PigPog

Air Force PreggoRobo Guard Bots: “Bless the maker, I think this Air Force patrol robot is giving birth to a smaller, tracked robot. Oh, it is!”

Cute. Deadly, but cute. Just like Sweeney.

Boing Boing: Rent-a-puppy: “About $15 will get you an hour of canine bonding”

Just $15 for an hour of dog. Arf.

Pacific Beach, June 14, 2004: “When I returned, to my dismay, someone had taken my parking spot.”

For once, something to be glad of. Lots of piccies, but it makes an impressive story.

Thanks to Metafilter.

Learning from Jakob Nielsen, and improving the usability of the PigPog web site – adding summary sections and clarifying links.

Introduction

I’ve been reading through the old Alertbox columns from Jakob Nielsen’s excellent UseIt web site recently, and trying to apply some of his ideas to PigPog. Jakob is a usability expert, and through his site, passes on a lot of really good, practical advice on how users interact with web sites.

Writing for the web is quite different for writing for print, and Jakob is one of the few people who has really studied this, and is good at applying his own ideas – making his columns very readable. I wanted to try to apply some of the ideas I’ve learned from him to PigPog, hoping to make it a bit easier to use, as there were a few problems with the site as it stood.

Problems

No clear statement of what the site is

Starting from the front page, there was nothing to actually say what the site contained. The About page wasn’t really much better – offering some insight into the name, but not a lot else.

Most writing was ‘upside down’

Most of the writing on PigPog (certainly mine) followed the standard pyramid model – starting with background, filling in details, suggesting ideas, leading to solution. OK, so not many articles followed that as such, but my writing started at the beginning and lead to an end. On the web, no-one will get to the end. They’ll skip to somewhere else if you don’t get to the point quickly.

Links in the Blogs were unclear

If you clicked the title of an article on the front page, you jumped to the permalink for the article – a page with just that article. The title on that page was a link to – the same page. After that, a reader could go in a clicking loop and never find the link to the actual page the article was about.

Solutions

No clear statement of what the site is

The top of the content section of the front page now contains a statement highlighted in green, which clearly states what the site contains, without dressing it up in marketing speak.

The About page hasn’t really been changed much – it doesn’t really take long to explain what PigPog contains, once I stopped trying to make it sound ‘cool’ or ‘enticing’ and just said it. "Writing and photography by Sam Harris and Michael Randall." Job done.

Most writing was ‘upside down’

Jakob suggests the ‘Inverse Pyramid’ style – start with the conclusion, expand on it a little, then work on the background from there. If someone doesn’t understand why to read the article from the first couple of sentences, they won’t bother.

This would be a difficult one to go back and change, and is really something we need to learn as a writing style. I first attempted it in my recent article on Internet Explorer’s security problems, but it still needs work – I can tell that this article isn’t going in the right direction, but I’ll try to get better…

To try to encourage this style a bit more, and to make an easy way to improve older pages quickly, I’ve created a new style called ‘summary’, which can easily be applied to the first paragraph of any page or article, which I’ll attempt to begin all new pages and articles with – it’s the same green text and green dotted left border as the introductory sentence on the front page. Each page or long-ish article should now begin with this little green summary section to explain what follows.

Links in the Blogs were unclear

I’ve tried a bit of a quick fix here, that I hope will make things more clear. The title of an article stops being a link on the page with just that article on it. So a user can click the title to get to the page for that article, but on the resulting page, the same title is no longer a link. It should then be fairly easy to spot the blue linked word ‘Link:’ next to the title, or the link in the article, rather than going around in circles clicking the title.

Conclusions

Hopefully, these changes will make PigPog an easier site to use – which can only be a good thing. People who get lost in a site will probably never return. Remember Jakob’s Law – your users spend most of their time on other web sites.

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Now he’s in trouble, and he’s been ordered to remove the clean patches.

Sellotape Copyright Information Page: “Hyperlinking to this site, is not permitted without the express prior permission of Sellotape.”

Whoopsie!

Future Shack: An Australian Architect’s (Sean Godsell) solution to housing for refugees and the homeless – A house constructed from a recycled shipping container outfitted with a minimum of industrial materials, and maintained by solar power, the Future Shack can easily be created within 24 hours.

Nice design, and a great idea.

undercity: “The primary content of this site is photography of underground or unknown sites in New York. There are also some Stories and Research about various facets of history and adventure in New York.”

Some interesting photos – worth a bit of a browse.

Via Metafilter.

Weird Foods from around the World: “Nearly every culture invents a food that is weird or disgusting to outsiders. These are cultural markers that show who’s a member (they like it) and who’s not a member (they gag.) Maybe a group of kids started eating it on a dare and at some point, everyone in the community accepts it. They then perpetuate it (perpetrate it) on the next generation. Then they nudge each other and laugh when foreigners gasp.”

There’s people out there eating spiders. Ew.

Via Metafilter.

cancergiggles.blog-city.com: “Radio and Chemo was a breeze as already discussed. A bit inconvenient because they refused to replace the bottle of 5FU (chemo) with malt whisky on my occasional days off but there’s more than one way to skin a cat.”