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Usability in print media

In the article Why Usability Matters, Monica Moses looks at how usability (and info architecture) principles can be applied to print journalism.

“Text is the hardest format we give readers. It is potentially the most precise — and perhaps even the most satisfying. But reading text is essentially unnatural. Nobody is born knowing how. Even when we get good at it, reading text requires letter-by-letter, word-by-word translation by the brain. It’s work.”

It’s all pretty obvious stuff, like splitting up text into easily scannable lists, but I couldn’t help but wonder where this might lead if taken to extremes…. The latest Stephen King 600-pager reduced to a 4-page summary of bullet points and plot graphs? 😉

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The regulated European Web

In a fascinating essay (titled “I’m So Bored with the USA” on his own site, but “Damn the Constitution: Europe must take back the Web” at The Register, Bill Thompson paints an attractive picture of how a regulated web could be a really good thing.

“The first [belief] is the idea that the Internet is somehow outside or above the real world and its national boundaries. If I phone someone in Nigeria and suggest a money-laundering fraud then it is obvious to all that I am breaking the law in two countries, not in ‘phonespace’. Nobody has ever suggested that the content of the telephone network -all those voice calls -should be somehow privileged and treated as outside the normal world.”

Once you legally establish that “cyberspace” is actually firmly rooted in the physical world, and can be mapped within conventional national boundaries, all sorts of things become possible. Not least of which is the application of European social democratic laws instead of American free-trade (so long as we control it) libertarianism.

(I’ve been reading Will Hutton’s book The Stakeholding Society lately, and his ideas fit nicely alongside Thompson’s thesis. I’ve never really read much politics or economic before, but this book is making me regret that gap in my knowledge. I’ll have to write more about this some other time…)

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Notes to self

Must do:

  • Change the Movable Type templates for this site, or at least for my own blog, so that they do proper XHTML.
  • Change the editing setup so that I don’t have to wrap <p> tags around paragraphs (i.e., make “Convert line breaks” the default), then go back and edit all my old entries to remove all the then redundant <p> tags.
  • For years I’d been working under the misapprehension that <a> hyperlinks have an “alt” attribute to go with them. Nuh-uh. Should be using the “title” attribute instead. Again, go back and re-edit the entries.
  • Also in the context of changing the site templates, allow comments. Which is probably going to mean turning on individual archiving for my entries here. (So far, everything’s just archived on a monthly basis.)
  • We changed the directory structure of our image store on Sunpig a while back, but (naughty me) I didn’t set up redirects from the old image locations to the new ones. I should do that, because we’re still getting hits (or rather, misses) on the old image files. Also, I should edit all my old entries to point to the new images.
  • I think that maybe I should just make a list of all the changes I need to make to the old entries, and edit them all once rather than trawling through them several times.
  • Need to add some entries for the last couple of weeks (weekend trip away–Plumed Horse!–Minidisc player–redundancies at work, etc.).
  • And, of course, upload some more photos of Alex!
  • And perhaps change the stylesheet for this page… It could use a little sprucing up.
  • Gotta finish copying over my reviews from Dooyoo to here. Maybe write a few new ones while I’m at it.
  • Bring my “recommended reading” list up-to-date. So many links, so little space…

Oh, and most important of all: write more. Write, write, write. Write for here, write for elsewhere. I need to get these fingers working for me again.