Dave Dash

Smarter excerpts: the art of the semi-automatic CMS

2008-02-28T00:00:00-08:00

I was browsing the TED site, since it's all up in my blogospheres and ran across this:

If you look at the excerpts, they are piss poor descriptions:

Frans Lanting is one of the greatest nature p...

Nature p-what? Nature painter? Nature preserver? If you click around enough... the answer is nature photographer. Many of the excerpts failed at giving me any indication of who these people are or even enticing me to find out. I am a web 2.0 person, if I have to click on a link and load a new page, then it better be good. When I'm doing an information binge, I am not going to have that level of patience.

One day at del.icio.us I decided to test the limits of every profile field... and I learned that every now and then you do need to truncate user generated content.

This page however, is trusted users who have edited structured content (to borrow a term from the Django Book). That means, that someone had to enter in a description for this person. Someone who is trusted at TED. Chances are the page was rendered to trim the excerpt at 46 characters.

There's two easy solutions to this:

DHTML

This remaining excerpt could have been hidden away, and a button that said "show all" or "expand" (or whatever is the usable phrase/icon) could show the full except. This prevents me from having to jump around.
Use Semi-Automatic excerpts

We are talking about "trusted users" meaning, we can trust them to do things that humans do better than machines (there's my del.icio.us humans-do-some-things-better mentality). When they enter the description for a person, their administration interface should be able to suggest an excerpt and they, the "trusted user" should be able to make adjustments or tweaks.

The former solution is far easier, but if you're scanning a site, especially one as extensive as TED's speakers listing, the last thing you want to do is click "expand" buttons everywhere to read everything. The latter solution is smarter. Of course, the problem could also be solved by upping the 46 character limit, but not everything should be fully automated.

Creative Friends

2007-04-10T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]photography, design, pretty[/tags]

A college friend of mine swims some creative waters:

corvail photographic agency has some interesting. This picture was pretty awesome. If we could get people to upload delicious photos like that for reviewsBy.us... we'd all be fat and broke ;)
The full screen pictures on striel were also fun. I especially liked 8/2005, 10/2005, 11/2005, 2/2006, 5/2006 and 3/2007.
Grasshopper is pretty... pretty awesome!

Blindly Trusting Locks

2007-03-20T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]design,usability[/tags]

How many times have you been minding your business, assuming you have total and complete privacy and BAM the privacy is broken for a split second as someone bursts into your private haven that you've made of the public rest room.

Those locks never seem to work. I don't like blindly trusting a lock. If I push a button, how do I know it works? I don't. What I do like is big heavy dead bolts that I know work. I turn the device and if I can't see it, I can at least feel that it's preventing the door to open.

Even better are the bolts that actually mark a room as being occupied (like the lavatories on airplanes).

Then there are the latches and levers that make a vain attempt at locking, but really just don't do what they say they're going to do.

I thought about this, and it makes for a great design analogy...

We need to make features that people don't need to blindly trust.
We need to make features that are trustworthy.

When I hit save, or I hit modify in a web app, I want to know that the save occurred or the modification took place. I shouldn't have to glue my eyes to the screen and just look for that flash that occurs when a browser refreshes. With Ajax, things like notification are generally planned out in advance (indicators, etc). At the same time, they are absolutely necessary. Features need some sort of feedback to tell you, yes, I did exactly what you wanted.

We also need things that are trustworthy. If a feature is enabled or activated and there's a notice, let us know. But don't lie. Do whatever sanity checks that need to get done to make sure this really occurred. Don't be the bathroom stall lock that says it's locked but gets easily unlocked with a gentle nudge.