A journalist friend of mine once said about Google "they are a freak of a company, the best advertising business ever built is funding the largest collection of mad scientists ever assembled" - Chris M
Yet another life changed by Total Immersion. In November of 2007, I could not swim 100 meters without sucking wind. 10 days ago I completed an Ironman (2.4 mile swim). TI is swimming for geeks. - Sacca via Bookmarklet
Jeff Pulver said almost precisely the same thing yesterday on FaceBook - Chris Selland
I don't remember two-way radio outages. - Jason Carreira
I see your point, but sadly Twitter is terrible for doing anything but making a shout and getting a group of replies. Actual conversations are pretty clumsy slash impossible. - Steve Isaacs
I hate to say it, but I agree with most of this. Neilsen's advice tends to be more tactical and -- at times -- anecdotal, and his website has extremely poor scanability The information layout is terrible. Norman, on the other hand, gives clearly written advice on how to *think* about design, helping you be a better designer rather than just a better implementor. - Kevin Fox via Bookmarklet
I've subscribed to Nielsen's weekly e-mail newsletter for years. I can't recall any anecdotal recommendations at all. He is meticulous about backing up his tactics with data. As for the site design, I'm just a civilian, but I find it very legible. (Much easier to read than, say, the gray color used in this comment on FriendFeed.com!) - Stephen Mack
The blog post you link to is discussing this page: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/... -- just curious, but why is the information layout terrible? Breadcrumbs, site nav, headlines, summaries -- seems very easy to scan and read to me. - Stephen Mack
I should be a little clearer. I don't mean anecdotal as in 'Boo.com uses flash in this way and it sucks don't do it' (though there is some of that) but more 'This very specific UI practice is bad' as opposed to Norman's more holistic discussions of UI principles. I don't want to sound too harsh though. I use his Heuristic Evaluation hit list all the time and it's extremely valuable, but again it's on a tactical level. - Kevin Fox
As for the information design, the typography is inelegant. It feels very pushy with text either being very dense or VERY BOLD. The leading isn't used to tie the bold headings with their content, but rather to just make them stand out more. The use of Verdana and interspersed bold terms invites people to skim and just pick out the buzzwords as a way of finding the piece they're looking for, which is fine in some cases but not for essays where one would assume there's something to be gained from the narrative flow of the piece. The design speaks to the largest problem of Nielsen in the world, which is that people anecdotally say things like 'Don't use serifs on the web because Nielsen said so.' They say this because this kind of bulletpoint is all they absorb from a layout that fosters this behavior. - Kevin Fox
@Stephen Mack: the font is rather large and not pretty, and the line spacing is all scrunched. That post could also have benefited from some anchored links. It is not horrible, but certainly not aesthetically pleasing. - Laura Norvig
To be clear, I think Jakob is brilliant and I respect him a great deal. What I'm saying is that his own site suffers from the same problem that, for example, DMV parking lots do: If you're an expert and try to apply every rule you advocate in one place, the result is often the opposite of what your expertise implies. Check out the useit.com home page and imagine it from a first-time visitor's perspective. - Kevin Fox
=kfury. I like friendfeed comment grey (part of the original btaylor design, I think), but I think it's just on the edge of being a problem, depending on your eyes and your screen. I feel like the grey plays an important role in the page flow, but when my screen is full of the comments from a single item (as it is for this one) I don't like it as much. But I don't have any better ideas. - ⓞnor
Sorry but that blog post only contains a single sentence of actual specific criticism, the rest being general remarks which are impossible to discuss because they lack an actual point. Here's that single sentence for reference: "I looked at the bulleted list of the top sites, and the bold cramped disorganized looking type starting each bullet, and I could not bear it." I think an in-depth usability rundown of useit.com would be interesting though. As for that single point of criticism, I think some spacing - Philipp Lenssen
This goes all the way back to the Handbook of Mathematical Functions from NBS (now NIST) in 1964 and an effort to continue that in the age of the Internet - Dennis E. Hamilton via twhirl
II wish DADS had really obscure things like priority deques. My faith in dictionaries is inversely proportional to the number of times I look for something and it's not there - Adewale Oshineye
Priority deques? So you can take off either the lowest *or* the highest element? - ⓞnor
@nor I've only ever needed that on a real project once. It was a trading system which required a way to fetch messages from either the front or the back of the queue. The queue needed to be ordered by a Comparator and we needed this to be done as quickly as possible since delays meant that users were trading based on outdated info. Trying to track down someone who had implemented a priority deque in anything other than a research paper was surprisingly unfruitful. - Adewale Oshineye
Seems like you could bang something out on top of a tree map that would be only slightly less efficient than whatever complicated thing could be done with pivoting heaps or such. - ⓞnor
The trap: read the tech blogs and fall in love with the bleeding-edge hip sites and lose focus on the long-term players that deliver real value - Chris M
the last photo in the series offers some contrast. another great 'big picture' post. - eric mortensen
Awesome shots. In the crazy world of internet, I first saw these pictures from the Czech republic at widelec.org before finally seeing the Boston.com website. - Mitchell Tsai