Tag Archives: web

The Cobbler’s Kids are Shoeless

There’s a 16th-century proverb that goes something like, “The shoemaker’s children go barefoot.” Or unshod. Or something olde-timey like that. But however you phrase it, the sentiment certainly seems true today.

Last week, Apple announced that their developer site was hacked, and that potentially thousands of developers’ emails and other info may have been compromised. The hack (and the hacker) have since been called into question, and the real scope of the intrusion is unclear. But, to put it mildly, it ain’t good.

If Apple, with all of its resources and intricate technological knowledge, can’t keep it’s, ahem, stuff together with basic security, it seems like there’s not a great amount of hope for the rest of us. At least under the current security regime. Some of this is certainly due to neglect close to home — the shoemaker/cobbler proverb again — but much of it is based on how we handle security in general.

The username/password or email/password security approach just doesn’t work. It really doesn’t. Oh, sure, you might argue, it’s ubiquitous, so it must work fine. But there are SO many examples of breaches that something is amiss, and even where there aren’t breaches, it may just as likely be because nobody has really targeted that system yet.

So if not that, then what? Biometrics? RSA keys for everyone? Implanted chip under the skin? How apocalyptic sci-fi movie do we want to get?

Frankly, I don’t know. Each of those approaches has definite pros and cons, including a glimpse of dystopia. But I know this: what we have now is not working. And perhaps this is just another example of Apple leading the way.

Not that they were wanting to lead in this particular area… Apple, get your kids some shoes!

Should Lorem Ipsum Die?

Last month, Paul Souders posted a piece that was one-part futurism, one-part opinion, one-part rant, entitled: “Content-first design ain’t herding cats.” He raises a handful of design trends and then makes leaps to what he perceives to be the best responses.

Amidst some of the all-caps and bolded pieces is the underlying premise that content should always drive design, and thus, the content should be present before the design is done. Not necessarily a revolutionary sentiment, but certainly an admirable one — sort of the web design version of form following function.

In practice, though, it seems like it’s a goal but not often the reality. Usually, content is getting reworked (or generated) as the design is being done as well. So Souders’ contention that we should “[k]ill Lorem Ipsum for good” might ignore how projects tend to work. Or at least how they’ve tended to work in our experience.

That’s not to say design drives content — quite the opposite. But often, a design framework will be in place well before the content is “done” (put in quotes because when is content ever really done?). When the content is ready to go into production, there are often tweaks and alterations to the design. But to hold one up altogether for the other would extend project lifespans considerably.

Other responses are predicated on the idea that walled gardens and Instapaper will be the primary way we view content in the future — web scrapers that take someone else’s content and puts it in their display. I’m not so sure about that future, both for copyright and commercial reasons. Big brands aren’t going to want some third-party app effectively removing their specific brand pieces (trade dress), nor will they stand for it for long, if it threatens to become ubiquitous.

Further, it’s difficult to see how the Instapapers of the world would handle more intrinsically dynamic content, where design necessarily is a bit removed from content because the content can vary.

Thinking hard about content before thinking hard about design is a good idea. A great idea, even. Holding up the design process until the dots and twiddles are done to accommodate a scaper-driven future? I’m not convinced.

Advertising Saturation

I was at a restaurant the other night, and needed to use the restroom. As I was doing so, I could not help but notice that there was an ad in the restroom (for neither the restaurant nor its restroom services). That was a little offputting by itself, but moreso was it’s location: the bottom of the urinal.

Upon further checking (advertising research, not checking bathrooms), it appears this is quite the growth location for advertising — some entrepreneur has even come up with “interactive” urinal advertising. My, oh my.

It got me thinking (no pun intended) about advertising saturation. There has, for many years, been an evolving science of determining when one’s ads have reached as many people as they’re going to. This is the point, it’s theorized, that you can stop spending money on that campaign — to do more reaps diminishing returns.

But what about the saturation to the viewer? It is increasingly difficult to go through a day (let alone a few hours) without seeing ads. Surely this overload of messaging dilutes its effectiveness.

This comes up with our clients regularly. When working on commercial sites that wish to advertise their own wares, or publishing platforms that feature the advertising of sponsors, there are always conversations about placement, frequency, and the balance of content vs. ads. The initial tendency is often to create as many ad placement opportunities as possible — to really “get the message out.”

In our usability and interface testing, though, we find that there is a balance point, after which additional branding and marketing messages simply aren’t seen, and by that time, the effectiveness of the ones that are seen is also diminished. While we haven’t studied the results of our testing over the years, my guess is that the balance point has shifted over the years, as viewers get both more sophisticated and more tired of seeing wall-to-wall selling.

It’s a reinforcement for doing user testing, to be sure. But it’s also an incentive to look at more integrative ways to communicate advertising — and more restrained ways of papering it across the Internet!

WebRTC: Live web audio/video chat without plugins

Most of the design and development technologies we work with every day are in ‘evolution’ mode, not ‘revolution’ mode. Enhancements are made, bugs are fixed, but the leaps are relatively small. A browser here adds support for the latest HTML5 canvas feature, a device there adds an API for better map coordination. Nifty, but a little light on the ‘wow factor.’

With the release of Firefox 22 this week, though, there’s a browser advancement that has the potential for a real leap: WebRTC is now baked-in and turned on by default. That means both Chrome and Firefox have it up and running in their latest versions. It will soon be ubiquitous (or perhaps ubiquitous-ish until IE follows along…).

Why is this so great? WebRTC is a W3C standard that allows for real-time communication (thus the RTC) in the browser — audio chats, video chats, whatever. No plug-in for users to download and install. Cross-platform and cross-browser compatible. Just code and go.

It will soon be much more trivial to just throw a video customer-service chat on a help-desk website. Or bake it into a community website to allow for in-site community chats. Or integrate it with the many more social networking sites with varying results depending on the site (you can let your imagination run on that one).

The possibilities are pretty remarkable. It’s a great case of where the technology itself has been around a long time, but by establishing a standard, the power is in the interconnection. Like, I don’t know, almost all Internet-based technologies.

There’s a good getting started tutorial over at HTML5 Rocks, and you can also jump off of the WebRTC home page. Either way, it’s worth a click-around. I think this will be big.