Don’t Click It is an interesting slant on the user interface: what would the UI be if clicks weren’t allowed? As a trained clicker, it’s amazing how navigating through this interface using only gestures feels both intuitive and wrong: the years of training almost invalidate the ease of movement. It’s a very odd experience that led me to wonder if this is what navigation is like for people who cannot, for whatever reason, click a mouse button.

Update: Thinking about this more, I’d call the interface itself "natural but wrong": the gestures feel like both at the same time, as ease of use runs into convention and learned behavior.

technorati tags:mouse, gestures, dontclickit, navigation

Yesterday at work, we held a Hack Day (for those unfamiliar, you get 24 hours to build a prototype on just about anything you want). My team chose to build a company intranet in Ruby on Rails. Why Rails? Because it’s fast and easy and is my language + framework of choice for web development. Gregg, one of our top Java guys and my teammate, suggested we use RadRails as our IDE. I’d downloaded it at home but never had a chance to test it out. Plus, I’m not usually a big Eclipse fan (RadRails is based on Eclipse). When the day was done, I was very impressed with what RadRails did.

RadRails really works as the center of your development environment, providing things like a server and quick access to generators to get development moving. It makes already fast things (like script/generate tasks) even faster (no need to leave the environment and jump to a terminal to run that script). Bottom line: RadRails streamlines your Ruby on Rails development workflow. Go get it!

technorati tags:radrails, ruby, rails, development

Blogged with Flock

Ruby on Rails has the great find(:first) method that lets you grab the very first ActiveRecord object out of a given database table. That’s all well and good, but what if you want the last? Use this: Model.find(:first, :order => “id DESC”). That will give you the first record in a reversed list of IDs: basically, the record with the highest ID value, or the last record in the table.

Not good enough for you? Order by any other field. Want a different first record ? Sort by a field ASC. The :first record really depends on what order your records are in.

technorati tags:rubyonrails, RoR, Ruby, Rails, ActiveRecord

Alex Russell, the Dojo project lead, presented this talk at the Ajax Experience. It’s a PDF deck that’s worth a quick scan if you’re a Dojo developer.

technorati tags:dojo, javascript

Blogged with Flock

Google’s just launched Google Custom Search Engine, which lets you, basically, build your own search engine around a certain set of topics. Why would you do this, other than to show off? Well, Google will let you "make money from the traffic you receive through Google’s AdSense program." Now, why on Earth would Google pay you to make your own search engine when theirs works so well? Simple: your personal engine can make theirs better.

Experts are going to deliver more relevant search results than an algorithm almost every single time, simply because they are experts: they know where and how to look for information in their fields. Search engines only know how to look for information, and that’s not talking about highly specialized information. Essentially, you’re training Google in what’s relevant for your subject and giving them information that they can easily roll back into their own search algorithms. (AJAX titled search + lots of traffic = pretty good indication that Google should mark these pages as relevant).

Plus, Google is improving user experience on two fronts with this product: first, they’re making available a great resource for specialists to find what they’re looking for; second, they’re ensuring that all searches that end with a Google result return highly relevant, targeted information. Your search’s specificity makes Google’s search look better: it’s the halo effect. All for a little AdSense revenue.

technorati tags:google, custom, search, user, epxperience

Blogged with Flock

Ajaxian is running a series of recaps from their Ajax Experiene: Boston conference. Among the early highlights so far: Animation & Data Visualization in Javascript, which introduces us to JSViz, a JavaScript-based visualization engine. I’ve only tinkered around with the demo, but it looks killer.

technorati tags:jsviz, javascript, data, visualization, dhtml

Blogged with Flock

Wildcard SSL certificates let you purchase a single certificate for an unlimited number of subdomains. For example, you can buy a certificate for *.foo.com, allowing bar.foo.com and baz.foo.com to live under the same certificate. But, x.bar.foo.com is not covered by the wildcard. (And, it leads to a particularly nasty barrier page in Internet Explorer 7 that says, basically, this site is a scam so don’t visit it). Wildcard certificates only wildcard a single level: if you need subdomains of subdomains, you’ll need to blanket them with their own certificate.

technorati tags:ssl, certificates, wildcard, domains, subdomains

Sent to the office colleagues:

Very nice interface and use of technology (javascript libraries Behavior and Prototype). The design really supports the interface (note how all columns are even and each panel has a solid top edge which scream "draggable," to promote and invite users to drag items around the page, yet dragging things around keeps the newspaper column feel in tact). Of particular note is the introductory steps they present to take you through initially building your page, which are a great, unobtrusive wizard. In all, it’s a pretty nice take on the "AJAXy homepage."

Josh, one of the guys I work with, pointed out how well the screen resizes, which is very true. Fonts scale pretty well, too. Very "scalable" design, in terms of screen size and what’s on the screen.

technorati tags:espn, redesign, ui, interface, design, ajax, behavior, prototype

I think everyone would like to have this problem:

Google is trying out a number of new UI improvements with SearchMash that it may or may not implement into Google’s current search engine, but doesn’t want the user experience to be skewed by Google’s brand name. The general public has such positive feelings towards Google that users might be inclined to simply like whatever is presented to them, which would hinder a true analysis of what’s actually good and what’s not.

Even though it’s almost never going to happen for us normal, only-kind-of-liked folks, Google’s predicament begs a really interesting question: how do you test new products, or big product revisions, on people who are intimately familiar with, and really really love your existing product? You can’t simply recruit people for testing, sit them down in a room, and have your facilitator say, "OK, this is the new Google. What do you think?&qout; This invites very biased responses: passionate users (as most who use Google are) will have passionate answers that are inherently biased towards the thing (product, idea, etc.) that they like like (or dislike). Preference, in either direction - love or hate - breeds passion; passion leads to a bias. So, how did Google avoid bringing preference into testing? They used the software equivalent of the blind taste test.

We’ve all seen those crazy Pepsi vs. Coke, "if you blindfold 10 people and have them drink a Pepsi and a Coke, 9 out of 10 will take the Pepsi," ads on TV. Google’s brought this out of the world of TV (and traditional product research), and remapped it to the web: "9 out of 10 people who didn’t know they were using a Google search product really liked our new features" Now, you’re able to get unbiased results for a beloved product. Without any bitter aftertaste!

technorati tags:google, usability, user-centered design, ucd, research, search, user, testing

Blogged with Flock

Ajaxian has a nice little thread on IE DOM toolbars. Originally meant as an intro for DOM Helper, it kind of evolved to incorporate a couple other toolbars. Sure, we all use the FireBug and Web Developer extensions for FireFox, but what do we use for IE?

I personally use Microsoft’s Developer Toolbar, which I was only fairly happy with, mostly due to it’s kind of unintuitive UI. (Yes, floating tooltips are easy to make in .NET applications. No, they are not good as the primary means to communicate data). The Ajaxian article finally prompted me to figure out how to modify the DOM in the IE toolbar (because, apparently, it’s always been possible if hidden). Click on (or otherwise select) an element, and use the middle pane to add and modify attributes.

I’ve been trying to use the right pane, which, to me, seems like it should work (but is apparently only meant to show your element’s current style, which is pretty valuable nonetheless). I especially like how the attribute names are a big, giant dropdown so that you can see them all. With that middle pane, IE’s toolbar is better then the Web Developer extension (more robust), yet still not as great as FireBug. Hopefully, it works in IE 7 right off the bat.

technorati tags:developer, toolbars, ajaxian