Is anyone else concerned that the Internet is becoming a walled garden on Facebook, encouraging people never to leave the facebook site? People are more likely to read the Guardian now it’s a Facebook app. No doubt this is due to having to install the app to read content “read” by others – frictionless sharing as they call it. It means a lot more traction gained for Facebook, and a less neutral web experience.

Net neutrality is already wishful thinking, now that Google & Facebook dominate so much – do you even have a separate Instant Messaging / email app outside of Outlook at work? Are you aware that most of what you listen to and read will be shared automatically with your friends?

‎”As well as increasing traffic, the app is making our journalism visible to new audiences. Over half of the app’s users are 24 and under – traditionally a very hard-to-reach demographic for news organisations. The Facebook app is one of a number of successful launches by the Guardian in recent months as our ‘digital first’ strategy gains momentum. We’re delighted with the results.”
– Andrew Miller, chief executive officer of Guardian Media Group

I must be an old grumpy git, since being on Facebook is frighteningly efficient at appealing to the younger demographic. I do get nostalgic about plain-text email with properly nested quoting wrapping at 74 characters, web pages that are visible anywhere on any device, and music that comes from analogue encoding on physical objects. Will appealing to the younger net users without embedding your content on Facebook be possible soon?

Happy New Year too!

Five years ago, I published an article for our fifth wedding anniversary. So if I have got my head on straight, that makes it our tin – 10 years – anniversary today.

How time flies. When we first got married our wedding site had a guestbook I cooked up in PHP. Five years on, a blog post was where a few friends gave their comments. Ten years on, and it’s Facebook where all the reactions have come from. So from DIY PHP/MySQL to WordPress (also PHP/MySQL) to Facebook (PHP too) things keep on changing.

Here’s to ten more! No doubt the next anniversary post will happen somewhere else entirely. Any predictions?

Every time a major site with a big audience changes, there are always going to be detractors. Especially a site like Facebook. People spend a lot of time there, so interface changes are almost tantamount to moving stuff around in their lounge/den.

I think there are a number of issues with the new Facebook homepage. I’ve seen it before. It’s called feature creep. Lots of stuff all clamouring for your attention. Chat, realtime updates, top stories, the rest of the news, adverts, suggestions for friends, app updates, messages (FB-ized email) and notifications.

Clever use of AJAX saves FB a heavy, slow loading user experience. Unfortunately it also allows stuff to get very busy. Progressive loading is an interesting technique and FB has evangelised it well. They’ve added a new design pattern I’m less of a fan of into the mix, inspired no doubt by a pattern I’ve seen on mobile terminals: revealing scrollbars on mouse over.

For some time you have been able to set overflow:auto on <div> elements so that scrollbars – regular, OS managed scrollbars that look different depending on whether you’re a Mac or a PC – appear if the content goes outside the bounding box as defined for the div. FB are presenting to the masses a funky new way of doing it. A grey rounded scrollbar, as seen on your iPhone / Android terminal when you touch a screen full of text that can scroll, appears when you hover your mouse around each of the blocks of content on the right hand side (and in some other cases too).

I have a big beef with this, because scrollers are now everywhere on the page. You still have your regular scrollbar if you’re still using a desk/lap-top machine to access the site. Very close to it you now have other scrollable elements that don’t follow the same rules. They don’t work the same as OS scrollbars. If like me you often scroll with the keyboard once the area has focus, they’re a PITA. The target for scrolling is not very wide. The screen looks a mess if you leave all the different boxes scrolled at different points. It’s not intuitive to know which zones really will scroll or not if text inside them aligns perfectly with then edge of the scrollable zone. So you have to mouse over them, which isn’t good for an addict of the PgUp, PgDn, Ctrl, Shift and arrow keys like me. I only click to give a zone focus or to position the cursor far from where I am currently.

Other bad karma effect for me: I was assaulted with little bubbles and tutorial messages when the version change happened. Not a discreet “learn about what’s new” that I could easily dismiss, but (IIRC) something like 3 or 4 different notifications all around the screen which meant I had to dismiss them all before getting back to my usual FB timewasting / networking activity.

There is a personality type that resists change, and with group effects in play this gets amplified. I’ve already seen groups campaigning to get the old back. I could care less about that, by all means go and change and organically improve. Just be careful about the over-riding experience, because a site as popular as FB has a real responsibility to keep design patterns sound, so that people don’t start getting used to bad practices. FB may have more reasons than most to cram stuff into a central page, but what they’re doing is making a one-page experience as they remove more and more reasons to leave the main page. You can now comment on people’s walls straight from the home, and read comments not currently on screen with new fly-outs from the right hand column. I can imagine other sites doing the same, and how difficult they’d be to navigate.

And of course I can hear them now in boardrooms around the world. “Why don’t we just make that a scrolly box, and stick like four of them together in the right column…”. Like as if somehow, the page no longer scrolling has solved the old page fold debate, and instead lots of individual blocks will be scrollable. Or not.

On holiday this summer in the Vendée region (near the Loire valley), I was pleasantly surprised by my till receipt for my holiday shopping. Instead of a list in simple order of items scanned by the cashier, the receipt was both grouped by department, and ordered by highest priced item first. At a glance, you can see which items from each department are the most expensive, and which departments you bought the most goods from.

In the past, till receipts were printed line by line first mechanically – possibly with mechanical tabulation (addition of next item to subtotal) inside the machine – then by fairly dumb electronic calculators which would do much the same. More recently, bar code scanning meant the machines queried a database for the item price. Later, the item name would be queried and printed (initially a few characters per item) and yet the basic running totals and chronological ordering have still to change in many supermarkets and other stores where you buy a lot of items.

Behind the scenes, no doubt accounting has been done by department for some time. It’s a relatively small jump from a flat database lookup to allowing classification by groups of products. This, to my knowledge, is standard practice for any self respecting supermarket manager / category manager. I’m fascinated to see just how long it has taken to expose these groups to the customer in a useful way. Buffering the data scanned and making a single printout at the end has surely long been within the technical capability of many point of sales devices, since back office equipment and even individual tills have been able to do it for some time. Fast printing of hundreds of lines of text has been possible for well over a decade.

I see several advantages to this approach. Customers get a clear receipt, even if errors are made while scanning or products are cancelled (these need not show on a final receipt, but will create ugly correction lines on “print a line after every item is scanned” receipts). If any goods are bought in multiples, they need not be scanned together at the same time and relevant multi-buy discounts can be neatly added in the same place. Most of all, you leave the store with a feeling that you might want to keep the receipt a bit longer and look at your purchases a bit more carefully. Perhaps even in store, you might notice that you have been billed twice for expensive items because of scanning error. You may be on a tight budget and readable receipts surely help money management at the end of the month. Most of all, errors at tills are commonplace but it’s terribly difficult to see the errors while stressing to pack up your shopping. Kudos to Super U (France) for this little innovation which I think is a real customer pleaser. Now if only the database people could put decent descriptions in for products, instead of “ENM PAST 32%MG U BIO 250G”.

I love the series of sketch notes from Eva-Lotta Lamm, someone who attends a lot of conferences and makes notes with amazing visual impact.

I could have chosen one of many different images that she has uploaded, but this one is recent, colourful and contains perhaps a few things that are less technical – though you probably need to work in a company with an active website to really “get” the overall message. I’d love to know if you get anything out of reading them if you’re completely outside of web marketing / user experience / web project management.

They’re available as a book and there is a fantastic presentation on how sketch notes work

Do you sketch in meetings while taking notes? Did you realise that it’s a good thing to maintain your attention span? Or that it helps you to memorise what you hear?

User centred Design at XING @ UX Camp Europe
Originally uploaded by evalottchen

On the 1st of May (or the Sunday close to it usually) Argenteuil closes a stretch of road near the Seine and they remember the pre-war (pre WWI) era with old style dress, dances and activities. Argenteuil has a fine artistic history. Impressionists like Manet, Monet, Caillebotte, Sisley, Seurat and Braque (born there) all spent time there at one point or another. Flâneurs from Paris would catch a train to Argenteuil on Sunday to be in the “countryside” and wander by the Seine.

I think I’ve been every other year – on average – that I’ve lived in Argenteuil. A lot of people play the game and dress up for the occasion. There’s usually some jazz / musette playing live, dancing, traditional street food as well as typical international fare (beer, chips and BBQ sausages). It’s a shame that the very road they close for the occasion is the road that stops most people from being able to venture down onto the banks of the Seine. You can get there, but you have to go up on the bridge, down a set of stairs, and then walk over the grass verge with cars going past at 90 km/h (56 mph). There’s only a section – as far as I can tell – of grass and trees wide enough to get you far enough from the traffic to appreciate the river.

French Country Dancing
Originally uploaded by simon_music ]]> http://www.caperet.com/2011/05/french-country-dancing/feed/ 2 http://www.caperet.com/2011/03/3-parisian-things/ http://www.caperet.com/2011/03/3-parisian-things/#comments Mon, 28 Mar 2011 09:45:12 +0000 fruey http://www.caperet.com/2011/03/3-parisian-things/ Sacré Coeur

The church (Basilique, in fact) of the Sacré Coeur in Montmartre. It’s quite a climb through streets aptly named things like Rue du Calvaire, roughly translated as “time of hardship street” in common parlance.

You can get a cog-wheeled railway which mounts a steep incline instead, called the funiculaire. Recommended if you want a bit of energy to check out the nearby square where artists paint caricatures or portraits and coffee is ridiculously expensive.

Maybe check out the Espace Dali if you’re into a small, hidden away museum with all things Dali.

The Eiffel Tower

Built for the Paris exhibition in 1889 it was originally intended to be taken down. Somehow the phallic tower remained – and is visible rising up into the sky, or hiding behind a skyscraper and suddenly leaping out again – from many places all over Paris and visible from a vantage point less than 5 minutes from where I live, especially on a clear day.

Nothing quite like it (except the copies in Vegas and the like) anywhere else. The Champ de Mars, the park upon which it stands on the north west edge, is a pleasant place to become a flâneur with a sandwich and a cool drink. Watch out for hawkers though, they’re everywhere.

Centre Pompidou

In a big square in the Beauborg area of Paris, not far from the Halles shopping centre with the Hotel de Ville not far in the other direction (though slightly more south) the Centre Pompidou is a good place to check out if only for the curious inside-out architecture, though the collections inside are good. Look out for special shows, seen a couple of cool ones there.

You can hang out in the many bars and cafés in the area, and don’t miss a curious bunch of colourful sculptures giving an endless loop of a water performance which can be watched from a terrace of the closest café.

3 Parisian Things: Sacré Coeur
3 Parisian Things: The Eiffel Tower
3 Parisian Things: Centre Pompidou
All originally uploaded by simon_music

I have been doing a bit of writing lately, and might even get an article or two published in an online technical publication. Which led me to thinking about the separation between technical stuff I write, often close to my profession, and the more personal items I write at other times. There are bits of photography and music in here too.

Many successful blogs stick to one subject, and treat it well. Some bloggers who want to scratch several itches therefore launch several blogs. I’ve always preferred one place to do everything, especially given that I don’t create anything like a useful volume of work to really get a following going anywhere in a given niche subject. I quite like the notion of an eclectic mix, and that has been my sub-heading ever since this blog was launched.

I may gain from better categorisation and taxonomy (tagging) though. Good categorisation allows a visitor to find related content easily. It may also allow separate blog entry points with navigation options per category. Perhaps I should code a top navigation with a few main category entry points (tech, photography, music & film…) which would allow different “views” of my blog based on different interests. I’m not exploiting that enough. Good tagging of each article creates little bridges between articles that share particular keywords. With WordPress you can assign multiple categories and tags to each article. Restricting the number of each you use makes all articles have tight interlinking which is good. Using lots of different tags and categories may cause the interlinking to be too spread out. This causes attrition on the usefulness of tag and category efforts in the first place.

In this blog’s case, after several years without any tags and a few set categories, I will have to go through all the old articles and reclassify them for any new taxonomy / categorisation to really work. What do you think about mixed-up blogs? Do you ever even look at blog navigation and try to find more content that is like the article you most liked on a blog?

Over a year ago now, I was in a band that got together for a gig in Paris which was a line-up of colleagues from work. I have been thinking about our vocalist recently, since she’s from Tunisia and has been very active on social networks following the revolution and helping people connect as regular digital communications were hampered.

This is a track from a time before that… a little bit of nostalgia for me recorded at rehearsal – the first run-through of the Jewel track Foolish Games for which I played the piano. The song itself is a story of unbalanced love, and the single was a big success which was nominated for best pop female vocal at the Grammy awards in 1998.

It was a wonderful moment of musical complicity – it starts off a little weak and sometimes slightly out of time, but somewhere in the middle it all comes together quite beautifully. Nothing like music to take you away from the anguish of existence and just let yourself relax for a few precious moments. Funny how this first run through was never matched afterwards, even though it has a couple of rough edges. Click the title or the “play” icon to hear it.

Foolish Games
V Special Club & Friends
Originally uploaded by simon_music

I surf around quite a lot of blogs, thanks mainly to blog exchanges like Expose Your Blog which are like StumbleUpon but based only on blogs, and have the added bonus of gaining you reciprocal traffic. I used to surf on other exchanges too, but they are all losing traffic and are poorly maintained. Expose Your Blog is relatively new and quite a small but vibrant community of those enthusiasts of personal blogging that haven’t defected to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and others.

I thought I’d share a few reasons why I might be put off by blogs, and tune out if I land on them again. If you can think of anything else, I’d be pleased to hear it in the comments. Feel free to share your pet peeves too .

Reading: If your blog is hard to read, then why read it?

• Don’t use busy backgrounds that interfere with the foreground text, especially if that foreground is not separate from the background because it’s semi transparent.
• Don’t use super-small text or change text size, colour or font mid posting. A different style for quotes, captions and other elements can work, but stick to one style per type of content and make your main text as simple and easy to read as possible.
• Don’t make adverts obscure the key content you’re trying to push. Your blog will not make you rich, get over it.
• Don’t have too many wacky widgets all over the place. Pick the ones that best represent your personality and stick with them if you must have a couple. Try to keep them aligned so that there aren’t loads of different widths of widget all higgledy-piggledy on the page.
• Don’t have so much fixed content at the top of your blog that it’s not obvious where the fresh, unread content starts. This last point is particularly important on blog rotation sites because someone who’s already read your blog wants to identify what’s new since last time!
• Do make sure there is good contrast between your foreground and background. Some people have awful screens; some people are not blessed with good eyesight.
• If you are going to use teasers, make sure I get a good idea of the article content before I click a link to read more.

Writing: that’s what your visitors are here for.

• Don’t apologise for the lack of posts, or make promises you might not keep like posting more often soon. It will only look worse as the most recent posting date recedes into the past.
• Do set a reasonable rhythm of posting and stick to it. No point being one post a day for a while then nothing for ages. Better to set a reasonable goal for yourself and stick to it. I try to make an update about every ten days, I can’t manage more. If I have a great idea for a post a couple of days in a row, I store them up as writing prompts for the next post.
• Commenters: they might want to write too. Don’t make life difficult for them by requiring them to have a specific website ID like Blogger or OpenID. Let them post anonymously, using either a CAPTCHA or moderation to stop spam. I’ve actually typed nice comments to people only to find that I can’t post them anonymously. The nice comment is thus wasted, and my time with it. Yes, I have a Google account but I don’t want it all over the blogosphere.
• Crazy punctuation, over-use of quotes, lots of exclamation and question marks. Tough one this, because some people can do it and it totally fits in with their character and works. Other times it just looks like filler and detracts from an otherwise interesting read.

I edit myself a lot and try to be as good as possible, but obviously I am guilty of some of these crimes. I’m happy to hear your suggestions if you have constructive criticism of this blog.