Recently I’ve been really worked up about all these computers in the closet. It’s a bunch of junk.
A bunch of dot-com-bubble bullshit that never needed to be purchased in the first place. I’ve been stressed out about that festering backwater of old computers since I got my job here 16 months ago.
For 16 months, I worried that it would all be super expensive to recycle.
For 16 months, I worried that it wouldn’t be recyclable at all.
I worried because it was all crappy Pentium II processors and Pre-OSX Apples and janky Sun workstations. Stuff our design and programming team would never touch (nose upturned). Not to mention the 105-pound rack-mounted servers. All of it full of toxic heavy metals. Not to mention the steaming pile of three button Sun mice and a giant nest of serial cables. And the 39 (!) keyboards.
Seriously, this stuff has been sitting around for years. It obviously must be some sort of corporate psychic baggage. Worse, I’ll bet most everyone reading this blog also has some secret e-waste laying around. We’re a web design shop, but every office I’ve ever worked in has at least one generation of ‘puters laying around.
Taking a clue from Ecoiron, a great blog of green hardware issues, recently bought the book Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by historian Giles Slade. It has been pretty great so far, mostly string of amusing primary sources.
“Americans threw out 315 million computers in 2004, and 100 million cell phones in 2005. Most were still usable, and all contain permanent biological toxins (PBTs). Electronic trash, or e-waste, is rapidly becoming a catastrophic problem. To understand how we ended up in this alarming predicament, Slade recounts the fascinating history of American consumer culture and the engineering of our “throw-away ethic.”
- Booklist on Made To Break
not getting an iPhone. One less Blackberry that has to die in a desk drawer.
Anyway, about all those computers in the office. I was really just nervous about taking it all to the dump and feeling like a complete earth rapist or something.
But in the end, what did it take to get rid of them?
Well, it turns out, not a three-day excursion to the landfill. And we didn’t have to participate in some ill-conceived plot to ship it all to the developing world.
We just took pictures and listed it on Craigslist.
And 90% of it was gone in 24 hours. To people who were *delighted* to have it.
The moral of the story: give it away now. Even if you think it is too old to use, give it away. And then think twice about that new gadget. There is joy to be had in your ewaste. Reuse is cathartic.
There are very few web design books that have any currency after about 2 years. Very few.
And half of these are notable because their very outdatedness is instructive. The rare remaining 50%
of this minority of web design books is the “on-every-designer’s-shelf” collection. Among them is certainly Steve Krugman’s “Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability.”
It is, he writes, a book for “people in the trenches — the designers, the developers, the site producers, the project managers, the marketing people, … and the one man band people who are doing it themselves.”
The rule, “don’t make me think” is an obvious principle, but it can be translated many ways.
One great translation is the user’s maxim ‘the more difficult it is to use, the less I will use it.” You must design for users, not yourself. Always second guess your new aesthetic vision, and, if at all possible, conduct a usability test with real users.
Another reformulation of the main theme is “no one cares as much about your site as you do.” And really, it *doesn’t matter* to users if they understand everything about your site. (This is difficult for many developers, who are intensely interested in how online stuff works.) Users want to know how to use it to do specific tasks. This is the age-old (ie 1990s) principle of “satisficing” — being satisfied and sacrificing. If you expect more than 10% of your web page to be read by a single user, you have high expectations.
The corollary to this principle is that, if a user can make your site work for them, they will stick with it. Secondly, you must respect a counterintuitive fact: it is _difficult_ to make a site simple and _easy_ fill it with confusing design. I am fond of saying that web design is a process of subtraction. There are a number of helpful hints for building subtrative process into your design method:
- Create a clear hierarchy from the beginning.
- Use conventions.
- Spend a lot of time on the navigation. Harness the power of links by focusing your design energy on that navigation bar.
- Remove words: Take out that useless banter.
Steps designed to ensure hierarchy, conventionality, easy navigation and conciseness are the basic rules of content development for the web.This is what it means to write for the web.
Krug also poses the wonderful “Trunk Test of Web Usability”:
1. Print your page.
2. Hold it at arms length and circle:
a. The site name
b. The sitewide search box
c. The sitewide navigation
d. The page name
Does your site pass the test? Can you easily identify the most usable, important parts of your website? Yes, this is common sense, but, again you have to be sure: can your users really use your site easily?
There is also great chapter devoted to designing your home page, the most important page of your site. In brief, here are a few things that your colleagues (or inner slacker) may offer as excuses to creatign a truly usable site.
There is also great information about working with teams of developers. Namely, stay away from “religious debates,”
in which people are “expressing strongly held personal beliefs about things that can’t be proven.” Contrast, for example, opinions about Macromedia Flash, the web’s animation format. Some people (namely graphic designers and CEO’s) love Flash. Some (namely me) don’t care for it in most situations. Arguments begin. People waste their time going round and round with the religious debate about Flash. The way out of this cycle, Krug explains, is to ask: does this use of Flash in this situation, on this site, with this content and our users work?
Lastly, it must be recognized that Krug always carries to flame for testing: you must test your website, Krug writes. Stop thinking that usability tests cost $50,000. They cost closer to $100, if you have a tape recorder and a computer. Get a few of your potential users and let them tell you what is really happening on your web site.
I recently picked up a copy of the “for Dummies” CSS tutorial book and was disappointed to find the following in a section about using named vs. hex color values (like cornflowerblue instead of #6495ED):
“… my advice is to just assume that pretty much everyone who’ll see your web page uses IE [Internet Explorer]. Why? Because most everyone does use IE.” p. 79 CSS Web Design For Dummies, 2005
Thankfully, our dear author is misinformed, or simply addled. Unfortunately, the sentiment that “only Internet Explorer matters” is a popular one still. New webmasters please be ‘ware: there are alternatives to Microsoft IE, most notably Firefox which has more than 25 million downloads and is now reported by the W3C to have nearly 20% usage on the internet. That’s a lot of people who will be seeing a screwed up page if you only test your work in IE.
Apparently, people want to test and develop in IE because it simplifies life. “Your job is much easier,” writes the www.positioniseverything.net.
