“There is an unarticulated war currently raging among those who make web sites. Like the war between dark- and light-skinned blacks in Spike Lee’s School Daze, this conflict is one that only its participants recognize. The war is not between commercial sites and experimental sites. It’s not between “Bloggers” and “Flashers.” This war is between usability experts and graphic designers.”

“What’s just as interesting, though, is the account of how two normally mortal enemies – human factors engineers and visual designers – worked together to come up with an innovative and creative solution to a user problem.

In scenes of tolerance and understanding only ever hinted at in Revelations, human factors lay down with visual design, with each party gaining some of the sensibilities of the other.

“Abomination!”, you cry. Not so.”

“Yet a growing body of research by automakers is finding that buyers of these two kinds of vehicles are very different psychologically. Sport utility buyers tend to be more restless, more sybaritic, less social people who are “self-oriented,” to use the automakers’ words, and who have strong conscious or
subconscious fears of crime. Minivan buyers tend to be more self-confident and more “other-oriented” — more involved with family, friends and their communities.”

“Dr. Rapaille looks at the intellectual, emotional and “reptilian,” or instinctual, reasons why people buy consumer products. He said sport utilities are designed to be masculine and assertive, often with hoods that resemble those on 18-wheel trucks, vertical metal slats across the grilles to give the appearance of a jungle cat’s teeth and flared wheel wells and fenders that suggest the bulging muscles in a clenched jaw.

Sport utilities are designed to appeal to Americans’ deepest fears of violence and crime, Dr. Rapaille said. People’s earliest associations with sport utilities are wartime Jeeps with machine guns mounted on the back, he explained. Sport utilities are “weapons” and “armored cars for the battlefield,” he said.”

Thousands download and pay for King novel

“Stephen King’s latest online publishing effort got off to a smooth start Monday as thousands of users downloaded the first installment of “The Plant,” a new serial novel.”

King E-Novel Short of Expected Demand

“In a closely watched test of the Internet’s potential to transform the book business, the horror writer Stephen King yesterday became the first major author to self-publish online. But demand for his new electronic book fell far short of his last, an event in March that seemed to foretell a revolution in
publishing when more than 400,000 fans jammed computer servers trying to download it in the first two days after it appeared.”

“Websites must tone down their individual appearance and distinct design in all ways:

– visual design
– terminology and labeling

– interaction design and workflow

– information architecture”

“Even as websites become more similar and appearance design becomes more simplified, there will be a large number of design decisions that still need to be made in order to optimize the usability of each individual site.

Most important, each Internet service needs to be based on a task analysis of its specific users and their needs. You can combine standardized user interface elements in many ways, and the better sites will support the way users want to approach the problems.”

“This piece is the promised follow-up to Nielsen’s June 25th piece, which dissected Microsoft’s .NET announcement. In that piece, Nielsen argued that since the network is the new user experience, individual sites will no longer “supply a complete user experience, [instead] each site will supply a component of the overall user experience that is coordinated by the new nexus.”

To put it bluntly, Nielsen has it backwards.”

“Nielsen believes that this network-centric world will demand that all websites look and act alike, since we’ll be traversing amongst multiple sites even more frequently than we do today. This makes very little sense to me. If information can move freely, why should I have to jump from site to site to have an “overall user experience?” If all information is networked, why should I have to travel the web to find it? Why shouldn’t it come directly to me, in a user experience that’s uniquely tailored to my needs?”

“Standard methods of exchanging and delivering information will open up opportunities for Internet application developers to provide more distinct user experiences for more distinct target markets. If there’s a market for a particular type (or brand) of user experience, information standards will only help create that market, by helping users avoid information-based application lock-in (a la Microsoft Office), and forcing developers to cater to the user interface and functionality needs of their particular audience.

This is just the beginning of web design. Not the end.”

“Microsoft’s latest announcement, called Microsoft .NET, while touted by the likes of Fortune Magazine as a huge “revolution”, is really nothing but vaporware, and I think it proves that something has gone very, very wrong in Redmond.

With vaporware, you promise all kinds of features and products that you simply can’t sell because you don’t really have them. Of course, Microsoft doesn’t have one line of .NET code. But .NET is worse than vaporware. In their blasé loftiness, Microsoft isn’t even bothering to provide the vapor itself.”

“Ya see, the bright side of vague documents like the .NET white paper is that they are a kind of Rorschach test. People read them with preconceived ideas, and since the document is so vague, they think that Microsoft is reiterating their ideas. Dave Winer, president of UserLand software, has many
interesting, innovative ideas about software. When he read about Microsoft .NET, he assumed that Microsoft was finally recognizing the same ideas that he’d been talking about for two years. Dave, you give them too much credit. They are completely clueless compared to you. They are playing the
trick of psychic hotlines and newspaper horoscopes: by feeding you cloudy, meaningless generalizations, you fall into their trap of thinking that they read your mind. “Today the planetary alignment is such that you will take a big step forward to achieve your goals.” The difference is that Dave has real, concrete ideas that can translate into real software, while Microsoft is still in the kind of lalaland they were in 6 years ago when they were talking about how “Cairo” would provide “Information At Your Fingertips,” a vision that the Internet fulfilled and Cairo didn’t.”

“I’m absolutely certain that Net devices will become ubiquitous and will change our relationship to computing and to information. However, I’m just as certain that the industry suffers from a surfeit of hype, which is to be expected in any new, explosively-growing industry.

International Data Corp. (IDC) says there are currently only 560,000 wireless Internet subscribers in the U.S. This is a trivial number given the hype wireless Internet has received. Even if this number were twice as high, it would barely cover early adopters.

CIDCO recently bragged that its MailStation e-mail appliance has sold a total of 17,400 units through the second quarter. The device has been on the market for a year.

While Net devices will eventually become ubiquitous, the devices, applications and content still aren’t mature or compelling enough to capture the broad public’s interest. Sorely lacking are multi-purpose devices with sharper displays and killer apps. Besides personal information management, telephony and
e-mail, we need acceptance of applications such as device-based payment systems,PayPal, and e-books before broad-based acceptance can occur.”

“Somehow you still believe that the reason for Microsoft’s inability to make IE standards compliant has something to do with a lack of competition. I’ve read their posts in your mailing list. I know better. You do, too.

Standards have had nothing to do with Netscape’s declining market share, and if you can show one statistic that says otherwise, I’d love to see it. The reason for Netscape’s declining share is nothing more than Microsoft’s monopoly control over the browser marketplace. I would venture that half of the “86%” of users who are using IE now have never even seen Netscape’s browser. Remember, in the past two years, more and more people have come on the ‘Net — what’s that percentage? half of the current Internet users? — and the first and only application they use is IE. Even if some have made the effort to switch to Netscape, the fact remains that the integration of the IE browser into the Operating System has played more of a role in the decline in Netscape’s market share than any “standards compliance” issue. To deny that is to take a myopic view of the browser wars.”

“The WSP has taken exactly the wrong attitude. Instead of heaping scorn on Netscape (and, by association, the Mozilla effort), you should be supporting — nay, advocating — the standards compliance that Mozilla and Netscape 6 will bring to the market. You should be advocating for Mozilla’s standards goals that you so quickly took credit for a year and a half ago.

You should be encouraging the work of the many developers who are fighting an uphill battle against a monopolist. You should be encouraging the WSP members who are putting a serious effort into the Netscape and Mozilla product.

The WSP so easily turned its back on Netscape and the Mozilla effort. Do you know what your goals really are?”