Silberbauer Says:

Tuesday I managed to take a day out of a too busy schedule to go to the NN/g event in London with two of my colleagues from Creuna. On the Tuesday agenda was a tutorial on eye tracking, a tutorial on newsletter usability and Hoa Loranger‘s tutorial on corporate sites. I attended the latter.

Now, Loranger is an excellent presenter and what I like about the NN/g is that all statements are very well grounded in thorough research. That said, this tutorial was clearly targeted inhouse web masters in medium or larger corporations and not IA professionals or consultants. In other words, to me it was very basic indeed. That’s not Ms. Loranger’s fault – I should have picked another tutorial. Anyway, it’s always nice to get a brush up on the basics and Hoa Loranger is definitely more fun – and certainly better looking – than Nielsen himself.

My colleagues tell me that the eye tracking and newsletter tutorials were better, though.

We stayed at the Victoria Park Plaza which is nice but over priced. When paying £198 a night for a single, standard room I don’t expect to be charged £16,50 for a slow wireless connection and to pay extra for breakfast. The hotel business must learn that internet connection (wifi or otherwise) is considered no more a luxury than running water or electric light. It should be free and easy to use, expecially in expensive hotels.

Ok, and now to the important stuff:

• Roka (37 Charlotte Street) serves very nice Japanese food. The tempura tuna rolls were incredibly yummy and the duck… gnarf!
• When you wait for your table, go downstairs to the Shochu Lounge which makes excellent cocktails and long drinks. I had Mojito and the whole place smelled of fresh mint.
• While waiting for your (again incredibly) delayed SAS flight, the Caviar House & Prunier at Heathrow has some very nice Balik salmon.

UPDATE: Jacob has commented on the eye tracking seminar here

So guys, You’re ready to launch your new fantastic ubiquitous cross-media cutting-edge Web 3.0 software solution which, without any doubt, will bring you instant succes, fame and fortune.
All there’s left to do, is to launch a major marketing campaign in the Big Apple. If you can make it here, you can make it everywhere.. remember??

Here are the numbers:

The “Noobie” Campaign (no guarantee of instant succes, fame and fortune)
- Starbucks coffee sleeves: estimated 12 to 14 cents each.
- Street hawking with megaphones: $36 per hour.
- Ads on urinals and on the back of stall doors: $100 to $125.

The Medium Campaign (no guarantee of succes, but you will have a lot of fun)
- Airplanes: $8,500 per flight for skywriting; $1,000 per flight for flying a banner.
- Spotlight or projection on a building: $4,500 and up per night.
- Mobile billboard trucks: $5,000 per 50-hour week.

The “Big Spender” Campaign (guarantee of some buzz)
- Digital subway-entrance ads: $274,000 for six ten-second spots every minute on each of New York’s 80 digital displays.
- New York Marathon naming rights: About $2-3 million per year.
- Naming rights to the new Jets-Giants stadium: at least a $12 million onetime cost.

What are you waiting for? Go for it! (and remember to invite me to the big opening at the New Stadium).

Read the full article by Brooke Kosofsky Glassberg

I tried signing up for Adwords to check out the new Google Analytics using Firefox (as always). I was somewhat surprised to find that Google has chosen not to support Firefox in the Sign Up flow. The wizard simply breaks – the “Next button” on the Set Up Account page just doesn’t show. I had to start over in IE to complete my sign up.

So, I wanted to send a notice to Google nicely asking if they’ve struck a deal with Bill Gates to support IE only – but guess what: In Firefox the submit button on the contact form doesn’t show!

I know that Google’s stuff are mostly free and in beta only. But this perpetual beta nonsense has gone to far if Google’s frontend programmers feel that they need not test in Firefox.

UPDATE

Got a nice answer from Google. They cannot replicate the error. Guess it comes down to some strange flaw in that particular version of FF.

I’m featured

Cologne Bonn Airport’s tagline is “So Simple”. Its web site is anything but. The extreme abuse of icons and the total absence of photos and decent labelling makes the site a nightmare to use. This is reeaal bad communication.

Example: This icon means “Flights Today” when on the frontpage, but on the page Transport Info it means Aviation Businesses. When you move your mouse over it it turns into a house…?

Have a look at Transport Info yourself and try to guess what the icons mean. Now move your mouse over the icons (annoying dhtml popups aren’t they?) Do the icons make sense? Absolutely not. It’s like the designer ran out of clipart on the frontpage and simply decided to use the same icons over and over again.Furthermore, none of the icons are explained by text labels making the whole site a guessing game. And why on earth does the plane turn into a house on mouseover?

This means “Baggage Retrieval”, right? No – on the Transport Info page this means “Late Night Check In”, but on the frontpage the Late Night Check In icon is a crescent moon.

How about this “menu” – So simple, is it?

Stupid icons combined into retro-hieroglyphs: Car + Key = Rental Car. Car + house = Road Routes … ? God. Someone get an ancient Egyptian to translate.

I see three lessons to be learned from this site:

1. Kill your darlings. The retro-icons-galore idea might have seemed nice at the start but it doesn’t stand the distance.
2. Icons need text labels.
3. A website needs to connect to reality somehow. Photos of places and human beings do that. This particular website is about an airport – the airport is the product. Show us the freakin’ airport then, don’t hide it behind icons.

Thursday I went to Oslo to give a short talk on e-commerce at Creuna Norway’s brunch seminar at the SAS Radisson Scandinavia Hotel. Great event featuring the true Gentleman of Statistics, Edward O’Hara from JupiterResearch, and several of my colleagues from Creuna Norway. And with 22°C and blue skies it was a real nice day in Oslo.

Anyway, what I wanted to tell is that the “Flytoget” – the (cool looking) rapid train from Oslo Central Station to Gardermoen Airport – has launched a new and really user friendly e-ticket system: Swipe your credit card through a reader and board the train. That’s all: No buttons to press, no ticket to wait for – just one swipe. Later you may download your receipt from the web.

It’s so simple that I almost doubted it would work – but it did. When you exit the train – swipe again to check out from the station. I love such simplicity. It’s not like the stupidly designed ticket machines in the Copenhagen Metro – but I’ll bitch about them some other time.

Tomorrow is a special day for me (Lars Silberbauer) and my colleagues in Corporate Communications at DR.
Because tomorrow we’re leaving our present HQ (Also described as a “maximum security prison” by some Dutch visitors) and we’re moving into our new HQ.
I don’t like the corporate punch line: “The New Multimedia Powerhouse” – sounds to me like the promotion of a new pinball machine, but anyway I think it’s gonna be awesome.

This is the “Maximum security prison” we’re leaving.

And this is our new HQ (“the New Multimedia Pinball Powerhouse Machine”). As one might notice – even the weather is better at our new place .

Check out the impressive specs, the live webcam and a lot more on DR’s website: http://www.dr.dk/drbyen/english/

Apparently Microsoft doesn’t own a lot of bandwidth or else they’re really careful about how they spend it. The Mix06 presentations are online (and some are actually quite good), but next time Microsoft shouldn’t be so cheap on the bandwidth.
And a little free piece of advice to Microsoft: If your download speed and streaming servers suck, then you shouldn’t place the “Hosted by Microsoft” logo everywhere on the site

If you have a lot of patience, then enjoy the presentations here.

The last few months I’ve been working on a wireframe prototype on a pretty complex webshop for a large international corporation. It’s about 200 or so screens. The first 2 major iterations were done in various versions 3.something of AxureRP Pro. As the prototype grew large, AxureRP 3 wasn’t up for it.

We’ve reached 3rd iteration and now I’m doing all 200 screens all over again in v 4.0.3, and I’ts a thrill.

These are some of the major improvements in v4.:

1. You can now duplicate pages or entire branches. And If you duplicate a branch all internal links in that branch are updated to match the new branch. Great for doing different versions of the same flow.
2. Organize your templates and references. Template and references (which are now the same thing and called Masters) can be organized in folders.
3. Masters can be nested and layered. Yes! Nesting in nesting in nesting And you can apply several masters to the same page. You can now do a master with your basic grid, sub masters with left or right nav, with or without top nav etc.
4. DHTML emulation. It’s not AJAX, but you can do some AJAX-like stuff if you’re creative.
5. Much Better HTML rendering

…and so on. AxureRP is the best software thing that’s happened to the interaction designer in a very long time.

I’d love to see some of this in V.5:

• List-view. To quickly add some page items before starting to design.
• Site mapping and flow charting.
  
• Multiple versions of the same page. Some way to do several versions of one page.
• Global Variables. Some way to send values between pages to emulate “logged in” and “non logged in scenarios”.
• Placeholders in masters. A way to do placeholders in masters so that when I moved a placeholder in the master, the element placed in the placeholder on the pages that were generated from that master would move to. A bit like Dreamweavers editable fields.
• More generators. E.g. a generator that lets me do a Word doc with all specifications overlayed on the screen shot instead of placed in a table below the screenshot. Or HTML-version with alpha-blended spcifications. You know: Make it look good
• MouseOver and MouseOut on all types of widgets
• Automation of the navigation. Emulating a functioning navigational system is still hard work. Some sort of navigation generator would be nice.
• If / Then / Else-scripting of some sort. “IF this radiobutton is selected THEN this button should send the user to Page A ELSE send him to Page B.

If you are an IA or ID and using Visio or (God help you) Powerpoint for prototyping, try the 30 days trial of AxureRP Pro.

What a cool title for a great album. Elvis Costello and The Metropole Orkest. Grab it now if you like Elvis.

The BBC has launched a new site to help the ignorant masses use RSS (BBC Feed Factory).
That’s great – nice work guys, but are your graphic designers and information architect on crack?
What have you done with the icons and your labeling?
I won’t comment on the graphics, you’ve probably been forced by a branding guide, but it is obvious that you don’t practice the ancient art of labeling. You’ve made a category called “Talk and Interact” and one called “Knowledge”. How can that describe a collection of RSS feeds???
Please, come on guys – you can do better than that!
If you want to help people find RSS feeds, make a labeling that makes sense!