It came from Black Background: Matt Shobe's Blog

This morning, around 8:30am or so, I went through yesterday's postal mail. I noticed a Nordstrom print catalog, among many others, that I'd just as well have them save the trees rather than send to me since I'll gladly shop their stores or website without prompting. (Yeah, I like the company.) Trusting that their own customer service process might be above par in the junk mail dept., I decided to send them a quick note through the standard feedback form on nordstrom.com. I sent:

Please remove me from the printed catalog mailing list; customer number AC74774XX1.

Fourty-five minutes later I received this response:

Dear Mr. Shobe,

Thank you for contacting Nordstrom regarding removing your name from our mailing list. I apologize for any inconvenience or frustration receiving our catalogs may have caused you.

Per your request, I have removed your name from our mailing list. Please note that because our catalogs are preprinted several months in advance, you may receive two or three additional mailings before the removal takes effect.

I hope the news of the removal eases your mind. Please let me know if you have any further questions or concerns. Thank you again for contacting Nordstrom.

With warm regards,

Tari
Internet Customer Service
Nordstrom Direct
Visit us again at: www.nordstrom.com

OH, the inconvenience and frustration I've just been spared! :) Take that, FTD. OK, so I didn't start from a position of anger related to a botched mail order invoice, so it's not exactly apples-to-apples. But the blitzing turnaround time, simple precision of the response to my inquiry, and utter satisfaction from seeing that Nordstrom perceives my mundane request as meaningful enough to man the barricades on a Sunday-freaking-morning is worth real consumer bonus points to me. Seriously — well done, folks.

Posted by Matt Shobe at 05:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Earlier this week, I ordered an FTD bouquet for my mom; it's an obvious Mother's Day play, but lacking any real competition from siblings, this is the sad regression to the safe-and-mediocre that passes for thoughtfulness in my worldview. That said, I thought it was a really nice-looking bouquet of spring flowers with a smart ceramic vase she might actually want to keep. I ordered it last Monday for delivery May 11th.

Cut to May 11th, late evening. I check my Inbox:

Subject: Unable to Deliver Order (Order Number:FMM83784)

---

Dear Matt:

Thank you for your recent purchase from FTD.COM for Sally.
Despite our best efforts to schedule your delivery as you requested, we were unable to get shipment placed to this particular zip code in a timely fashion.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this may cause.

Your FTD.COM order has been cancelled and a full
refund in the amount of $~fref.amt~ has been posted to your credit card.

If you are interested in rescheduling a delivery for after Mother¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿s Day, please visit us at www.ftd.com/love and save $15 off your next order.

Thank you again for your understanding and for choosing FTD.COM .

Thank you,

Laura

For Customer Service Issues Contact:
E-mail: custserv@ftd.com
Shop: http://website2

For Billing Issues Contact:
E-mail: http://website3
Phone: phone4
Shop: http://website2

You can imagine my reaction. Actually, you don't have to imagine a thing. Instead of emailing http://website3 or calling phone4, I replied with a heat-of-the-moment response:

This is among the worst "we're sorry, but we couldn't complete your order" emails I've ever received. Did your database even bother to make an effort to pull in the relevant details of my specific bouquet into the order below? Does a forest of question marks help explain why delivery didn't work out? Did you make any effort to make up this service gaffe to me, other than to offer to ship a time-sensitive gift well after the necessary due date at a modest discount? No.

I'm off to 1-800 flowers for my next similar occasion. FTD, you blew it.

Fortunately, I had a plan (B) and Amazon's Prime shipping deal will get it there on Monday. (Their logistics have almost never let me down, and the few times they did they fell all over themselves to apologize and make it up to me concretely.) But who wants to call Mom and say "no, really, they lost your gift in the mail! I swear!" Mom's been down this road before and knows every one of your tired tactics, buddy.

Enough with the griping already, Matt. Happy Mother's Day, moms!

Posted by Matt Shobe at 07:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been using My Yahoo! since its very earliest days; while many parts of this very web 1.0 "personal portal" have changed with the times, their detailed weather forecast pages had all the design panache of an interstate on-ramp. A smattering of ads, some gritty daily forecast graphics, and not much else to distinguish them from, well, anything.

Boy have things changed. Getting a dose of inspiration from the Yahoo Widgets (neé Konfabulator) design language, the detailed forecast page now has a crisp, inviting, easily scanned visual layout. Naturally, the weather page provides a link to the Widgets product itself ("Get Yahoo! Weather on your desktop"). It's now much easier to view the forecast content. Below the fold, two screenfuls of both regional radar and general weather headlines exist to provide related information as well as news of interest to explore. Nice to have. Let me put it another way; if this information has always been listed on detailed forecast pages, I never noticed it before the redesign.

(Click this thumbnail image to view the actual page)

Overall, it's a smart property cross-promotion and represents a concept I'm sure Yahoo is taking increasing advantage of, given its breadth of offerings.

Posted by Matt Shobe at 03:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you haven't heard the news, we launched a significant redesign of FeedBurner.com yesterday. I'm very pleased with the result, and although web applications are never truly done, you can always point to certain milestones of evolution in each where the product experience is permanently transformed. I think we passed one of those markers yesterday and I'm optimistic we've laid the groundwork for expanding our services without undue complexity bubbling over, as we were already suffering some of that with a site design that was fundamentally unchanged since its launch in February 2004.

If you've been working with an interface long enough, you start to lose perspective on the details that work and those that are in desperate need of update because your target audience has changed, the product has grown in stature within the marketplace, or (more likely) both. I'm proud to say the lion's share of the XHTML heavy lifting and thoughtful interaction design thinking came from John Zeratsky, our "new" hire from earlier this summer for just this sort of comprehensive, design-and-build work. John's 'new eyes' made this redesign more substantial and comprehensive. Major credit also goes to Jessie Chavez, the engineer who rolled with every design revision punch and brought it all together right on the target release date. Of course, the whole thing wouldn't have happened properly without the entire FeedBurner team contributing at some level, so once again we're all in each others' debt. We'll sort it out using a system of cocktails or some other medium of exchange one day soon, I just know it.

Anyway, a couple of hours off, then we move on to the next project. Like I said, you're never truly done!

Posted by Matt Shobe at 02:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I finally clicked on an ad in the GMail right-side panel. I was reading an email from AOPA, the pilot's association I belong to, and one of those innocuous little links on the right-hand side made its siren call:

Free Flight Planning Software!

I clicked through to check out some interesting desktop software, presented with an exceptionally annoying Flash site nav menu. (Don't believe me? Here.)

If you're a GMail user, I'd be interested to know if you've ever gotten anything particularly useful out of the Sponsored and Related Links sections -- or if you've ever seen anything that raised your privacy hackles. (If you're not a GMail user, and you wanna be, let me know. I've got 50 invitations gathering dust.) I still believe GMail is the best web email user experience going. I just wonder how much longer they're going to sit on whatever RSS subscription application they've got in store.

Posted by Matt Shobe at 05:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ESPN is taking a little self reflection seriously with a tour through ten years of ESPN.com. (Remember when it was named "ESPNET SportsZone?" Talk about flab for lack of a branding exercise.)

The notable thing for me with this piece is that ESPN.com's timeline corresponds almost precisely with my own as a web application designer and developer. I can see in their own design's evolution some of my own work's successes and failures (marble-textured table cells, anyone?) and the irresistable march toward broadband-centric content choices like ESPN Motion, Flash naughty bits here and there, and a home page blitting like Times Square with image tiles, fan polls, DHTML tab-lets, and probably some surplus thrust reversers near the bottom. There's something about the utter simplicity of that 1996 3-column table layout that's appealing in an RSS news reader sort of way: just prioritize the headlines for me, I'll dig down from here. Maybe it's the no-nonsense usability of an unadorned blue hyperlink. Maybe it's the fact that the 2005 edition is 85K and slaps me across the face with 3-6 JavaScript errors when I navigate between years in the retrospective (Firefox). Either way, I find myself in that "less-is-more" mindset pretty quickly.

Still, I keep coming back, month after month, year after year. I don't have anyone else's sports site bookmarked. (When was the last time you bookmarked something, anyway?) The content's the thing, as it should be, and their writers are still among the best in the business. Still, I almost wonder if a single GIF imagemap of the front page would be a faster load than the existing HTML?

Posted by Matt Shobe at 02:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

About two weeks ago, I got the following message from Microsoft Entourage (the bastard child of Outlook and OS X) when I attempted to connect to my free Hotmail account:

You can bet I was pretty upset to learn that access to Hotmail was going to cost me an additional vig each month when I've already paid for this particular access client — Entourage. It's not like they made Hotmail a pay-only service and Entourage was just another, undifferentiated gateway into its special little world of wonder. Compounding my blind rage at this point was the fact that my introduction to this new business model was delivered through a freakin' modal dialog error message. I couldn't recall seeing a message or announncement in my Inbox in recent weeks or months that might've prepared me for this. No. It was just, >boink<, and at that moment I'm on the outside looking in. No spam for you!

Oh, and if you had the chutzpah to click Learn More...? I think you ended up at some very generic "Upgrade your Freeloader Account Now!" appeal. Not unexpected. But hey, how about at least a "Valued Entourage User! Get Hotmail Plus for the first 6 months for just $1.99!" or something to reflect that fact that I was already bought in. Just personalize the gesture a touch more, and I might've given it a second thought.

I have a feeling someone high up in the program management food chain at MSN relented, though, because a few days later this message did not appear again when I dared connect to my Inbox through Entourage. Been moving along just fine ever since.

Do you connect to Hotmail through Outlook using the mother ship OS? Did you ever see this dialog box, even just for a couple of days? I wonder if I was part of some sort of test-marketing campaign. I don't remember anyone declaring "Microsoft PR crisis brewing in the blogosphere!" or any other hue and cry rising from the blogmasses around this issue. I'm still just a bit baffled. Even if MSN's fair intention was to convert freebie Hotmail users, going about it through the error handling UI of the mail client is no way to make that winning first impression.

Posted by Matt Shobe at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Saw this on the morning news: it's an MP3 player meant designed specifically for use while swimming. The SwiMP3 uses bone conduction to transmit sound while you're knifing through the water. Supposedly your skull bones will vibrate the fluid of your inner ear and, in the process, transmit a quality audio signal. This is so totally Buck Rogers, but I guess I can buy that it's the likeliest way to get audio through when you're mostly underwater. It looks a little bit balky to me -- especially the base unit -- but the one reviewer listed didn't have a thing to say about the form factor getting in the way.

I swim a lot of laps in the winter, so I have to admit I'm pretty psyched about this product -- it's something I'd really like to try before I buy, though. Frankly, swimming laps is pretty dull work. Breaking up the routine with some motivating music would really help get me out of bed when it's so damn dark and cold outside.

Posted by Matt Shobe at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Do you do spend any time at all working on HTML or CSS? Maybe you just tweak your blog templates, or possibly you've taken up with the web standards camp (like I have)?

Whatever your ambitions, if you're looking to really speed up the feedback loop when testing your creations in a browser, you must run, not walk, over to
Web Developer Extension on chrispederick.com and download this extension for Firefox 1.0. (It goes almost without saying that you should already have Firefox installed on your machine, especially if you use Windows.) This extension allows you to X-Ray your HTML and CSS on live web pages and see where your layout and/or code is flawed. Plus, built-in hooks to popular code validation services further help trim unruly cruft from your code. If you're still just View Source-ing and reading those tea leaves, you're wasting a lot of otherwise productive time.

Browsers may still be forgiving of sloppy code, which is good, but if you're looking to achieve a certain layout and aesthetic goal, you'll do much better to play by the standards and create valid markup.

Posted by Matt Shobe at 11:24 AM | Permalink

From MS Office:Mac 2004, PowerPoint:

"German post-reform rules?" What the fark is this? Does it force-convert any Reichsmarks references to Euros?

Posted by Matt Shobe at 09:10 AM | Permalink

I shot the clip linked below on a Sony Ericsson P900; the final result is a ~176K MPEG-4. It looks worse than the worst videophone transmission out of Baghdad under fire, but it's still good enough to capture the gist of what's going on around you at the moment. (As far as I could tell, I had all of the quality settings maxed out.) I suppose that that's more than enough for the current generation of mobile devices. Still, I wonder if we'll soon reach the point of phones carrying enough combined CCD, megapixel, and storage horsepower to outperform lower-end, dedicated consumer video electronics. According to Steve, we may already be there on the camera end with the new S700I from Sony. (Is that your first '10' rating for camera capabilities, Steve?)

The Video (may require QuickTime to view easily): Gameday Crowd

Posted by Matt Shobe at 10:50 AM | Permalink

The following snapshot from my Gmail inbox is an aesthetic cautionary tale (click to enlarge in a popup window):

Never, ever, ever, ever assume that a funhouse font like Comic Sans is going to result in an effective impression on the receiving end, especially at 32 points or so. Comic Sans might be the worst font that ever was. Even Nancy refuses to use Comic Sans.

Please, please stop using Comic Sans. Anywhere. Everywhere.

Posted by Matt Shobe at 09:34 PM | Permalink

From the This Really Isn't a Question Dept.:

Posted by Matt Shobe at 09:02 AM | Permalink

After visiting Gamefly through a link at Gamespot.com, my first impression was, "professional-looking. Yeah, I'd probably trust them with a monthly subscription to rent PS2 games." About 8 seconds later, the thought "why the hell isn't Netflix offering this to me, too?" rear-ended that first impression with a resounding crash. As a Netflix member since 1998, I trust them implicitly to deliver movies when they say they will; their logistics and shipping processes are fine-tuned and effortless to use on the consumer side. And yet they appear to have no plans to rent video games anytime soon. In fact, they're so terse on the subject as to suggest the very idea is ludicrous. ludacris. Whatever.

Why Netflix doesn't see the need for this very natural extension to its business, I don't understand. Let's look at the practical case for game rental in terms of their current web service:

• Huge addressable market. Plenty of gamers out there and rental is a great way to sample a bunch of different games at about the purchase price of a single new game every two months.
• No new logistics problems. Game DVD media fits perfectly into the existing movie DVD inventory system. You're still a critical website redesign away from a proper consumer face on game rental and title marketing, but that's "soft" and can be done aggressively in a few months. Netflix's core distribution and warehousing capacity stands ready to fling PS2 and XBox titles into a waiting public's arms right this instant.
• Brand leverage. Netflix's current customers may not be a big union set with potential game renters, but Netflix is pretty well known as a reliable DVD rental service. I don't see why they should have to pigeonhole themselves as catering solely to their already-converted audience, in case that lack of union is one of the reasons they haven't ventured into game rental. Imagine if Amazon was still strictly a book e-tailer? A lack of such ambition would have consigned them to niche player status indefinitely. Let me put it this way: as a Netflix customer, I'd expect Netflix to provide more reliable and efficient service than any newcomer, and as long as that remained the case, my own word of mouth would be equally positive. And I really would rather not set up yet another account with yet another online merchant.

UPDATE: Steveand Eric pointed out that acquisition costs for games titles (in bulk) are probably quite a bit higher than DVDs, even if you're Netflix and can buy in more bulk that just about anyone else around. It's quite possible that the per-title costs are just too steep for them to offer a monthly subscription model that's any more compelling than Gamefly's. So, maybe I'm coming down too hard on Netflix for lack of vision or ambition. However, that doesn't mean I want them to offer the service any less!

UPDATE II: Pretty sure this is the first time anything I've written has come back number one as the result of a Google query that wasn't "black background:" http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=netflix%2BPs2

Posted by Matt Shobe at 04:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you use a browser that supports custom cursor icons (IE6 is the only one I know about for sure), you'll appreciate the simple design trick Chicago-based rock zine publishers Glorious Noise are putting to use. Move your mouse pointer over any hyperlink and note how the typical pointing hand isn't quite so typical:

A simple bit of CSS applied to all anchor tags changes the cursor over a hyperlink to a different, site-specified image:


cursor:url(http://www.gloriousnoise.com/images/horns.cur), auto;


If only they also had a cursor flicking a Bic lighter whenever you hovered over links to archived materials. Um, yea -- in that case, shark jumped. As is, a great in-joke.

Posted by Matt Shobe at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently wrote About Feed Syndication as a content item at FeedBurner.com in order to provide a page of explanation and valuable links around the ever-expanding phenomenon of RSS. There's a lot of general excitement that's finally expanding well beyond the blogging community about RSS and its capacity to change how people interact with the web. It's all about more efficient access to your daily must-have information, and while serendipitous web-surfing will probably continue well into the future, syndication promises great advantages and a whole new space for innovative interaction design, commerce, and enterainment (this will eventually go WAY beyond just news and headlines).

If you have any comments about the piece or about your experience with RSS today and hopes for it in the future, I'd love to hear them.

Posted by Matt Shobe at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As Eric has mentioned, Google has a good number of search parlor tricks built-in that can fast-track you to useful or interesting information. There are also some clever technologies out there for getting directly to flight status information without even going through a search application first.

Sometimes, however, a plain old text search brings back precisely what you want, in so exact a form that your head spins a bit -- two or three complete revolutions. This morning I wondered if someone had put a weight+balance calculator for general aviation aircraft online in javascript or applet form. Seems like a likely application to find on the web. So, a bit optimistically, I typed cessna 172n weight balance calculator. The first link that came back was dead-on perfect; check this thing out. Not only is it the sort of script application I'd hoped to find, but it's also been built for the exact aircraft type i entered in my original query. (Great CSS and JavaScript example, too.) I mean, what's not on the web anymore?

Posted by Matt Shobe at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I posted my own comments directly to this insightful since1968: Nick Bradbury Interview already, but I thought I'd link back to it directly as well. Nick's software has consistently been rattling around somewhere in my toolchest since about 1999, and even though I always find a reason to check out the latest-and-greatest from Macromedia, Adobe, and others, Nick's nuanced approach to designing and debugging web code at the source level remains unmatched.

If you're still using HomeSite, you should really checkout TopStyle. It's what HomeSite will never grow up to be since Nick has no association with it anymore; furthermore Macromedia seems to have done nothing substantive with it since acquiring it from Allaire.

Posted by Matt Shobe at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For all of you who (somewhat rightly) argue Nielsen complains about technology but never suggests improvements: his Ten Steps for Cleaning Up Information Pollution offers some guidance you probably shouldn't ignore, no matter where you are in the digital workplace. I for one believe his best advice in this piece is evergreen: "write short" and "don't use Reply to All." These are tips that I so wish people would remember the next time they're buried in their own inbox, wondering how things got that way. Just stopping to ask "does this person really need to see my reply?" probably would cut email clutter by a third or half if practiced across any sizeable organization. Being as brief as possible in the actual reply would be a godsend as well.

You know what? It would be kind of cool to have some sort of incentive for email efficiency that could be tracked by server-wide scoring system. The hard part would be reconciling a specific employees' email frequency/message length with measured business results or productivity. But I bet that somewhere in the fuzzy math is a score generator that would be at minimum fun-to-know, at maximum directly rewarding to those who write x% smarter than their peers.

Posted by Matt Shobe at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This ITU news item explains how travelers can use their browser's URL field as a sort of direct query line for flight status information for any flight involving Geneva Int'l Airport (Switzerland). I gather they've algorithmically reserved namespace within .aero to make what they've put online possible. Don't take my word for it. Try this URL right now: http://ba723.aero/.

Posted by Matt Shobe at 03:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've decided to demolish this blog and rebuild it completely, starting from a muddy excavation pit. I think the reasons for doing so are self-evident:

• does this blog cater to a particular audience?
  no. it's just another rant-catcher.
• what does the visual design say about the author or the theme of the blog?
  that he's too lazy to create his own look.
• what keeps readers coming back?
  not visible to the naked eye.
• are there calls for help I've chosen to ignore?
  hallo. I am a cry for help, already!

I feel these reasons are true because I haven't yet given myself a real incentive to blog beyond the occasional belief that something I've uncovered online merits preservation. Consequently, this site has amounted to little more than a firefly jar enclosing URLs that buzzed within my reach. Is that of much use to anyone else? Only if my most recent posting(s) cross a fortunate intersection with their fancy. The web has been about this sort of star-crossed interaction since Tim Berners-Lee first lit its fuse on his back porch in 1989, so virtually anyone who wants to have some say in the way of the world can do so online. That's absolutely great. What's not so keen is when, as a web property owner, you let the yard go to seed. I can just imagine my neighbors here at Burning Door tuttering among themselves about this blog's sorry state while standing along the fencelines of their own well-kept blogs. Can't blame 'em.

So, over the weekend I'll raze the old structure and start over. I think I finally have a theme in mind -- something that will hopefully address the balance of this blog's shortcomings. The theme includes:

• an intended audience
• personal motivation for progressive updates over time
• appropriate use of a blog as a time-ordered display of hypertextual information
• a visual style that reinforces the theme while avoiding the Herb Tarlek web-safe palette

A lot of the fun in blogging comes from putting something out there and seeing what sort of crowd gathers. The pain comes from each Google search on a topic you think you know something about revealing 68 expertly crafted blogs that beat to death your novel thesis or how-to guide idea better than nine months ago. sigh.

Posted by Matt Shobe at 01:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Brushed Metal is Ugly has decided that OS X's Brushed Metal look (found in Safari, QuickTime, and a variety of newer iApps) is fugly. Some may agree, but I actually find this look far less distracting than the default Aqua hard-candy-and-pinstripes look for extended usage. I'm not against their petition, but I'm against overly ornate UIs and buttons that go whoosh.

Posted by Matt Shobe at 09:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Websites should link to PDF in lieu of equivalent HTML only if selling that content or providing it for extended offline reading.

PDF is a DRM (digital rights management) tool that's actually ahead of its time. PDF is not a proper standard for rapid-fire web-based information exchange, Google's deconstruction of it in search results notwithstanding. PDF makes web infoseekers download, wait, scroll, zoom, scroll again, and then in many cases find themselves unable to copy/link to/reference the found infonugget in any meaningful way except to forward the whole bloody binary on to the next unsuspecting chump.

If I am buying a valuable report, requesting a backup copy of a detailed user manual I need to refer to off the grid, or acquiring information that's been digitized because in its original form it was archival-only (e.g., turn-of-the-century house plans), I'm happy to wait and download a PDF. I'll even suffer some marketing materials because I might want to save specs, contact info, or some "feature comparison chart" for later reference. Otherwise, dear webmaster, you've fouled my user experience by taking me out of my browser. Please stop doing that.

Posted by Matt Shobe at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the happier, simpler, go-go 90s, a prescient but ill-fated company called DKA created what amounted to the groupware version of the now-ubiquitous weblog. The Burning Door team was central to that product's creation, defining both the technical architecture and user interaction design. "SceneServer," as the packaged product was entitled, allowed users to:

• post whatever was on their mind, and share links (there were a few billion fewer of them in 1997, but still)
• rate and comment on others' postings
• get notified when stuff they cared about got changed, either by an original author or another member of the community

Sounds awfully familiar to users of Movable Type and Blogger, no? It's fascinating to me (and the others here at BD) how web technical architectures, no matter how novel or forward-looking, always require a certain size-of-community tipping point to break out into the open. SceneServer never made a dent in the larger web consciousness for a variety of reasons (which might be worth exploring as a user experience post-mortem some day), but its spirit is definitely powering every individual publisher who shares their world via text and cameraphone.

-- section below added 1/25/04 --

Oh yeah. Why you're here -- why this blog's called It Came from Black Background. I created a set of templates for "edgy" SceneServer authors to demonstrate the unfadeable hipness of our technology with the espresso crowd. They were entitled Black Background because, well, they had such a background and in the days of HTML 2.0, <body bgcolor="#000000"> was about as out-there as you could get on a budget. Plus, they also featured orange text. Orange! Like, retro yet browser safe. So iconoclastic!

Sorry -- got all Dean-conceding-Iowa there for a paragraph. So I suppose, with this blog I can't help but make a callback to my own insignificant web publishing past and get a little smug about it.

-- end edits from the future --

I'm looking forward to working on the design challenges that arise from this new world -- especially its walking-around wireless implications -- and taking another shot at shaping how individuals and common-interest groups make community happen online.

Posted by Matt Shobe at 03:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)