Confusability

Happy New Year - Usability Caption Competition

Gabriel, Chris (and Heather) McEvoy wish you all a fantastic new year and Gabriel thought it might be a good idea to see if anyone can come up with a good caption for this photo of me and Gabriel (he's the cute 18 month old baby on the left).

There may even be a prize for the best usability related caption.

egoSurf has arrived

Jason has been busy over Christmas.

egoSurf is born. Look what a few idle hours over Christmas can do. A total of 9 hours R&D, design, and coding… we’re here.

egoSurf helps massage web publishers ego, and thereby maintain the cool equilibrium of the net itself.

We, the publishers of this here internet thing, need the occasional massage. We aren’t paid. We aren’t recognised. Our sites hit count used to be enough to massage our egos, but no longer. We need to be no 1. In Google.

There is an egoSurf blog, a FAQ and the egoSurf application itself.

My egoSurf stats are 5265 points on google, 3862 on yahoo and 3821 on msn.

Go on, search for yourself, you know you want to.

Tales from a Christmas Pedant

It's very gratifying to end the year by being quoted in a national newspaper:

Invigorated by McEvoy's pedantry, I thought I would take a look at the lyrics of some Christmas classics, starting with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer - did he really have such a shiny nose?

Simon Singh - Daily Telegraph 20 Dec 2005

A pedant is a person who is a formalist or precisionist in teaching or scholarship. The term comes from the Latin paedagogare, "to teach", derived from Greek terms for "child" and "to lead". The term is typically used in a negative connotation, indicating someone overly concerned with minutia and detail.

Wikipedia definition of Pedant

Hurricane Ajax - The Aftermath

As I write this http://usabilityviews.com/ajaxsucks.html is at number 4 on the del.icio.us popular page. This is my most successful "net event" yet.

Donna Maurer was the first person to read the article and notice that is was a spoof. (Well done Donna).

Here are a selection of comments about the articles that have been posted since it was published two hours ago. I promise that all of these comments are real and I haven't changed any of them. I would encourage you to visit the linked sites to read more of the comments.

I just hope that Jakob sees the funny side and doesn't get too upset.

Posted on DonnaM

"Shortly, I'm sure Jakob will say that 99% of all Ajax sucks; and we'll be doomed to an interaction-poor internet and a huge round of stupid arguments for a couple of years".

Posted on Ajaxian

Web usability pioneer Jakob Nielsen gives Ajax a big fat thumbs-down in his latest Alertbox, though is a little more optimistic than his previous "Just Say No" stance (in the sense of improving from an "F-" to an "F"). An article like this deserves an extended response...

Posted on digg

Good article from a very well respected usability expert. This should at least be considered

You silly people. Scroll to the bottom of the article and READ. :)

I'm sick of people saying Ajax sucks because it broke the back button. The internet is still in such early stages of development that maybe the back button is on it's way out.

11% using mobile browser?! Yea right! This artical no longer has any credibility since they are going to just throw out random number like that. This is stupid

Posted on Web Coder Plus

I stumbled across a link at digg.com to a page that looked like it was the latest Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox. Titled, Why Ajax Sucks (Most of the Time), I read it and was completely unaware that is was a spoof until I got to the following section...

Posted on del.icio.us

interesting read. And an endorsement of all-lower-case "ajax"?

"When It's OK to Use Ajax - If you are working in a Web2.0 company that needs to provide evidence of their technical expertise in order to gain new clients." Pretty brilliant spoof.

Very persuasive philosophical argument against using ajax

He used the Web 2.0 business idea generator at the end, didn't he? That cheeky bastard.

Alles lezen tot het einde anders mis je het hele verhaal. Een hoop redenen waarom je Ajax voorzichting moet behandelen en waarom niet zomaar op de high-tech trein te springen.

Search and replace "Ajax" with "frames" and it's like an article Jakob wrote years back.

Looks like quite a few of you didn't, y'know, bother to read to the end of this article or realise it was a spoof. IT IS NOT BY JAKOB NIELSEN. Jesus Wept. The del.icio.us Horde: the Slashdot Horde for the 21st century.

Interesting to hear from a longtime vet on a hot trend

A "spoof" with a point. I'm not a huge fan of this kind of sweeping statement, but there are some good points in here. As with most everything "Web" -- it depends on the project, etc.

As Donna M predicted, Jakob Neilsen lashes out at AJAX in his latest AlertBox post. To some degree though, he has a very good point. Poor AJAX implementation will cause more harm than good and breaking the widely-accepted page model challenges users.

Posted on Manish Jethani

In this month's Alertbox, Jakob Nielsen offers a second opinion on Ajax.

The fundamental problems with Ajax that Nielsen is referring to are exactly the ones I had mentioned on my blog in May. Since that post, Backbase has added bookmarking support to their website (and I presume their framework).

Posted on Slashdot

Ajax on my CMS admin interface is good. Ajax on my site's homepage is not neccessary. Lets not confuse what Ajax is with how people use it

If sites DON'T implement Ajax, engines will have NO REASON to support Ajax navigation. /Wasn't worth my time, but I'm REALLY sick of seeing these pointless Ajax bashing articles/posts.

Flash is not an acronym.

It's not that the page itself is supposed to be atomic, but that the identifier used to refer to it is. There is a distinction between the two.

It speaks for itself, but it doesn't say anything coherent

Isnt this the EXACT same reason we are told not to use frames?

I've been reading Jakob's blog for years. He's one of those 50-50 guys. Half of what he says is dead on, and the other half is complete crap. I got a real chuckle at the end of this article when I saw: "Next month: Micropayments will take off in 2006."

So the article is a spoof -- knew I'd read all that already somewhere -- but I say it's illegitimate : comparing AJAX to frames is most insulting in the most unjustifiable way.

Ajax is a methodology.

Well, I'm with the author. However, I think the back button thing and non working bookmarks are intentional, by design.

I think that the author has mistakenly correlated frames and AJAX. Application state and browser state can be separate and usable.

Despite the fact that this is a spoof article, it's still a good opportunity to discuss the accessibility issues

You know, a lot of people will read this and not understand that it's a joke. If five years from now, the general population thinks that it is a MS technology, we'll know where it started!

The author has clear gripes with the misuse of AJAX, but his claim that it should be banished to "Web2.0" companies and kept in permanent beta, never to be fed after midnight is a bit harsh for a technology that does one thing and does it well.

I was interested in reading the article until I found out it was by Jakob Nielsen.

Should have read the WHOLE article before clicking "submit". :) Still, spoof or not, makes valid points :)

I read the article and I am not impressed. The complaints are mostly trivial or nonexistent with proper coding and design.

Funny you should say that, since the article basically took a real Jakob Nielson article and replaced the word "frames" with "AJAX."

Posted on Web2.0 Blog

What amazes me most is that the post is actually largely relevant as can be seen by the fact that Michael Mahemoff was completely taken in by it in his original post over on Ajaxian.com. His post has now been updated to indicate that Jakob’s post was a spoof. Michael does a pretty good job of rebutting Jakob’s spoof claims and defending Ajax, which for Ajax developers is a good thing, but it does highlight the fact that web developers do need to be careful. The issues of browser support, unique URLs, searching and printing are very real and need to be considered by the Ajax developer.

Ajax and Frames - Can you spot the difference?

This latest Alertbox article "Why Ajax Sucks (Most of the time)" is quite predictable, but I thought that it looked a bit familiar.

It looks remarkably similar to a similar Alertbox article published in 1996 called "Why Frames Suck".

Perhaps there really is "nothing new under the sun".

Add billb@microsoft.com to your contacts list

Bill Buxton has joined Microsoft Reaearch.

It is with more than a little excitement that I want to announce that as of Dec. 5, I will be assuming the position of Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research. For someone with my background, this is a great opportunity, as well as a healthy challenge. The opportunity is to be in the best position imaginable to leverage 30+ years of accumulated work. As someone who has always been driven by making a positive difference in how people experience technology, what more could I ask for? It is also an opportunity to work with some of the best researchers in the world, both inside and outside of Microsoft, to continue making a difference.

The challenge is obviously one of transforming this potential into a reality.

billbuxton.com

Bill attended the Horizon Design Summit last year that was co-sponsored by Co-Sponsored by IDSA and Microsoft. I hope that he can help re-dress the balance between technology and people at Microsoft Research by ensuring that more focus is given to the human aspects of the technology we create.

Good Luck Bill

Ajax is a Flash in the pan

Spot the similarity?*

The use of Ajax in Windows Live is what makes the user experience so appalling.

Search for "usability"

click on the first result to view the page

click the back button to return to the search results

And lose all of your search results. If Microsoft think that this nightmare of an experience is their path to future success then they need to start talking to their own usability people rather than swallowing too much Web 2.0 hype.

*They both break your back button.

Ajax Mistakes : Breaking the back button (May 2005)

Flash Usability : (Digital Web - January 2002)

Top-10 New Mistakes of Web Design (Alertbox - May 1999) : 1. Breaking the Back Button

Christmas Tradition

Leslie Harpold has published her traditional online advent calendar for 2005.

See also Advent 2004, 2003, 2002 and 2001.