It’s been a while since my last update, but some pretty substantial stuff has been going on in the interim. First and foremost, I’m changing things up professionally (again): Starting the day after Memorial Day, I’ll be returning to Microsoft’s Developer Division to continue my usability research work.

It was a tough, but exciting, decision to make. Following along with this year’s MIX Conference clinched it for me; I realized how much fun DevDiv was having without me! Plus, you really can’t beat Ux team at DevDiv, and while being the lone soldier had a lot of benefits, it will be nice to be back with that team, doing what I love to do.

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This will likely be fixed in no time, but the irony was too much to ignore.

Jakob Nielsen released his Alertbox just a few moments ago, implying in the summary that, of all the bad design decisions a company can make, those around content are the most costly:

Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages… which is worst for business? In these examples, bad content takes the prize for costing the company the most money.

Intrigued, I followed the link, only to find this:

So not being able to even see the content… does that fall anywhere near the “bad content” end of the spectrum?

A bit of investigation reveals that the entire Alertbox subdomain is somehow restricted in its access. Hopefully this issue isn’t too costly for him.

In general, I’m not a fan of wikis. I appreciate them as a collaboration tool, but I think their usability leaves something to be desired. However, six months ago, I decided that I needed a place online to keep notes, elaborate on ideas, and keep track of to do lists on my various side projects. A wiki was an obvious choice, so I set out on trying to find a choice that was at least semi-usable.

I stumbled upon Stikipad, and I was impressed. The design was simple, the markup commands easily accessible, and it didn’t require any complicated setup. From that day six months ago, if anyone asked me about setting up a wiki, I recommended Stikipad as the most usable alternative.

Yesterday, I was distraught to find that I couldn’t access my wiki. Every time I tried to sign in, I was redirected back to the sign in page. No errors – my password was correct – it just wouldn’t pull up my account!

Once I learned it was happening to a friend also, I decided to check out their help page to see if there was anything about this issue. The page is, itself, a wiki, and it turns out it was edited 15 days ago; likely, with that bold message at the top (posted here in case Stikipad comes to their senses):

Conclusion? Stikipad must be dead. I can’t imagine a legitimate business functioning for two weeks with such an inflammatory message on the landing page of its help site.

Really, it’s a shame. I thought Stikipad had a lot of potential. I guess it goes to show the extreme importance on having bulletproof customer service when you’re in the web industry (especially if you’re asking people to pay you): It seems like customers will put up with occasional bugs, as long as the company is responsive. But dropping off the radar entirely is simply unforgivable.

At the end of my review of Spaces yesterday, I mentioned an article over at 37signals. Like me, David identified the need to open separate application windows on different spaces, without being torn from one space to another.

I followed his link to Mac OS X hints, and adjusted the Dock accordingly. But even with that fix, I ended up being so frustrated that I turned off Spaces all together last night. Why? Because the “fix” ended up breaking Alt+Tab.

I still maintain that the best way for Spaces to be effective is to maintain truly separate Desktops; including, separate files on each Desktop, separate Docks for each Desktop, etc. However, that isn’t how Spaces operates today. Accepting this fact, I still find myself determined to reap the potential productivity benefits.

After the jump, I discuss why I’m obsessed with Alt+Tab, how Spaces is breaking Alt+Tab, and how I’m using Mozilla Prism to make Spaces meet my needs a little bit better.

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I’ve been excited about the prospect of Spaces for quite some time. Perfect for someone who wants to multi-task: I can have one space for email and chatting, another for blogging and photos, and still another (or two or three) for side projects. Brilliant!

In some cases, applications will be nicely confined to one space. IM clients, for example: I will only chat in one space to prevent from being distracted in others.

Web browsers are another story. I need them everywhere. For email. For blogging. For arranging photos on Flickr. For researching that tricky programming issue that has me pulling my hair out. But I don’t want email on my programming space. That’s the point of separating it out – I don’t want to be distracted by something that isn’t contributing to the task on that space.

So let’s take a simple scenario, and explore how Spaces supports it.

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OK this incident was just freaky. Whilst I’m freaking out and asking Julian to help me recover my iTunes library, I was noticing that none of my IM emoticons were showing up. Instead, I just got the standard Apple “I don’t know what this image is” question mark:

Perplexed, I decided to go into the Preferences menu and see if I could sort something out. And then I was really perplexed. My Preferences menu looked like it had died during the upgrade:

If you run into this, simply trash the current version of Adium and reinstall it. In my case, the preferences remained intact, so reinstalling fixed all my problems without any additional setup work required.

Anyway, this will be the last Leopard Chronicle about an application hiccup. I just couldn’t resist showing off that Preferences window, since it freaked me right out.

Shame on me for believing Apple when they say that their new Leopard OS “works with the software and accessories you already have.” I’ve already mentioned that Leopard didn’t play so nicely with Safari. It turns out that it doesn’t play well with iTunes either.

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I’ve been watching the blogosphere and waiting for the latest version of Mac OSX to reach a level of quality that most people seemed to be happy with it. With update 10.5.2 that seemed to happen, so I bought the disc and set it up on my machine.

And my first experience with Leopard was so special that I just had to share it with everyone:

Take a moment to let that sink in. It’s not saying that I have an old version of Safari, or that the Safari I’m referencing can’t be run on Leopard. It’s telling me Safari can’t run on Leopard. Period.

What it means to say is that I’m trying to open the version of Safari left over from my Tiger installation, and that version doesn’t run on Leopard. That’s just not what it actually says.

And whether or not I figure out what the error means to say, it’s still pretty jarring to hear that Apple’s browser doesn’t work on Apple’s latest operating system.

One of the first things you learn in an Information Design curriculum is how to communicate a message across different distances. What do people notice from far away? Are they compelled to come in for a closer look? How do you hook your reader into coming closer to examine the entire piece?

I’m always impressed by pieces that can do this without using any words… they establish a compelling macro view that is equally interesting at a micro level, when you’ve stepped right up to it. Yesterday, I received a link to some recent Chris Jordan work, and I was really impressed by the message behind these visualizations. They can be enjoyed as they are, but they become even more powerful when you read the caption associated with each piece.

Enjoy!

The first iteration of the category subtitles on this blog wasn’t… ideal. I received a ton of feedback on it (including Vince’s subtle comment), prompting me to find a font that still had a certain decorative quality to it, but was still very structured and appropriate for what I was trying to achieve.

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