Puzzlepieces

<rant>When I'm reading a blog in my newsreader, and want to e-mail the blogger, I want to follow a link labeled "e-mail". When I receive an e-mail about an event I want to attend, I want to follow a link labeled "add to calendar." When blogger A mentions blogger B, I want to follow a link labeled "more on blogger B", and see what company blogger B works for. When I'm going somewhere, I want to know what people I know live close to there so that I can meet them. When I write an e-mail I want to select from my contact list those people who attend the same school as me. When I'm talking to someone on an instant messenger, I want to follow a link labeled "view blog." When I'm talking to someone on an instant messenger, I want to "join calendars," to find a time we both are free.</rant>

I'm talking (I think) about things that are possible with the semantic web. Maybe I'm talking about RDF; I don't know. Actually, I don't really care how it's done. Now, some of these things exist today. NewsGator (a newsreader) has an "add event to calendar" feature, so that's a benefit to anyone using NewsGator within Outlook on Windows, and is reading RSS feeds that have data in ESF format. Dodgeball will let you know when people that you know are physically near you.

In conclusion, tomorrow can't come soon enough. And as for today, I think I'm looking for an online address-book-type thing. Recommendations? Oh yeah, and I added my photo to my FOAF file. Which may give an indication of what I think may be the solution to the "problems" I've posed. Maybe Danny has some thoughts?

Information Architecture - Part 1 - this post on Webmaster World (which is interesting in itself) includes a reply mentioning three types of users: wanderers, seekers, and action-takers. This reminds me that Erind Dnirex wanted me to expand on my recent post on the topic.

While not exactly lumping all users into those three groups, I was saying that websites (and actually, this applies to other things such as real-world stores) have different types of users. The Webmaster World thread also points to another thread about e-commerce where users are classified as browsers, evalutators, transactors, or customers. See also more on occasionalization (Google query).

I still haven’t given the topic enough thought, it really warrants at least an essay, which I doubt I’ll ever get around to. Instead I’ll point to a couple of examples I’ve seen recently. One is the article Designing for Context with CSS on A List Apart, which discusses sending additional information to different outputs (handheld device, and website print-outs). A user that prints out a page on a website, for example, is definitely an interested user, as opposed to a web surfer just dropping by. If, for instance, your website has a fee-based service for power users, a reminder about that service could be shown. Another example is something on my own website, which I eventually plan to work on more. Take a quick look at the top of my Croatian page. Now search on Google for croatian spanish web page translation, and click on the result that goes to my Croatian page. I think the difference is quite obvious. That feature, which was quite simple to make, is targeted only at people who arrive at pages in my /translate/ section from search engines, i.e. users who are very unlikely to already be familiar with my translator. Take a look at the website for Ballard Power. There are four prominent links, labelled "be a customer", "be an investor", "be an employee", and "be informed". I can’t think of anyone that they’re missing.

While in the slow process of redesigning my website (mostly a mental process at this point), I considered perhaps making fewer options available on pages (less confusing to first-time visitors), with the ability to see all the options on the preferences page. In a similar manner, I could set up a cookie that tracks how many times a user visits the website, and after a certain number of visits (i.e. they have become regular users), the additional options are shown automatically. Hmn, I really should be studying for calculus exam tomorrow. Time to stop blogging.

Why Mobile Phones are Annoying (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox) - I wasn't originally going to link to this article, which suggest that cell phones are annoying because other people only overhear half of the conversation. But then Nielsen made the point that the study was actually testing usability on people who aren't even the customers... and this is important too.

Shirky: Situated Software - I get this. On small use-specific applications.