JasonMorrison.net

I’ve been kicking around the idea of redesigning my homepage and blog, though I’m not sure I really have the free time to do it. To start, I thought I would to put down a few thoughts about applying usability principles when designing blogs.

When you starting thinking about usability it’s temping to jump right into lists of principles and rules of thumb. It’s a little silly applying Fitt’s Law when you haven’t even established what you want your site to accomplish in the first place. So what, generally, do you want your blog to do?

Personal Goals

• Share thoughts and work with others
• Collect a body of work to represent myself (like a portfolio)
• Collect information for later discovery (by myself and others)
• Provide an outlet to continue practice writing
• Allow others to communicate with me and comment

If you’re creating or redesigning a blog for a company, the goal set may be very different. Below are some examples that don’t actually apply in my case.

Business goals

• Communicate with customers
• Build long term relationships with customers
• Produce quality content to drive search traffic
• Generate revenue through advertising
• Etc.

Many projects don’t even get this far before the graphic designers and web developers are already making mock-ups, but we still have one more important step to do. We know why you’re building a blog, but why are users coming to it?

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One of the great things about working at Google is the company’s commitment to the environment. This week for Earth Day the company gave each employee two LED light bulbs – much more efficient than regular old incandescent bulbs and better in some ways than the twisty compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs I already have around the house.

Energy efficiency is one thing, but how do all these different lights compare visually? Three important measures to look at are the color temperature, the color rendering index (CRI), and the light output in lumens. I’ll talk a bit about both and explain a simple science demonstration you can do in your own home.

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Having run a big online poll and seen some abuse, I had to share this story posted on the Music Machinery blog. Every year, Time collects their list of 100 most influential people and conducts an online poll. Most years it’s a healthy ballot-stuffing competition between Stephen Colbert fans and fans of the Korean singer Rain.

You can see the list of the top 100 this year here. Does anything look strange to you?

Through a combination of seeding forums with misdirected vote links and clever vote bots, the fans of 4chan not only got moot to the number 1 position but spelled out a message with the first letters of the following positions. That’s a truly amazing hack, and a surprisingly mild response from Time’s developers.

This is also an interesting look into the kind of tactic used by web spammers. Funny in this case, but this is the kind of thing we’re up against.

My Nikon D60 is set to continuous release mode. This is great, because it allows me to capture ambient-light images of normally motion-blur-prone children. I took some photos at my nephew’s first soccer game and the continuous shutter works really well for action photos too. Instead of snapping one shot and finding out later I was too slow or the kids too fidgety, I can snap a few and pick out the good one later.

So a shot like this is culled out of a series of blurred frames:

The not-so-great part of this technique is what happens after a week visiting family across the country. I have 1100+ photos to sift through, and that’s after some in-camera deletion of obviously useless shots.

I use Picasa to manage the photos on my hard drive, it’s fast and has a nice UI. My usual tactic is to make a couple passes through, starring good shots. Then I make a final pass through the starred photos where I might crop or adjust levels a bit (that’s the Tuning tab in Picasa) and finally export to a folder. From there I can upload to Flickr, Facebook, Panoramio, and any of the other places I find myself sharing photos.

Anyone have any helpful tips for speeding up this workflow? Any actual professional photographers out there who deal with this on a regular basis? I remember similar problems when I worked in newsrooms but that was a while back and I don’t remember a good solution existing at the time.