Jackson Fox

I am clearly not an important person to Yahoo. Their new Yahoo! Photos site was previewed in February 2006, went beta in June 2006, and started getting rolled out to users in August 2006. Me? I didn’t get to see the new site design until today. I admit that it could have gone live some time ago, but I have been checking periodically and today was the first day I was able to see it. anyways, now that I’ve seen it, I have to say I like it. Even more, I like that it demonstrates some smart design decisions.

Blank Slate

37signals likes to talk about “designing the blank slate”:

The blank slate is the first screen someone sees when they do something new. Where do you drop them right after they create a new account? What do you tell them on a screen that starts blank but will eventually be filled with content? That’s the blank slate.

Logging in to Yahoo! Photos for the first time I see:

I flipped through the help bubbles and clicked on My Friends’ Photos:

In both cases Yahoo is helping me adjust to a new interface. The walkthrough of the new features in particular helps me learn where everything is and introduces me to some new concepts (assuming that I didn’t know what tags were).

These niceties should be part of any new design (or re-design), but more often than not users are thrown in to new surroundings without any orientation. Particularly when re-designing interfaces, we have an obligation to ease the transition as much as possible. Not doing so raises the possibility that we alienate our existing users just when we’re trying to improve things for them.

This is a problem that’s been plaguing me for weeks, and Bloglines customer support helped me straighten everything out, so I thought I would put the solution out there for others to find.

The problem I had was that links in Bloglines used to open in a new window. I then set Firefox to open links destined for a new window in a new tab instead. All was right with the world. Then one day those links stopped opening in new tabs and started opening in the current tab. I would constantly loose unread posts in Bloglines when I would forget to right-click on links to open them in a new tab.

Solution: There are two possible causes for this problem. The first is a setting in Firefox 2 that tells Firefox to open links that should open in a new window in the current window instead (Tools → Options → Tabs). Make sure the setting “New pages should be opened in” is set to a new window or a new tab. The second cause is the Tab Mix Plus plugin. This is what was causing me problems. TabMix has a setting (Tools → Tab Mix Plus Options → Links) that says “Open links with a target attribute in the current tab”. This needs to be unchecked in order for everything to work right.

Thanks to Bloglines support for the quick and easy solution!

I’m a big fan of Gmail, and I’ve been looking to offload my mailing list email onto another account, so I setup Google apps for my personal domain tonight. When I went to activate the Gmail service, but first I had to switch the MX record for my domain. I have very little DNS experience, so this was scaring me a bit, until I saw that Google had instructions on the page on how to do it. In fact, they had instructions on how to do it for MY HOSTING ACCOUNT. I assume they saw that my DNS servers were all Dreamhost name servers and acted accordingly, but the attention to detail is impressive none the less.

Toward A Better Understanding Of Help Seeking Behavior (Xie, Cool)

Notes from the user behavior panel at ASIST 2006.

Read the rest of this entry »

Notes and comments on the SIG HCI Research Symposium at ASIST 2006.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m in the blogs & wikis workshop at ASIST, I’m speaking in a few minutes, but I also wanted to share my notes.

Wiki page for Blogs & Wikis Workshop on the ASIST 2006 Wiki

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m in Austin for the ASIS&T 2006 Annual Meeting. If you’re in town and want to find me, you can reach me on my cell at (919) 423-4798 or via email at jacksonfox@gmail.com. I’m curious to try some Texas BBQ, so if anyone wants to get a BBQ outing together, get in touch.

It’s late and I’m not thinking to clearly, but I have a couple of ideas bouncing around in my head that I want to get down so I don’t forget about them.

Inspiration

I want to start collecting insprational designs, screens, interface, etc. Back when I used OneNote all the time, I would save interesting screenshots. Alas, these are the days of the internets and OneNote has fallen out of favor. Do I start a new blog? Do I post these to Flickr? I’m inspired by Dan Saffer’s No Ideas But In Things weblog and demos of the new Backpack, Scrybe and Joyent demos and Swarmf. This leads me into my next thought…

All Wikis Suck

No, seriously. Every open source wiki sucks (sorry Roy). JotSpot does not totally suck. StikiPad isn’t too bad either. PBWiki sucks. I want OneNote for the web, and I want it now. The new Backpack is very intiguing to me.

Speaking of Wikis

I need to find a lightweight PHP-based wiki for me school website. I probably don’t have .htaccess available to me, and I’d like to avoid database servers. Does anything like this exist? Most of the active wiki projects out there are either; (1) bloated out of control, (2) too hard to setup, or (3) too hard to use. I just want something where I can create pages with Markdown, edit them via the web and (optionally) track revisions. Most importantly, I don’t want or need a heavy install. Very basic wiki stuff, but hard to get without the kitchen sink.

Ok, so that was more of a rant than I thought it would be.

Sessions I’ve attended today:

• 10 Ways To A Killer Blog (Robert & Maryam Scoble)
• Learning To Love Chaos (Jim Rosenberg)

Apparently this is the first time the Scoble’s have done a presentation together. I only caught the end of their presentation, but what little I did see was impressive. They made a concerted effort to get the audience involved and make the session a conversation.

Ran into quite a few Triangle Bloggers (Anton Zuiker, Bora Zivkovic, ae, Michael Kimsal, Josh Staiger, WillR) and SILS friends (Michael Habib). I also got to meet really interesting people like Ajit Anthony (Ticklebooth, Squigglebooth) and Simon Whittaker.

ConvergeSouth at Technorati

I’m off to ConvergeSouth for some good ‘ole southern bloggin’. Sadly, I can only stay for a few hours. I’d love to stay for the after conference activities, but I have obligations in Durham in the evening. Still, it’ll be nice to get out of the house for a bit; I’ve been layed up with a cold the last two days.