In Why I Don’t Use Social Software, Ryan Carson of Vitamin magazine (where I published The MySpace Problem), asks some tough questions about the rise of social web apps. The biggest question is: Are social web apps here to stay?

Using his own tendency to shy away from them as evidence, Ryan wonders if the excitement of social networking apps is a bit over the top. He asks: “is the market already saturated with products that no-one yet uses?”. His reason for not using social networking apps is a good one: he doesn’t have time because he’s busy getting work done. But even if he were to use them there are still too many services out there competing for our limited attention. So how would we find out about them in the first place?

Continue Reading: Are Social Web Apps Here to Stay?

According to my friend Bill, who teaches there, 92% of the 45,000 94% of students in a recent survey (Bill points to survey) at Michigan State University have Facebook accounts. That’s a high percentage of people! This number is probably not indicative of the whole campus, but it suggests that it could be well over 50%.

In addition, so many students use chatting tools and social networking sites that MSU is even considering phasing out the #1 internet tool of the last 30 years: email accounts. Because students are online all the time and messaging through other means, there is little need for personal, school-based email accounts. Everybody simply uses the built-in tools in the virtual spaces they inhabit.

When I was in school it was all about email. You’ll have an alumni email account for life, I was told. There was an assumption that I would need an email account for life. Maybe that’s not true anymore…

Continue Reading: Social Networks are Killing Email

In The Power of Positive Whining, Jeffrey Zeldman writes:

“If web design were not an art, then we would always get every part right. But it is an art, and, like all arts, it deals with the subjective. The subjective is something you can never get 100% right.”

I think Jeffrey is right: no designer can expect perfection in design. They can neither expect to create the perfect design nor expect to be able to know it if they did. And even if they did, somebody would hate it just because it was perfect.

Web Design

But web design is design after all, and as such we need to know when it works and when it doesn’t. If people use it, it works. If people don’t use it, it doesn’t work. Though people’s comments about it might be subjective: “I like it!” or “It’s ugly”, web design, like all design, succeeds or fails based objectively on how well people can use it. We may argue about metrics: (do 60% or 80% of people need to succeed in order to call it good design?) but we aren’t talking about someone’s subjective opinion…we’re talking about their actual behavior. That’s the beauty of behavior: it’s verifiable and objective.

Continue Reading: Self-expression in Web Design

Note: A follow-up to The MySpace Problem, published over at Vitamin.

Many weeks ago I contacted Ryan Carson over at Vitamin to talk to him about writing an article on successful, but ugly, web sites. I had seen a lot of designers dismiss sites like Google and MySpace because they are ugly, failing to talk about their merits or what makes them successful. ( I also wrote Does Google Succeed Despite Bad Design? in response to two of them, but that was more focused on Google than it was on the general problem of being ugly and successful. )

In particular, I kept coming back to the question: is MySpace well-designed? Obviously, they’re doing something amazingly right…to have grown so fast and so big. I read Kathy Sierra’s piece: Ultra-fast release cycles and the new plane and it dawned on me that all this ugly-design talk is basically monday-morning quarterback. What matters is the perception of MySpace users. A few I talked to confirmed this: the service is their social life.

So I wrote The MySpace Problem, over many weeks, through many stops and starts, and it is now getting some good conversation going. I’m happy with the piece, even though it ended up being much different than I had originally planned.

Continue Reading: More on The MySpace Problem

Joel Spolsky has an interesting view on design:

“If you have been thinking that there is anything whatsoever in design that requires artistic skill, well, banish the thought. Immediately, swiftly, and promptly. Art can enhance design but the design itself is strictly an engineering problem.”

What I like about Joel’s piece is that he focuses on design as creating something for real people in real-world contexts with real-world constraints to use.

Kathy Sierra, soft-spoken in person, kick-ass writer, on her time at Search Champs:

“Usability schmusability… where’s the part where we talk about how this helps the user kick-ass?”

Kathy’s doing great work: Here’s her feed.

Sitting in my chiropractor’s office the other day I read a fascinating article in the offline version of Businessweek: Math will Rock Your World.

In addition to finding out that using a laptop 12-14 hours a day can affect my spine, I also found out about the amazing rise of math in business, from analyzing clickstreams to tracking blog conversations. It seems Google and Yahoo already have next year’s math grads lined up for jobs. They simply cannot get enough brain power to do what they want to do.

Continue Reading: Mining the Two Types of User-Supplied Content

Lots of people ask me this question. I used to say that we help make web sites easier to use. Now, I can simply point to this:

What UIE is all about

On our Brain Sparks blog, UIE founder Jared M. Spool explains in detail what we do, outlining our biggest themes in the process:

• The Scent of Information
• The Goldilocks Content Framework
• New testing methods like the 5 Second Test
• Challenging widely held assumptions like the Three Click Rule
• And our ever-expanding library of research

During lunch at work one day this week we were talking about movies, one of our favorite topics. Both Jared and Christine suggested watching the new Val Kilmer movie: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. They said it was quirky, funny, clever, and just a great story. They highly recommended it.
But I got to thinking. Why [...]

Continue Reading: Which Movie to Watch? An Overview of Recommendation Systems

Jeremy Keith finds the new alistapart design utilizing a 1024 pixel fixed-width layout too wide. (I wrote up my initial thoughts a few days ago)

It seems that designers creating a 1024 pixel wide design are making a certain assumption …something like “screens are continually getting bigger, so our designs can get bigger, too”. But it’s also an assumption that most folks want to browse using a single window, and have that window take up the entirety (or close to it) of the available screen.

But I agree with Jeremy. I have 15 inches of screen to work with, which is plenty wide enough to handle a 1024 design, but I never make windows as big as I can. So there is a small horizontal scrollbar in the new redesign when I view it, but I just deal with it. The new two-finger scrolling feature of my Powerbook also alleviates a little frustration with this. Jeremy says he will deal with it by creating his own stylesheet.

In fact, in recent weeks I’ve been seriously considering buying a new Apple display, with 20 or more inches of viewing capacity, large enough for an even bigger design than the new Alistapart one. But the reason is not so that I can stretch one window and make it as big as possible, the reason is so I can have two windows at ~800 pixels wide.

So I wonder if, instead of seeing everyone adopting a wider fixed-width design, we’ll instead see a comfort level forming with slightly smaller, liquid windows. There is, after all, an upper limit to everything, except plasma TVs, of course. Perhaps we’ve seen the beginnings of it with this new design. And, perhaps other folks have the same opinion that I do: that two windows are better than one.

So, what’s your window habit?

Update: Jon Hicks has an interesting discussion: Is 1024 OK? about this with comments from the designer, Jason Santa Maria. He makes the same point that I make, that not everyone is going to maximize their window. Also, read this quick interview with the designer.

Just goes to show you that we’re all still trying to figure this thing out.