Day: September 16, 2008

Instant karma

There are some moments of karma that are just too good not to post. This is one of them: GOP delegate’s hotel tryst goes bad when he wakes up with $120,000 missing. An attendee of the RNC convention who argued that the US should “bomb the hell” out of Iran and seize its resources to pay for the invasion picks up a woman in the hotel bar, who … makes him drinks, gets him bombed, and seizes his resources:

In an interview filmed the afternoon of Sept. 3 and posted on the Web site LinkTV.org, Schwartz was candid about how he envisioned change under a McCain presidency.

“Less taxes and more war,” he said, smiling. He said the U.S. should “bomb the hell” out of Iran because the country threatens Israel.

Asked by the interviewer how America would pay for a military confrontation with Iran, he said the U.S. should take the country’s resources.

“We should plant a flag. Take the oil, take the money,” he said. “We deserve reimbursement.”

A few hours after the interview, an unknown woman helped herself to Schwartz’s resources.

Heh.

Via.

WordPress gives a window into user experience design

With the WordPress 2.7 Navigation Options Survey, the fine folks at WordPress.org have opened the kimono on one of the trickiest product management tasks: user experience design. The context: the administrative interface of WordPress. The UI was famously redesigned earlier this year by Happy Cog studios, who applied a rigorous information architecture along with a highly readable visual style. So why redesign now?

Well, it appears that users didn’t like the way the dashboard used screen real estate. While the WordPress team doesn’t describe what the users complained about, the key navigation options are currently along the top, and I would guess that users who have widescreen monitors are pointing out that horizontal screen real estate is less precious than vertical. So the team has created a survey to get user feedback about some design options.

This is a tricky task, and it could have been made a little easier by some better user requirements gathering. For instance, what the team is fundamentally trying to do in identifying top-level command categories is classically served by “card sorting,” a classic usability design exercise. They might get better feedback by doing a card-sort study, either offline or with a software package like WebSort.

Second, the presentation of the choices doesn’t include a control. It assumes that all users prefer the vertical menu and presents variations on that option. Adding an option for the existing horizontal menu might present some valuable information on how users feel about the existing option.

My opinion may be tainted by my personal preferences; I’m one who finds the current administrative interface design preferable to what I’ve seen so far of the new direction. But regardless of my personal feelings, there’s something to be said for rigorous user centered design in determining the next direction.