Start with a Glossary

Often when starting a new project in web development participants gain a lot of proprietary knowledge about a new subject, and distribute this knowledge inefficiently.

It has been my experience that when starting a new project, it may benefit the team to start building a glossary. Many companies have their own proprietary language they use internally and this language has no usage or meaning outside of their company. Talking to others about the project, will leave them confused without a knowledge of this vernacular, and leave you scrambling to define obscure terms.

Even if you never show your client the glossary, build it for yourself and anyone else working on the project. If by chance you quit, those who pick up on the project will have a great reference tool.

MSNBC Poll UI

Recently I came upon a poll on MSNBC. The UI is very unique in that a user can submit a comment with their selection. In doing so a quantitative and qualitative analysis can be given as well as commentary feedback below the qualitative poll feedback. Users can filter the feedback to only show responses for one of selected choices.

MSNB Poll

A Redesign of Digg Mobile

Digg is by far my favorite site for news aggregation. It has a very strong design compared to it’s competitor Reddit, but I’m just not a fan of its mobile site topic listing.

PROBLEM 1
The topic listing looks something like a windows mobile app. The text is way too small for iPhone users and I continuously click on the wrong category.

PROBLEM 2
Why can’t I filter by one of the three post types: news, images, or video?

I understand that we want to limit functionality in a mobile site, but these functions aren’t that complex and would provide a better user experience.

My solution…
Make the buttons bigger for iPhone users, and add in 3 checkbox button filters for the post types.

Digg Mobile Redesign

One final note.
Why isn’t Google one of the categories for Technology? We have Apple, Microsoft and Linux/Unix, but not Google. This just seems odd to me.

Let me See It! Newsletter Previews

Persons or companies who offer newsletter services should allow users to preview the design and content of previous newsletters.

Give an archive of previous newsletters so user can see the design and quality of your information. I would bet that subscription rates for informative, well designed newsletters would get be greater with a preview.

Congressional Quarterly gives a good example of this on their site.

Congressional Quarterly Screenshot

90percentofeverything.com gives a good example of what not to do when offering a newsletter subscription.

Confirmation Overkill

Flickr has confirmation overkill

Does anyone else think that it is overkill to confirm tag deletion in Flickr?

A user can only delete one tag at a time, and a tag that has been accidentally removed can be easily re-added.

I’m all for alert confirmation on big decisions, but Flickr should change this and kill the confirmation message.