rather “what do customers think about your company.” On the Web, if you have a reputation for being difficult to use and for offering bad customer service, that reputation becomes your brand and you will lose customers.
People don’t return to a site that’s pretty if they can’t use it. Conversely, of course, websites that are useful and give good service (Google and Amazon come to mind) build brands that users want to return to.
References:
1“Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002”
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20021223.html
2“Let Users Control Font Size”
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020819.html
3“Web Usability for Senior Citizens”
http://www.nngroup.com/reports/seniors/
4“How Users Read on the Web”
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html
5“Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed”
http://www.useit.com/homepageusability/
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