Blog posts

Screen performance data and new research indicate that users will scroll to find information and items below the fold.

<p>The most basic rule of thumb is that for every site the user should be able to understand what your site is about by the information presented to them above the fold. If they have to scroll to even discover what the site is, its success is unlikely.</p> <p>Functionality that is essential to business strategy should remain (or at least begin) above the fold.</p>

"Many people," Kornell noted, "have had the experience of listening to a computer instructor open a menu and go through a series of steps. Then you try to do it, and you don't even know which menu or what the first step is. If you are passively following along, you won't remember it as well as if you're forced to do it yourself. Active learning is much harder, but if you can do it successfully, you will remember it much better in the long run.

<p>I admit to having overlooked <code>alt</code> text. Until a year ago I sniffed at the idea of creating useful <code>alt</code> text for images. “If a user is blind,” I reasoned, “what does he care that I have a photograph of the university tower on my website?”</p> <p>My fellow designer shrugged. “Well, I guess if you don’t really care about what the image <em>says</em>,” she said slowly, “you really don’t need it in the first place.”</p>

But the point is that these writers and researchers totally ignore or overlook people like me who were the earliest users and adapters, and are ourselves ‘natives’. Or more properly, we’re <em>pioneers</em>, since we’re the ones who built, tested, and worked the bugs out of many of these things. We were the people in the university computer labs, or in the military communications shops, who put this technology to real-world use, and, when we could, started bragging about it to our outside friends.

<p>When you hold a meeting over chat, develop an idea on a wiki, discuss solutions to problems on a discussion board, or collectively edit a document, you leave little traces of the process everywhere. There are transcripts, different versions of documents, and there is an actual record of who made what comment and contributed what material.</p> <p>In a f2f meeting, we rely on a person to take notes. We all know that Meeting Minutes are nothing more then a list of decisions and action items. Meeting minutes do not reflect the decision process, the tension a topic may have induced, or the crazy idea that got thrown on the table and very quickly was swept under the rug. Meeting minutes are the sanitized version of what really happened. Sometimes, they are so sanitized as to be completely useless to those who were not in attendance.</p> <p>Conducting committee work on the web can be dirty, it can be chaotic, and, in most instances, it is open for all the world to see. Moving committee work to the web is the picture of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_transparency">radical transparency</a> and that scares people. Big organizations hate admitting failure and process can look like failure.</p> <p>We have to get over the idea that conducting our work in the open is bad. We have to get over the idea that f2f meetings are the most productive way to work. They are not. They never will be. Get over it already.</p>