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A New Year and a New Look
aesthetics, announcements, internet
January 01, 2004, 01:11 AM
The witching hour has come and gone and the year 2004 is now upon us. In this spirit of newness, I've been working on a new design for roBlog as well as the rest of this site, which I'm calling "Heimdall" (the name of the current design is "Odin", in case I never mentioned that). These changes will (hopefully) include:
- More useful categories
- Monthly and comprehensive archives
- The "looking forward / looking behind" feature I mentioned a long time ago
- Proper print versions of every page
- Numerous usability-related tweaks
The information architecture of the site shouldn't change much, but I have come up with a proposed new visual design template for the site. Note that this sketch is intended to give a sense of the visuals only, and thus I've left out some page elements like some of the sidebars and the comments sections. In the interests of participatory design, I humbly submit this sketch to you, dear readers, for comments and criticism. If you love it, hate it, or have thoughts on how it could be better, please leave a comment below or send me an email.
Heimdall, I should note, was the Norse god who slew (and was slain by) Loki at Ragnarok, the end of the world. In hopes that it won't spell the end of me, I'm making a New Year's Resolution to complete this project by this time next year at the very latest (and hopefully soon before); a feat which is far from certain since I'm at least as bad as Kevin at completing all the projects that I undertake.
Email Rob:
An Obsession with Measurement
processes & methodologies
December 30, 2003, 12:33 AM
A policeman on the early morning beat sees a man, obviously drunk, standing under a street lamp and casting about on the ground as if he was looking for something. He parks his cruiser and asks the man "You there! What are you doing?"
"Looking for my keys, ocifer," slurs the drunk. "I lost them and I can't find them."
"I see. And you're certain you lost them under this street lamp?" the officer replies.
"Oh no, sir, I lost them over in that alley. But the light's better over here."
You've likely heard some version of this story before; it's an old one. The joke, of course, lies in the drunk's absurd belief that the better light will somehow help him find his keys. But its not always uncommon for beliefs like this one to get embedded into accepted practice, until no one realizes how absurd they are.
Tom DiMarco once said, "You can't manage if you can't measure." And without a doubt quantifiable measurements are invaluable tools; they provide objective proofs of progress and success, as well as early warning of impending failure. Processes that are founded on measurable objectives are almost always more efficient and effective than processes that are not. In a society founded on scientific values, it's unsurprising that measurability is often insisted upon by many managers.
The problem is that many valid and important objectives may be inherently difficult to measure. "Provide an excellent user experience" is one such objective, so is "improve programmer productivity", "increase the sense of community of our website", and "improve employee morale", for example. Yet rather than leave these important issues to softer evidence, often people will try to graft numbers onto the objective (efforts in software metrics, starting with counting lines of code, come to mind) or will just ignore the objective outright (especially if their incentives favor maximizing the quantifiable objectives). But now we're starting to look like that drunk under the street lamp; we're carefully measuring the wrong thing, just because we figure that somehow measuring something will be better than having no measurement at all.
That isn't necessarily the case. A programmer whose pay depends on how many lines of code he cranks out will write sloppy, inefficient, overly verbose code just to crank up the line count. A UI designer who will be fired if his interface doesn't start "passing" more in-lab usability tests will inevitably design for the novice users in the lab, probably at the expense of any other usability objectives. These examples of "metrics that miss" can be more of a curse than a cure for the project as a whole.
What's perhaps most frightening about all this is that any objectives that have to do with values or ethics are frequently notoriously unmeasurable. And they might be the ones that are most unsafe to ignore.
So what's the solution to all this? Only to think carefully about what exactly your metrics are measuring, and to not be afraid of techniques that yield softer evidence when quantifiable metrics just won't do. A quote attributed to Albert Einstein goes "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." Better light won't help you if you're looking in the wrong place.
Email Rob:
Quality
philosophy
December 28, 2003, 01:57 AM
And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good—
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
I finally completed reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", an amazing novel both for its compelling story and its intriguing philosophy. It is also a difficult work, at least if you take the intellectual framework Pirsig proposes seriously. I'm still puzzling out his concept of "Quality".
Quality lies at the very heart of the philosophy described in ZAMM, yet Pirsig refuses to define it. He suggests that it is similar to the Tao (the Way) of the Chinese, the areté (excellence) of the ancient Greeks, and the dharma (duty to oneself) of the Hindu. He further insists that Quality is the source of all that is; that it sits at the top of The Ontology and thus comes before any notions of form or structure, before the subject/object dualism that has formed the basis of modern thought ever since Plato, before even the concept of truth itself. But what is it?
Pirsig claims that Quality needs no definition because we know it when we see it. That anyone can tell a good piece of work from a bad piece of work simply through intuition. Yet this is at odds with my understanding of the Good, developed through theory and experience. When designing and building software, for instance, the question often comes up as to whether a particular software product is any good, but to the wise developer this is a meaningless question. The proper followup question is "good to whom and for what purpose?"
That branch of philosophy known as esthetics contains theories that support the claim that the purpose, or use, to which a product is put defines its quality. A bread knife is good for cutting bread but bad at opening jars (at least when compared to certain alternatives). Human-centered design philosophies take this one step further and ask who the user of the product is and what his goals are. Only then can the proper purposes be determined.
But if we must rely on the user, the human who applies the object whose quality is in question, then whose idea of the good is authoritative? Despite Pirsig's assertions, there is obviously a great deal of variation in opinion about Quality in pretty much every field. People's opinions very widely on whether Word is a good piece of software or not, even for the same tasks.
The usual question to ask at this point would be: is the perception of Quality relative to the perceiver or is it an absolute fact about the universe about which individuals can be right or wrong, but that their beliefs cannot change. In other words, is Quality subjective or objective? But Pirsig calls this a false dilemma. Remember, to him the subject-object dualism is illusory. Quality precedes it, and therefore cannot lie in either subject or object. Instead, he claims Quality is in the relationship of the subject to the object. But what does this mean?
I begin to think that the question of "good for what purpose" (dare I say "good for what interaction?") runs deeper than I originally thought. Is this getting at the elusive "relationship"? To use something is, after all, in the broadest sense, to form a relationship with it. But purposes, uses, themselves have Quality. This is the entire concern of the field of philosophy known as ethics. If use is related to Quality, then that relatedness is not clear.
I have a sense that these concepts of Quality and use are connected somehow, and that the entire structure is much more connected to my own field of human-centered design than it initially appeared. But I cannot see the connection. Not clearly. Not now. For now I wait for more information or insights, whenever that may come.
Email Rob:
Posted by Rob on January 02, 2004 at 12:50 AM
Today's Diesel Sweeties struck me as amusingly relevant.
Posted by Dave on January 02, 2004 at 09:41 PM
Oooooo....roundy-corner-type-dealies
Posted by Dan on January 05, 2004 at 10:53 AM
A few comments...from a man with a fairly ugly site himself. :)
I'm not sure the color palette works very well. The blue and green really clash. The top navigation links disappear. Plus, the colored bars overwhelm the page: your eye is drawn to them and not to what we're really interested in: the text of the entry.
I suggest you stick with the blue, personally, and make the top nav that blue and the side nav a lighter blue (#8AA8E6 perhaps).
I don't think you need two "previous week" bars. The one at the bottom probably would suffice.
How about moving the green bar to the very top of the page and moving the breadcrumbs below it? Breadcrumbs are awful big, btw.
I'd watch out from using those lines, too. They add a lot of unnecessary noise.
/time elapses...
Oh hell, I just did a quickie mock-up for you of what I'm talking about (with the exception of changing the color palette).
Check it: http://www.odannyboy.com/images/HeimdallDesign_ds.jpg
My rate is $75/hour. :)
Dan
Posted by Rob on January 05, 2004 at 09:22 PM
I uploaded a revised mockup that takes Dan's comments and others I've received into account. Right now I'm mostly working to get some css-ified Movable Type templates put together so that I can tweak the real thing.
Any further comments are still much appreciated, though. And Dan, your check is in the mail ;).