Petit Bourgeois

Congrats to AQ for their new web site, it looks very good and seems to work quite well. Good job, people!

Does the computer know what you think? This little test claims to test the thoughts that lurk below your consciousness.

Go on, try it before I go on, I don't want to spoil the fun!

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Oh am I happy about this!! The French web hosting co-op Ouvaton has a new web site, based on a layout Paul and I had made a few months ago. I'm very glad it finally made it onto the web, along with the new platform (for which I've worked as well, but less decisively I must say).

The new layout takes up the general design we'd made, but has left out a couple of elements -- it's not perfectly stable visually yet, but it's a damn sight better than the previous site.

The new logo breaks away from a general layout (4 squares and a green-yellow-blue-red color scheme) shared by Microsoft Office and Lapeyre, among many others. Some have criticized it as meaningless, and I know it might seem a bit confused or buzzing -- I personally like it very much. While the expression "conveying the values of the organization" is better left to the press releases of more expensive creativity boutiques, I do feel that the rich legacy of Ouvaton is respected while at the same time bringing in a clean, elegant and appealing look.

The site follows a number of rules that I consider crucial on the web:

say it like it is

particularly important for a non-profit organization, avoid marketing speech and focus on fairly describing the products and services on offer, in clear, simple words: it's good for the visitor and for search engines

offer content on the home page

the top page should not be a collection of links, but should offer a synthetic view of what's on offer, essentially a one-page version of the entire site -- don't waste people's time by requiring them to click to get to actual content

serve all your constituencies

as a co-operative web hosting company, Ouvaton can identify several key groups of users: the general public, end users of services hosted on the platform, clients/co-owners of the company, more or less motivated by technology, more or less motivated by the politics; each of these groups has its own use for the site, and they should all be served appropriately

strong branding

apply the company's branding to all visual elements, ensuring that at a glance, visitors can identify the site and connect it mentally to the brand and what it tries to be

clear navigation

navigation is one way for web sites to make sense, to articulate different pieces of content and construct overall meaning -- it must be clear on each page, allowing the visitor to build a mental model of the information offered by the site, no matter where the visitor arrived on the site

standards compliance

follow applicable web standards for (in no particular order) markup lightness and the highest content-to-code ratio, better content and layout maintainability, optimal accessibility, forward compatibility with future browser versions, lateral compatibility across browsers (although that was a bitch with Paul's cool page layout), and the best possible impact on search engines

Congratulations to the implementers (who have plugged in my HTML into the SPIP content management engine) and have done a great job of it, and good luck for the future!!

I am reasonably proud of weathernews.co.uk, our consumer weather information service for the UK. Want to know the weather in London? The flash interface will present a pretty detailed forecast, with cool comments written in Australia. Oh don't shrug: the comments, along with rich content, make up the value and differentiation of the service, and engage visitors.

Also try the rain radar maps that show you whether it's going to be raining soon. Or just get the general UK weather forecast.

Hopefully, I'll be able to trumpet a few more achievements in the next few weeks!

Here's an interesting post: you'll be happy to know I've upgraded to the latest version of b2evolution, the blog engine that powers this site.

I've had little difficulty re-customizing the skin, but I had to hack the core to hide empty categories, and to tweak things a little bit to handle entirely clean URLs. Deprecating rendering plugins really sucks though: some of my old posts that were using Textile markup are no longer rendered appropriately... I guess there's no easy way around that but it's pretty annoying.

The new Ouvaton platform works perfectly with this software, and I was able to make even cleaner URLs than before.

Dominique Voynet, a former minister of Environment and Equipment, is standing for the leftist Green party's in the French presidential election coming up at the end of April. As I explained yesterday, I must confess my utter bafflement at her campaign site, as it seems to break an exceptionally high number of basic and seemingly well-accepted usability and content design guidelines.

The first impression is not unpleasant. The body background is white and the text is rather legible, no fault here. The main tone is green, with purple highlights. I suppose the fonts and color scheme are a question of taste, to be evaluated in the context of the campaign, where all of a sudden, 15 people start to market themselves as political brands and attempt to impact the general public with their message, over the course of just a few weeks.

However, past this first glance, problems begin to pile up.

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In 6 weeks, the French will vote for their new president. There's quite a stir going on on the web despite the horrid tone of the general campaign (interesting people have been drowned out in the populist brawl between the two main contenders until very recently, and then only the centrist candidate emerged, with the smaller leftist candidates still wobbly from the upset at the last elections).

My favorite candidate right now would be the Green Party's Dominique Voynet, but I almost went into cardiac arrest when I saw her site. Go on, be a tiger, check it out.

I'll try to post a full critique here, if possible in both French and English so it can be useful to someone around her (Alexis, are you reading this?). This is possibly the worst campaign site I've seen this decade, complete with mystery-meat navigation, useless explanations for elements that would have required useful ones, megabytes of pointless video that just take hours to download and have nothing to say, gimmicky bits that just take up pixels and distract the attention, funky names to structure the candidate's proposals, a main section that's still under construction, a video splash screen (believe it or not), and an accessible version of the site that does not use Flash, indeed, but images with image maps. (Oh, it does have a blog.)

An unbelievable festival that tastes like a bad joke. I hate myself for not reviewing the link Alexis sent me back when it was in test.

Another interesting point this year is the overwhelming presence of video on all sites (using Dailymotion or dedicated services). While it brings definite entertainment value and takes away some of the harder edge of the professional approach usually favored by politicians, it also brings definite entertainment value and takes away some of the cleaner edge of the professional approach usually appreciated in politicians. The amateurish feel can't completely cover the politicking, but it does manage to scramble some issues. Wait, maybe that's actually a way to cover the politicking, hehe.

Overall, the Ségolène Royal site is probably the most web-native, while remaining compatible with real-life campaigning and pushing the issues. François Bayrou's is pretty good as well, and looks like it made a very efficient use of limited resources. Sarko's efficiently emulates online the candidate's real-life frantic activity.

An aspect I find quite interesting and will try to highlight, is the continuity between the street and broadcast media campaign, and the web campaign -- not being in France I'll have to take guesses about some of this, but many key points are pretty obvious. Another aspect that deserves attention is the link between the site of the candidate and that of its party, when appropriate (i.e. in most cases).

Before I do that, I'll need the night to recover from the stun of Voynet's ludicrous revival of the 1990s (plus a few hours to get a new fan on my soon-to-be-former corporate computer).

Edit 27 March: Review of Voynet's site.

This is going to sound pretty obvious to most UI designers out here, but pull-down menus and page scrolling offer two confusingly different outcomes to the same "downward movement" interaction. I have observed that mixing them creates significant usability problems and should therefore be avoided.

To scroll down a page, you can:

• use the browser's scroller on the right of the window
• press the space key
• roll your mouse's scrollwheel
• press the down or page-down keys on your keyboard

However, the last two interaction methods are also available on scroll-down menus. When using one of those two methods and the page or a fixed element has focus, it's the page that will scroll. But if a pull-down menu has focus, then it is the menu's selected option that will change, while the page won't budge.

Imagine the situation of a form that features a pull-down menu, but is longer than one screen and requires scrolling to access the submit button. The user begins with setting the value of the pull-down menu, then wants to submit the form. For that, he tries to scroll with his scrollwheel, while the pull-down menu has focus. Chances are, the user will think "nothing happened", click again on the page to give it focus (a reflex behavior I've observed in many users of varying skill) or reach for the window's scrollers instead, scroll again, and submit the form with a value modified without his knowledge.

An interesting point: using the window's scrollers will not make the pull-down lose focus. So the element with focus can very well move out of the page area that's visible on the screen. Use the scrollers, then the keyboard, and you've changed something without a single pixel moving on the screen!!

Pretty bad, already, but it can get worse. It's considered bas usability to link pull-down menus with interaction (I seem to remember that this sensible rule comes from the Mac Usability Guidelines). Nonetheless, you sometimes will do so: for example to change a subscription form when the user selects another country, in order to dodge an equally-bad initial "which country are you from?" question, irrelevant for 95% of the users.

In that case, while the user is expecting to continue interacting with the page, it is actually changing under him, a most annoying behavior that will dramatically undermine the users' trust in your system.

My solutions: 1/ avoid mixing page scrolling and pull-down menus, 2/ avoid binding behaviors to pull-down menus, 3/ avoid pull-down menus altogether, if possible.

About point 3, it's to be noted that pull-down menus with very few elements can be advantageously replaced with radio buttons or links.

Notes from the Self TV congress at the HKU. [This was originally written for the internal blog I maintain at Weathernews. I hope to cover the HKU's next congress, Upload.]

Many of the speakers ignored the topic of TV to focus instead on blogging and user-submitted contents. It seems the technological difficulty is preventing "self TV" from really taking place, and instead we focus on lighter technologies. In fact, the lighter the better: consumers are not willing to submit to difficult processes to publish content.

Left-of-center, quality newspaper de Volkskrant set up a new system, where the web site is part of the operations of the whole newspaper. Both as output (some articles written by journalists are published only online) and as input, with the following pyramid model:

• the public as newsmaker (creating the news)
• experts as moderators (qualifying the news)
• redaction as filter (ensuring quality)

The autonomous publication model (where the redaction is responsible for creating content and does not take into account reactions from readers) remains relevant, even in a thoroughly web-aware context, for example in this attempt at re-inventing the editorial cartoon.

Local TV channel RTV Utrecht launched a citizen blogging platform experiment, with the intention of relying on "an unlimited number of journalists in the province", referring to the capacity of such a platform to potentially turn every citizen into a journalist.

With 15.000 page views a day, the blog aims at involving more of the 1.2 million inhabitants of the province in the agenda of the channel's news services. The ambition is to bridge the gaps between small groups of people who otherwise do not come in contact, even if they share the same geographical space.

In the day's perhaps most insightful moment, a representative from the national public-service TV channel VPRO asked "who will watch self-TV?" He insisted on the really special effect we're all working towards: regular people communicating with each other. The key, for him, is to support and encourage people's capacity to tell nice stories.

The VPRO's various online experiments, although not supported by advertisement money, did benefit dramatically from the channel's support in free advertisement and coverage.

His parting shot: "if everyone becomes an author, then art becomes a commodity."

Self-appointed new-media guru Peter Mechels asked the usual questions about reality and our digital existence. To which extent does digital life blur the boundary with reality? To which extent does digital life replace reality? Welcome to eternity was his slogan, claiming that new media allow people to exist forever.

In a more business-oriented conclusion, he stated that media marketing needed to "replace usual systems of massive broadcast advertising." Showing a Flash-intensive web ad for Opel that actually has a robot call your mobile phone while you're watching the animation, he insisted that cross-media was "intensive marketing, identity marketing."

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