"Testing . . . 1, 2, 3 . . . "

In Don't Make Me Think, Steve Krug devotes a good chunk of the book and a great deal of passion to the topic of usability testing. "If you want a great site, you've got to test," says Steve on page 133, and elsewhere he states "Testing always works, and even the worst test with the wrong user will show you important things you can do to improve your site."

Which brings me to today's mild rant. Somehow, the following item must have slipped through the cracks. Below is a screenshot of the "Advanced Search" function of the catalog my library uses to procure interlibrary loan books through participating Oklahoma libraries. Since the day I started using it, I've been irked by the location of the "Clear Search" button:












Why would the "Clear Search" button be right in the middle of the box, just below the search fields -- i.e., where users are most likely to click by instinct?! "Counterintuitive" is the word that comes to mind. More than thrice I've typed all my search terms neatly in their boxes, sidled my hand over to the mouse, and promptly banished them into the ether by clicking this accursed button. I'd venture to say that most of my coworkers have done it more than once, too.

Aside from that (and the fact that the default search setting is our own library system -- what's the point?!), it's a good interface, but this one thing has always struck me as palm-to-the-forehead ridiculous. Just a good reminder to keep my eyes peeled for such problem areas as I begin designing my own website project for my MLIS coursework.

(props to TT for validating my frustration!)

Never Pay For A Ringtone Again!

This is a really cool trick I want to share for a couple of reasons:

a) it's a micro-precursor of my MLIS 5543 Web Design term project, and

b) to turn you on to a brilliant opensource app called Audacity. Any time I can preach the virtues of OSS, I feel I have to spread the word . . .

With this trick, you can take any part of any song and create your very own personalized ringtone. For instance, I'm a guitar guy, so I don't want the chorus of a song as a ringtone -- I want a crushing riff or a ripping solo! Audacity lets you take any song file in your possession and pluck just the right section or part to use as an MP3 ringtone on your phone (provided, of course, that your phone is USB-enabled, has Bluetooth, or has some other way download the file). Best of all, it's all perfectly legal -- and free !!!

In an effort to keep things Krug-like, I'm going to break it into steps:

1) Go to http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ to download the Audacity application, free of charge.

2) Once it's installed, use Audacity to open any .wav or .mp3 music file you have on your computer (Audacity can't open files directly from a CD; they have to be ripped first). It will open the file as a waveform, which will look something like this:










3) Press the "Play" button (w/ the green arrow) to listen to the song. Press the "Stop" button (w/ the yellow square) when you've heard the part you like.

4) When you find the part you want, simply click-and-drag that portion of the waveform with your mouse to select it, just like you would with plain text in a Word document. Then, copy or cut the selection, a la plain text.

5) Open a new, blank Audacity file from the File menu, and paste your selection there.

6) Select "Export as MP3" from the File drop-down menu, and tell Audacity where to save the file.

**The first time you do this, Audacity will prompt you to download a LAME MP3 encoder, and should walk you through exactly how to do it. In case it doesn't, you can get a thorough walk-through here. Do this once, and you'll never have to do it again.

7) Download the file to your phone in your preferred manner. With a lot of phones, like the Motorola RAZR I have, it's as simple as plugging in a mini-USB cable and treating the phone as an external disk drive.

Hopefully this makes sense; for a more thorough explanation, you can visit the Audacity Wiki.
My kids and I have a ball doing this -- I even made a ringtone of my 8-year-old son playing his own single-string rendition of "Smoke On The Water." If I knew how to put audio on this blog, I'd share it with you.

LONG LIVE OPEN SOURCE! ROCK ON!

The Mobile Web -- not all it's cracked up to be!

Yesterday I attempted, just to say I had done it, to submit to my blog from a handheld device -- my wife's new ubertechno phone, a Motorola Q. As my texting experience is minimal, I knew it would take a while, even though the MotoQ sports a full QWERTY keyboard and I'm an accomplished typist (i.e., I know where all the keys are). I had only been browsing for about 15 minutes up to that point, but my eyes had begun to water and my temples had begun to throb from staring at the tiny Windows Mobile-enabled browser and waiting for what seemed like hours for the pages to load compared to my broadband connection at home.

After correcting myriad typos and cursing the AutoComplete feature that tried to finish every word for me after two letters, like those waiters in old sitcoms who would fill up a restaurant-goer's water glass after every sip, I tried to submit my post. But, the buttons were unwieldy, the interface foreign and my longsuffering long exhausted, so I screwed up somehow and the post never posted. I may try again sometime, but certainly not sometime soon.

Ultimately, it was a great experience. I definitely got a solid dose of what a lot of my Beginning Internet students face when they can't find the mouse arrow on a convoluted web page or are beseiged with the overload and frustration that comes with a new technology, so I'll have a renewed appreciation for what they're going through when I teach the class next week. It also put in perspective some of what I've been reading for my grad course this week about reading behaviors in the digital environment; whatever negative effects computer screens have on absorption and and concentration, this is tripled when attempting to learn to use a device like the one I was using.

On the upside, I did find myself texting a little faster by the end of it . . .

Krug and the Long Tail

I am loving Steve Krug's book Don't Make Me Think, not so much because I don't want to have to think at all when viewing a web page, but because I'm thinking of neophyte web users like the ones in the Beginning Internet courses I teach -- neophytes who, ironically, have a mean age of around 75.

Krug's ideas dovetail (pun intended) with Chris Anderson's notion of The Long Tail. It's often used to refer to sales figures: in short, sales distribution on sites like Amazon typically has a limited number of high-volume-selling items, and a far greater number of items that sell far fewer units. Long Tail theory holds that these lower-volume items actually make up the bulk of total sales.

Web designers should approach the web likewise. Though it's not proven, I would venture that web users' abilities and savvy follow a similar curve: A relative few are very skilled at recognizing and navigating what they want on the web, no matter what web designers may throw at them, while the majority of surfers have a progressively less-sophisticated skill set. Web designers should design, by and large, for this lowest common denominator.

I'm a Krug disciple if there ever was one . . .

Web 1.5, or Scrolling Be Damned

I can't really tell you why it is that a long-ass page that shows a microscopic mote in the scroll bar that's near impossible to grab urks me so badly. Perhaps it's because those long-ass pages are gross violations of Krug's Third Law Of Usability:

"Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what's left."

Granted, many of said pages I run across are blogs, in which folks are free to Anne Rice-ify their thoughts ad nauseum, because that's what blogs are for. On my end, though, I pledge to keep my blog entries short and (hopefully) to the point, assuming I have one. To plagiarize a fellow 5433 blogger, I want to do my part to ameliorate web users' "heightened sense that they are drowning in way, way too much information."

I feel like I've gone on too long already . . .