Bob Browning's blog

I may have mentioned before that once a concept becomes ‘hot’ everyone wants to get on the bandwagon and spin their products. So IBM has announced a new rack-mounted server “designed for heavy traffic web 2.0 social networking sites”.

In marketing terms an own goal because the product almost certainly is good for any heavy-duty computer cluster application where fault tolerance for individual systems is not a huge issue (that is the trade-off). By marketing it in this way they are limiting their market to a very small number of specialised web sites. Admittedly these guys buy servers by the thousand, but the market must be much bigger.

I love eye tracking studies. This study tracked men and women separately on the Marks and Spencer home page.

http://www.etre.com/blog/2006/05/five_days_bonus_ms_revisited/

Quote “As you can see, these findings are somewhat counterintuitive. The women were extremely focused on the navigation menus and rarely looked at the main body of the page. However, while the men were also predominantly navigation-focused, they were a lot more willing to venture into the main body of the page – even though the majority of the feature located therein targeted women!”

People! Think!. The centre of the page is a picture of Twiggy with a big smile on her face and below her a couple of other very beautiful women. The men take a sneaky look at some attractive females? Big surprise!

A designer who we had done work for just sent me a contract their client had sent them to sign. It was headed ‘Assignment of Intellectual Property(IP) Rights’. It would assign all IP rights in the software to the client.

I had to check the date on the email but it was April 3rd not the 1st. We use the identical software on all our client’s sites, so the whole idea of giving the IP rights to one of them is a total non-starter. We would be out of business. Continue Reading »

I have just downloaded Vista SP1. The wretched program warns you that it will take an hour. I watched it for a while and got bored, so I took the hint and went out for a cup of coffee. When I got back there was a ‘click here to proceed’ thing! It then took about an hour while I twiddled my thumbs.

Why????

In any event I would say it was worth the wait. The machine is noticably slicker. Listing directories and copying files in particular much faster. Or should I say much less slug-like.

This month we have an outstanding useability column from Jakob Neilsen. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designer-user-differences.html

There are two important insights

• Designers are not users
• Users are not designers

Like a japanese haiku these two statements can be used for lengthy meditation and should be burned on the heart of every designer. Too many sites are built for the designer, not the user; an exotic, barely understood being. A person who doesn’t know how to run a search on Google, let alone manipulate a strange scroll bar or fly-out menu.

Read

Learn.

If you want a good laugh at other people’s expense go take a look at http://www.telebid.com/. It looks like a very cool auction site with some real bargains. There is a 32″ flat screen with 49 minutes to go for £197. What is the catch? Continue Reading »

This from the Google website

“Unfortunately, we’re unable to interpret the meaning of changes in our legal documents for you. If you have questions or you need legal advice on interpreting the terms, please don’t hesitate to contact an attorney.”

Uh!

Jeremiah Owyang in his blog, asks the following question: “What if they leave negative comments on my site/blog/forum? “. The answer is that it has to be handled well, not covered up or removed.

I have always believe that a customer complaint can be a huge opportunity if handled well.

You routinely buy something from (say) a web site and next day it turns up regular as clockwork. Then something goes wrong. If handled badly you will never go back to that store. If handled really well you will not only go back, but you will tell your friends about it. Why? Because now you know that if something goes wrong in the future these guys will deal with it. It has actually made you happier because before you maybe always had a nagging doubt.

Of course repeated mistakes or mistakes on the first order cannot be recovered from. You just plain need to get your act together.

Firefox has been incredibly successful in digging into Microsoft’s market share. But many believe every thing they hear that’s bad about Microsoft and everything they hear thats good about Firefox. I know a few people who are like that about the USA. This site is devoted to expolding those Firefox myths.

Someone has figured out the ten most common passwords. How? I thought they were supposed to be secret. Maybe the ten most common among people who will tell you there password if you ask. Who knows.

Anyway – few surprises. After ‘123’ and ‘password’ the third was ‘liverpool’. Number 9 was ‘arsenal’. So if you want to guess a password try some football teams.