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Some Portland Trivia

2008-09-09T14:06:00.000-07:00

Guess when the Portland MAX train started its Red Line service to the PDX airport?

Answer: September 10, 2001.

That’s right. The day before 9/11.

I know because I took one of the first Red Line trains to the airport that day for a two day trip to see clients in Santa Clara and San Francisco. Well, you know the rest. A two day trip turned into five days. I ended up flying home from Sacramento and, taking the Red Line again, arrived back at Pioneer Square (bags in hand) in time for the candle light vigil.

Small lesson learned: always pack the laptop charger. Had to rely on a clunky modem attached to a Palm for email. Never again.

Right.

Never again.

Last Night's Ride

2008-08-25T06:07:00.000-07:00

I've been using Map My Ride and Map My Run for over a year now - truly excellent tools for mapping, sharing, and tracking workouts. They use a Google Maps based custom application to allow you to create routes, track elevation and workout stats, and download the data for GPS devices and others... Anyway, they offered this feature to embed a route in a blog so I thought I would try it out (below). We've been creating Google Maps applications ourselves, so it is always interesting to see how much can be done with it...

Understanding the Groundswell

2008-07-18T15:24:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I attended the Internet Strategy Summit here in Portland, which was organized by Steve Gehlen, a former client of OakTree's. The conference was very well attended by the region's most wired, as well as similarly wired attendees from all around the country. One of the more energetic and thought-provoking presentations was given by Charlene Li, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research & most notably, author of Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. What is "groundswell," you might ask? In a nutshell, it's the phenomenon where people use technology to get the things they need from each other, rather than from corporations. A great and common example of this is the ever-increasing popularity of Craigslist, where millions of transactions are conducted strictly between people with no interjection or influence by corporations.

From an anthropological perspective, this is interesting, of course, but when we start to think about the significance of the groundswell to our industry, to our clients, to our livelihood, there are ramifications we should all be thinking of now. We are living in an age where something like only 28% of polled Americans say that they trust advertisers, while something like ~ 66% of those same polled people say they trust friends, family and acquaintances. If that's true of the world we live in, the conventional methods of online marketing won't succeed. Embrace the groundswell or become irrelevant.

Practical implications for website designers are always emerging, but becoming familiar with social marketing strategies and tools will be necessary. Gone, or going, are the days of static corporate websites--these narcissistic, one-way communication tools that message to consumers, rather than speak with customers. Create strategies that will encourage community, engagement with client products and services, and in the process, increase credibility. When customers can participate in the improvement of a company's products or services, they'll become brand advocates, brand ambassadors.

Many marketers fear the loss of control that comes with implementing a social marketing strategy, but as Charlene Li points out, "Control is an illusion." These days, people don't need to ask for permission to slam a company when its product sucks, or when brand promises are broken. A better bet is to participate in the discussion, or risk becoming irrelevant.

Google Custom Search... How to boost your Google site ranking in 5 minutes or less (guaranteed)!

2008-06-20T08:46:00.000-07:00

Well, almost. With Google’s Custom Search API , you can add a powerful site search feature to your website in a matter of minutes. This API allows you to easily create a customized search engine, influencing the results displayed. If you own a company that serves a particular market niche, for example, you can become a central hub for information on that topic, improve the “stickiness” of your site, and increase the likelihood that your users will read information on your site before being whisked away.

Google gives us several ways to control the results that are displayed via a web search. From keyword promotion and demotion, to site inclusion or exclusion, the methods allow for a surprising level of control. For example, if my site visitor performs a standard Google search on “Sharepoint”, my company does not appear in the top few search results. However, if I create a custom search engine centering on the Sharepoint topic, I can choose to display results from my site exclusively (probably not very helpful to the end user), or simply emphasize my site results over others. This means that my site visitor would likely see pages on Sharepoint from my site first, but sees other sites with Sharepoint information after that. Yes, ads are displayed in the free edition, but a business account will only set most people back about $100/yr to remove the ads from results pages. Not bad.

While a Google Custom Search Engine can be a great tool to improve site stickiness and engage your site visitors, they can’t find what isn’t there!

Annoying Interfaces of the day - Outlook/Word and the grocery store

2008-06-05T08:18:00.000-07:00

The Grocery Store:

Why is it at the grocery that we simply adapt to terrible user interfaces? Better yet, why do they even reach the market? Aren't they tested?

Case 1: The self checkout line. You have to run your credit card through a completely separate machine, but have to bounce back to the checkout interface at the end to signal you're done.

Case 2: How am I supposed to know hitting the big green button marked enter INSTEAD of my PIN will allow my card to be run as credit, not debit? I mean - I DO know it from repetition, but they look at you like you have 2 heads if you act confused. If you ask me, we as a grocery consuming culture are all bonkers.

MS Outlook/Word
I am sure you have noticed that Word will red squiggly underline misspelled words for you. Great. But it doesn't do this until you move the cursor off the word. I would think Microsoft, in its business devotion, would have come up with something by now that would allow you to contextually click a word before you've moved off of it and get several close spellings to what you might be trying to type. But nope, all you get is a formatting menu if you right click on a word before the re squiggle shows up.

I dunno, these things annoy me.

Speaking of SEO

2008-05-30T06:49:00.000-07:00

I've found it helpful to think about Search Engines like people. What I mean is, if Mrs Google comes to your site, she is looking in particular places to figure out what your site is about, and then validating the pages against the indications that higher level data gives her. She sees a domain named "www.tatertots.com" and thinks "this might be a site about tater tots". She goes to the home page and sees the word tater tots in several areas. She follows a link title "Tater Tot Ingredient Information" and goes to a page with the url "www.tatertots.com/tater-tot-information.html" - where she finds a page that lists all the ingredients but doesn't say the word "tater tot" anywhere - just a list of food ingredients! The page obviously should have certain basic areas that repeat this phrase or variations of the phrase so that Mrs. Google doesn't feel confused or ripped off.

This is a simplification of course - there are many gotcha issues with seo, such as duplicate content issues, keyword stuffing, spam, link syndication, etc - and Mrs. Google will look at all of these and negative marks against you as an information authority as it regards tater tots. But it gives you an idea of a common sense way to look at search engine optimization.

Google Friend Connect

2008-05-16T06:22:00.000-07:00

Google has just released a social networking add-on for websites. Here's some info from their press release:

Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social -- and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect (see http://www.google.com/friendconnect following this evening's Campfire One), any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming -- picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.

Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more.

We're looking forward to trying it out over here - these features are becoming more attainable for the average site owner every day!

50 Ways to Identify a VIP

2008-05-02T10:55:00.000-07:00

Did you know there are fifty ways to identify a VIP in a restaurant or bar? A VIP being a "very intoxicated person."

The Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC) requires restaurants and other establishments to train their wait staff and bar tenders to handle situations where patrons have exceeded their capacity to be safe on the road. The new on-line Alcohol Server Education (ASE) course includes reading, test and videos that mimic real life situations where the server has to make a decision or pick appropriate actions to defuse potentially explosive behaviors.

OakTree built this custom course in Flash using a train ride motif. Each section of the course is represented by a different part of Oregon; beach, mountains, city, desert, etc. Once you've made it to the end of the train ride by successfully mastering the training, you receive your liquor server license good for five years. See the OakTree Digital press release.

One of the fun parts of the project was filming the lessons in Kells and McCormicks. Both were very willing to let us have the actors light cigarettes and spill drinks. We did use union actors for the roles even though several OakTree folks volunteered to get smashed for the part.

IA Summit '08 - Miami!

2008-04-22T05:29:00.000-07:00

The picture - it is just one of the many deliverables on the "Wall of Deliverables" at the IA Summit. Oh and also - special thanks to Puerto Sagua in Miami Beach for providing me some of the best cuban food I've ever tasted.

First off - just to further elaborate on my post about Jared Spool's keynote now that I am typing on an actual keyboard, the discussion of process > methodology > dogma was interesting. Spool's company (firm? consultancy? - sorry, not sure offhand) did a study to try to examine what distinguished successful teams. Their finding was surprisingly that a project's success has nothing to do with how formally their methodology was followed. In other words, all successful teams have a process, but their success had more to do with what he termed "tricks and techniques" - ways they had of accomplishing individual pieces of the project most efficiently - his example was the plumber who banged on a pipe with a chunk of metal to fix a problem. When he asked the plumber how he know to do what he did he said "I didn't" and when he asked him if that was the right tool for the job the plumber said "No". Then he asked him why he didn't go to get the right tool first he said "I didn't feel like going to my truck". In other words, sometimes the efficiency of getting something done, maybe using less than formal methods, sometimes helps the overall project. It maintains a rhythm and pace to the project.

Some more random notes from Jared Spool's session:

Best teams don't have a methodology, focused on techniques and tricks

Struggling teams follow methodology without results

Tsa = "thousands standing around"

What inference to make from eye tracking, analytics (he exposed analytics tools as sheerly ways for consultants to have fun. However - he also said this isn't always bad if it is what gets them "to come to the lab"

U(ser) (e)X(perience)=vision, feedback, culture

Session: IA Tools/Content Analysis

Semi-random notes:

Axure - kick ass prototyping tool

Semantic analysis breaks content down to building blocks and allows systems that reinforce business processes

Connexor: natural English parser

Calais: Reuters service to provide stuff like what you write based on semantic analysis (didn't quite understand this)

This was Matthew Hodgson's session. He went through a case study of doing semantic analysis on some medical information regarding symptoms and treatments in order to codify it and enable the creation of a backend administrative interface that would standardize the input of the data without sacrificing any of the richness of the content. By basic subject/verb/noun/clause analysis of representative samples, they were able to create some basic maps and wireframes based upon the samples - by using the actual words as the nodes on the maps, they were able to map the relationships of the information and create order out of widely disparate sources.

Unfortunately, I need to actually do some work and can't type this up all day - but I do want to get it out there. So here are the rest of my notes with some mild clean up:

FOLKSONOMY SESSION

Exploratory search:

hierarchical

faceted (set of smaller hierarchies) Flamenco

dynamic clusters (dynamic, post_retrieval, unique/clustering algorithms - good example is automation) - Vivisimo is clustering platform, Grokker and Clusty

folksonomy - Motivation uncertainties, Activities: searching(cognition), browsing(perceptual) - flat and inclusive structure

USER EXPERIENCE TEAM OF ONE
Leah Buhley(adaptive path)

Generative design
1 Brainstorm a lot
2 ad hoc team
3 pick the best idears

Techniques:

Spectrums, continuums and grids (design)

Mix and match terms

Inspiration library

Screen grab(firefox plugin)

Concept sheet:
- description
- draw a pic
- it's like
- it does

Business needs are good, but so are user needs

PLACEMAKING

Sociably, uses and activities, access and linkages, comfort and images

Map markup 'slams' 'charrettes' (on site)

Cheese example - 2 people looking at cheese and also viewing each other's reactions at the same time - triangulation

SEARCH PATTERNS
Peter Morville

Songza
Oskope
Like.com
Live search (msn)
Spime search for physical obj (bruce sterling)
Everyzing

PROTOTYPING

paper!
XML/XHTML
Dreamweaver
Adobe flex
Fireworks
Adobe thermal?
Irise
Axure
Michael Schrage - prototyping books

And finally - if anyone actually read this far, Andrew Hinton's "plenary" (uh I guess that means closing speech), summed up perfectly where IA and UX are today. He had some amusing visuals and some interesting AK-47 metaphors, but what it came down to is that the web has evolved from an extremely hierarchical and abstract organization which was only fully understood by the engineers, now it has become a vast and complex, chaotic being in terms of its physical organization. New interface technologies combined with new ways of interacting socially and users contributing to the meta data of a site provide new opportunities for site navigation and organization. This all is serving to blur the links between user experience designers and good information architects - such that any good ux designer is an IA and vice versa.

IA Summit - balls of thread

2008-04-13T06:39:00.001-07:00

Brief update from the IA Summit in Miami - although it is torture to be inside, there's good stuff going on here. The highlight so far was Jared Spool's keynote. He had some fun examples, such as the 67 foot piece of rope with the 3 inch red piece representing 80% of a big box retailer's business. The conundrum being despite all the analytics we have it is still difficult to know and design for these 3 inches. He also had some surveys and used audience input to create human bar graphs of the responses. He had a great take on process vs methodology vs dogma at the expense of the TSA ('Thousands Standing Around'?)

Another highlight so far was Leah Buhley from Adaptive Path and her presentation on being a UX Team of One. She showed some great design techniques with a great energy and vitality at the time of the afternoon when I was jonesin for one of those Cuban coffees....

Much more later....

Where's the peanut butter?

2008-04-01T04:18:00.000-07:00

The grocery store is an interesting exercise in the limits of physical space with regards to organization. Many grocery stores have taken to placing certain items in multiple locations - a good example would be "natural" peanut butter - which is often found in both the "natural" foods section and in the "normal" peanut butter and jelly section. This is an attempt to make the limits of physical space more flexible and appeal to the needs of different tasks or users.

Technologists and webbies often point out that the web, and "Web 2.0" applications in particular, is limitless in terms of organization. In his excellent book "Everything is Miscellaneous," David Weinberger pointed out that this is the major difference between the physical and the digital in terms of taxonomy and organization.

However, the key point is - how does this apply to your website? Massive sites like amazon.com and flickr have created fascinating social organization and flexible site organizations, but for most companies, much of this functionality is still too expensive to develop or they just don't have the user base to make it useful - for example, the use of tagging to create "on the fly" architectures becomes more useful with more users and more data, and for a website with a few thousand visitors per month, it is fairly useless in most cases.

Additionally, you have to be careful when creating a flexible information architecture for a site, because, for example, if you place the same content in multiple places on your site, you run the risk of being penalized by search engines for having duplicate content at different urls on your site. This also can create a maintenance nightmare.

Content management systems like Drupal, Sitefinity, and many others are starting to offer much more flexibility in these areas for low start up costs. Properly implemented, these technologies are transparent to the user, and can allow you to phase in features based on user feedback and analytic data.

The New Information Authorities?

2008-03-11T11:18:00.000-07:00

I attended SearchFest '08 yesterday at the Portland Zoo. The lack of cellular and wireless internet coverage made for unforeseen levels of attention from those in attendance. It was amazing to watch internet professionals pay actual full attention to something for once. On the other hand, the panelists HAD ethernet connections and seemed to be furiously blogging whenever not engaged with presentation tasks. I found this to be an apt analogy for the state of the web as described by both Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz and Marty Weintraub of aimClear.

Rand made it clear that the people that you are marketing to, especially with social media related SEO efforts, are NOT your customers but rather the "linkerati" - the small group of bloggers and high authority sites/hubs that can immensely boost your visibility in both natural search and social media sites like Digg, Delicious, etc. And as Marty said: "Don't piss off the natives". In other words, be genuine (or simulate it....?), don't try to sell (blatantly), and be unique.

So as I looked at these panelists furiously Twittering and blogging about what they were doing at the moment, I could only help but think that this is just a new version of traditional media. You've got power users who have built up authority, sometimes due to compelling and engaging content, sometimes because they are the loudest/most persistence voice with the most technical tricks up their sleeves. They hold the keys to your customers. You've go to figure out how to talk to THEM.

Anyway, cynicism aside, it really was a good conference. Hats off to Rebecca from SEOmoz, who had a Towelie (from South Park fame) slide. I learned a lot of details that will be helpful to our SEO practice here, including a bunch of new tools to check out. Paid link detection seems to be something that is really changing the face of the industry as well, so we'll see how that shakes out.

Wim Hof

2008-03-10T11:10:00.000-07:00

I promise to post something more relevant later, but I am up at the SearchFest conference at the Oregon Zoo (a likely place for this collection of geeks, hipsters, and sick monkeys like yours truley). I just had to share this though - in his excellent keynote, Rand Fishkin from SeoMoz used Wim Hof as an example. This guy is incredible! He is completely immune to the cold - climbed Everest in shorts!!! Look him up...

Rhythm Sections

2008-02-25T09:53:00.000-08:00

This is something I actually know a little bit about - I am a bass player and have played on and off with the same drummer for 20+ years. People make comments about how 'tight' we are together and wonder what the 'secret' is. The secret is we played together 6+ hours a week for over 20 years. That's literally it. In other words, it isn't about a song, or a performance. It is a journey where you can rely on the other person to lead when you don't know the way, with the understanding that you will do the same at another time. It is the respect for the other's ideas and the ability to play towards and emphasize each others ideas rather than having a creative tug of war. The best rhythm sections have all had this - Ashton and Carleton Barrett (The Wailers), John Paul Jones and John Bonham (Led Zeppelin), and many others.

My Analysis of the Newest Blackberry Pearl Commercial

2008-02-20T14:12:00.000-08:00

Deconstruction of the day: I couldn't find this on You Tube or anywhere, but there is a BlackBerry Pearl commercial on the airwaves now where a guy is at a diner and his phone rings - its his daughter (or maybe he calls her). You see the phone and it is this bejeweled pink monstrosity. He starts talking to his daughter about how maybe it isn't the right phone for him - he can't even access email. Besides the fun factor of juxtaposing a teenage girl's cellphone with that of a traveling businessman, this also is a pretty transparent marketing squirm to transition perceptions about buying a product named "Pearl". In fact, it is a fairly feminine name due to the jewelry implications and this is an attempt to make it clear that it is a pearl in its singular perfection (jeez, I should write marketing copy for Blackberry or Verizon or whoever did this ad) and not like jewelry or a hot pink bejeweled phone.

New Google Analytics Tracking Code

2008-02-18T07:39:00.001-08:00

If you hadn't heard, Google is offering new/revised code for Google Analytic tracking. Your existing embedded code will continue to function, however it seems that new functionality and features will be only fully available in the future using the new code. Seems to be a good idea to update your code when you get a chance. Here's what Google has to say about it:

This will allow you to take advantage of the most up-to-date tracking functionality as it is added to Google Analytics. An immediate benefit you'll notice is that the ga.js tags allow you to track ecommerce transactions in a more readable way. And, we've created a special resource on the ga.js javascript for power users who want more control over Google Analytics tracking. If you do choose to update your site to ga.js, please note that the old tracking code (which uses urchin.js) and the new tracking code (which uses ga.js) will not work if placed on the same page together.

Social Bookmarking Made Easy

2008-02-13T10:00:00.000-08:00

Confused by the whole Web 2.0 "social" this and "social" that? Confused or just scared to death your email address will end up on some Facebook page and your 15 minutes of fame will be in Keith Oberman's Worst Person in the World segment on MSNBC?

Well, there's hope that the world actually has some nice people who are willing to cooperate and actually add value and order to help you find and remember sites you find valuable.

Here's an excellent video from CommonCraft that explains social bookmarking and the use of del.icio.us in an easy to understand, fun way.

Annoying Interface of the Day: Stairmaster

2008-01-25T11:14:00.000-08:00

So I was on a treadmill today. Running along, no problem. Machine gives me constant updates on how far I've gone, how high I've climbed, how many calories, etc. However, as soon as I got to the end of "course", this scrolling summary info was replaced with some inane message like "Have a good day!". The stats disappeared! Typically, most people want to see a summary when they are actually done...don't they? That's user experience in a nutshell, its not about what the information is, it is about when and how you can access it. If you are presented with a receipt on step 2 of 5 but can't get a receipt on step 5 of 5, there's a problem.

Vertical Alignment/CSS

2007-12-07T11:20:00.001-08:00

Apparently there are a lot of people who have solved this issue out there, but I thought I would post my solution (which is just a variation of someone else's).

If you want to vertically align something in the middle of a browser window, the CSS can be a little challenging. I did it by putting the element to be aligned vertically into the page with a defined height, absolute position, and negative margins to compensate for half the height of the centered object. One article advised putting all of this within a relatively positioned element set to 100% height, but in my trials this was unnecessary. I am also centering horizontally here, partially using the same technique due to the fact that this elements is now absolutely positioned. Example.

Erasing the Past (do the 301)

2007-11-12T05:36:00.000-08:00

Sure, the digital landscape is littered with detritus. I think my original geocities website is still even floating out there, complete with Java applets, my resume, and a link to my thesis about Jazz Autobiography. And the world should really be spared all that - it is the kind of memorabilia posted with half baked intention that gives the internet a bad rap.

But at the same time as we've cultivated this "data neglect", mostly through underhwelming apathy, we've also become a culture of deleters. Perhaps it is sheer rage that allows us to delete emails we've never read, or perhaps it is simply a philosophy of good old pragmatism - when the shrubs are a little overgrown you trim them, but if they are wildly overgrown you take a machete to them.

That's the idea.

So is it any surprise that companies routinely skip the step of creating 301 redirects when creating a new website? I suggest it goes beyond lack of knowledge - most experienced web builders with a little Search Engine Optimization knowledge know about 301 redirects - I think it also belies this new change in attitude towards information. Digital bits themselves have little material value, and this is fostered by the overgrowth and instant repetition of content and ideas. This is a cookie cutter approach towards information and users that further cheapens things.

Creating a new website without creating 301 (permanent) redirects from the old content paths to the new paths is equivalent to throwing all the search engine equity you had down the drain. If that's not bad enough - assuming you at least remove the old site files, if you instead use a different kind of redirect, you may even be penalized (all engines on reverse).

Do the 301s.

Demise of the CD/DVD?

2007-10-09T07:58:00.000-07:00

Netflix has rolled out on-demand movies streamed to your home. It's only available in certain areas for now probably for bandwidth reasons. We've all seen this coming but it struck me that we are probably also seeing the beginning of the end to the CD/DVD format.

Formats come and go. VHS and Beta lasted a long time. We lived with 3.5" floppies for years and didn't bat an eye when they disappeared from PC's and laptops. We may now be seeing the end of the line for CD/DVD format. With the ubiquity of 4-8 gig USB thumb drives and now 200+ gig portable (USB) hard drives what's the point in burning CD's or DVD's?

For now the CD is the main format for playing your downloaded music (does anyone still buy CD's from a store?) in your car. That's beginning to change, too, as my Prius has an iPod connector. All you really need is a USB port on the dash and that CD changer in the trunk is toast.

DVD's still have a place for making and sharing home videos. I've had hours of fun editing water polo games so the girls could re-live the victories and learn from the losses. But an XBox can pull video files off your family server. How long before your cable box can do the same? Or, access YouTube directly? How about a USB connector to access the videos off your portable video hard drive?

Laptops and PC's already have the connector of choice, USB, ready to replace the bulky and slow CD/DVD drive. Maybe the next generation of laptop will use that real estate for more batteries or how about a retractable USB cord? I'd use it to sync my phone and copy podcasts. Or will Bluetooth make cords redundant, too?

Someday you'll be asked if you still have that old DVD player.

People on the forefront of Democracy

2007-09-20T13:31:00.000-07:00

This blog is about people. Nice, hardworking people who are literally behind the scenes of our democracy.

Last week OakTree kicked off the Alternate Format Ballot (AFB) generator application project by holding a JAD (joint application development) session with twenty election officials down in Salem. The AFB application project is funded by the Secretary of State’s Office as part of 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA).

The reason for the JAD sessions was to solicit county voter office representatives’ wisdom and feedback on how best to configure and deploy the AFB.

The AFB will be an HTML formatted ballot that will be used by blind or otherwise handicapped voters. It can be emailed to them or they will use pre-configured systems in the election offices. By using special browsers (JAWS, etc.) they will be able to vote on their own and in secret. We’ve been told Oregon will be leading the nation with the AFB.

The key in Oregon, it turns out, is the vote by mail “secrecy” envelop. Once the voter has printed the AFB they put it into the secrecy envelop and mail it in. Simple and straightforward.

What was impressive during our four hour JAD session was the people. These election officials deal with hundreds of details and variations in the ballot process, are keenly aware of election laws and are the glue that holds our election process together.

Their concern, knowledge, insights and humor made for a fascinating day. We owe them our thanks.

Paying Attention

2007-08-31T05:55:00.000-07:00

Last night I was reading to my son - in the bath, which is always an experience full of many distractions. I was reading a new book to him which had a clearly aquatic theme and seemed to consist mainly of showing various creatures and objects in an bogs, lakes, etc

I could tell that much without paying a lot of attention, and I was pretty sure I wasn't missing anything.

Anyway, we got to the end of the book and there was the line "Basically I think/Shells and stones and rocks and sand don't float because they sink".

"Aha!" I said to myself. "Look at the Baby Einstein Company - at it again with their tautological and vaguely Zen messages!".

Then I looked at the cover of the book. The title was "What Floats?" and every line in the book had been dedicated to describing what floats and what sinks. I had missed the entire message of the book, which was that to understand the concept of floating, you had to first understand the behaviour of very specific objects before moving on to understanding why these objects floated or not. The "What" is right there in the title.

So I guess what I take out of that is that sometimes we think we are more clever than we really are. Sometimes we get so absorbed in getting through something (this could be a project or a bath) that we don't pay attention, and miss the meaning of the moment.

Captive Thoughts from ASTD eLearning SIG

2007-07-17T08:55:00.000-07:00

Last evening, I attended the ASTD (Cascadia) eLearning SIG (special interest group), the topic of which was "What's New With Captivate." Over the last several years with my focus on eLearning, I have endured many a product walkthrough, and while almost all off-the-shelf products offer discreet features that are attractive, I've continued to come back to custom courseware for its overall design flexibility and interactivity. Most tools have limited interactivity and design options are limiting. But I must admit I was wooed by Adobe Captivate. This is the same Captivate that began as a competing product to Camtasia Studio, which is ostensibly a screen capture and product demo software package. That's what Captivate was as well--that is, until Adobe gobbled up Macromedia and said, hmmm, what are the best features of Captivate and Macromedia Breeze, and how can we build on these?

You won't be surprised that Captivate is well-integrated with Flash, and design tools within Captivate will be very familiar to the Flash designer. But one of the more interesting aspects of the product is its support for "branching," which effectively allows the instructional designer to build in a "choose your own adventure" effect to the course, letting the learner explore nodes and discover the correct path. The branching view in the product is similarly impressive and easily editable in this view:

Slick navigation controls can easily be created in Flash, and the ability to layer and tuck in interactive controls is seemingly endless. I was also impressed by the library feature, which is a handy way to organize all of the project assets...and in the event that images are reused, the file size only hits the project once. Likewise, the interactions view is a single page view of all the interactions in the course, points associated with the interactions, SCORM tracking requirements, etc.

There are multiple ways to view and edit content, but the storyboard view is one of the more valuable. In this view, all slides or screens are visible as thumbnails and can easily be reordered or exported for sharing with the client.

All of which brings me back to the developer's conundrum: when does it make sense to design a custom course and when should the developer embrace existing technology like this to do it cheaper and faster...and in some respects, better? It all comes back to the client objectives, right? But as course designers, we'd better know what's out there, and out there, Captivate is breaking away from the pack.

Resources:

Outlook 2007 and Email Campaigns - back to the dark ages...

2007-06-29T05:41:00.000-07:00

We were recently testing an email newsletter and realized that the layout wasn't coming through properly in Outlook 2007. "Huh", we said..."it looks fine in Outlook 2003". Well apparently in Redmond, 4 years doesn't always mean 4 years of forward progress. It turns out that Outlook 2007 has some notable differences in how it handles Cascading Stylesheets (CSS). Because of web based email clients like Hotmail, it has been our practice for a while now to put all styles inline; rather than creating style rules that live elsewhere on the page and are then accessed by HTML elements, all style information is instead applied directly to those elements. This is extremely redundant, however it gets the job done and ultimately still makes use of (many of) the benefits of CSS. Its a coding concession we are willing to make in the interests of consistency across multiple platforms and email readers.

However, Outlook 2007 downgrades the list of CSS attributes that are understood. For example, "float", which will push an elements to the left or right or other elements next to it, is no longer supported. Background images and related attributes are no longer supported, nor are attributes that enable us to manipulate the appearance of unordered and ordered lists.

In short, we as coders need to take a step back and start coding these communications much the way we coded HTML 5 years ago - which is ironically just before Outlook 2003 was released. We need to start writing code that, if it weren't for a good business reason, would be downright embarrassing and antiquated. Hey Microsoft - get with it (seriously though - looks like the CSS issues were a byproduct of using the MS Word rendering engine in Outlook 2007).

There are some excellent tabular summaries of the differences between various email clients over at Campaign Monitor. You can also find an explanation on why the change occurred here.

The Bottom Line
The net result of all of this, if you create email newsletters or if you have them created for you, is that this is an important new development, and all your existing email newsletter templates and code should be scrubbed and re-evaluated in light of these regressions.