The Holistic Web

Ok, here is a rant on a pet hate of mine…

It seems that most major web projects these days are more about integrating existing bits and pieces than building from the ground up. While it’s not as much fun, I do agree that this is the way to go.

Here’s what really bugs me though, and has bugged me for years. It seems the vast majority of software seems to be poorly thought out. However, that in itself isn’t the biggest problem. What really bugs me is that most people just accept it.

For example, I’ve just finished a project based on the open source CMS, DotNetNuke. While it’s not perfect, I quite like DotNetNuke. Some of the defaults on install are less than ideal (and this isn’t simple opinion, it’s common sense based on anyone who has done any usability testing), but they are easy enough to change. But here’s the catch. Most people don’t.

As an example (and not wanting to pick on these guys who do some good work), http://www.kodhedz.net/ is a company that specialises in making DotNetNuke add ons, and they have some good products. If you look at their homepage (which is of course built using DotNetNuke), you’ll see that the left and right boxes have a little “-” icon top right which allows you to collapse those boxes. This function adds no value to the page, increases download time, and will confuse less experienced users - all downsides, no upsides. So why leave it there? Because it’s on by default I’m guessing. Most dotnetnuke sites have this left on, yet it’s so simple to turn off.

Similarly, the default settings for registering on a dotnetnuke site ask all sorts of questions - address, phone number, etc, which are totally inappropriate 90% of the time. It’s about a 1 minute job to turn this off in the admin interface. So why do at least 80% if sites have the options left at default, and would be reducing their membership as a result?

Similarly, I’ve been assessing several e-commerce shopping carts recently for a project I’m working on. I won’t mention names, but one well respected piece of software I assessed made the user go through 6 pages from the point they decided to buy till the point they enter their credit card. 6 pages! I can guarantee you that you store sales will suffer as a result. It is possible, although not immediately obvious, that it’s possible to reduce 2 steps from that process. Yet, when I visited 4 or 5 stores using that software, every single one of them had the process unmodified. Why? Why do people leave these substandard user experiences in place, and ones that are probably reducing your sales by a significant amount?

Now, you could write this off as “oh, but they are small projects with limited budgets and inexperienced staff”. I wish that were true. I have quite a bit of experience using a high end content management software package (depending on options, can easily be over $100,000), and frankly, what I saw in deployments of that was no better - poor defaults which were readily accepted, and on projects with budgets running into millions of dollars in some cases.

I just don’t get it.

Rant over.

John Allsopp has done a great summary on “The State of the Art in Australian Web Development”. Now, I know my blog is primarily international, so I don’t want to bore you non-Australians, but there’s some interesting insights here.

John & I had a brief dialogue over email about this article, and he made one very insightful comment:

> Nice article john, fairly predictable as well but good to see the
> research backs up a gut reaction.

Thanks very much. It is good to have evidence, not simply our gut
feelings isn’t it? I think it is the sort of thing that makes
something a profession or an industry, rather than a craft.

John makes a point which many of those who know me know I’m fairly big on: you really need to be able to measure things in order to have a good idea of where they are going. I’m not obsessed with measurement for its own sake, and have strongly resisted this in the past, but this is a great example of measurement done well. I believe John is planning to repeat this over time to allow tracking of progress. That will be interesting.

Anyone can shoot their mouth off about their opinions (and many day). People like John are a credit to the industry and help us be true professionals rather than self proclaimed experts.

In 1202AD a book called “Liber Abaci” (translated as “Book of the Abacus”) was finished in Italy by Leonardo Pissano, more often known by his nickname, Fibonacci. Liber Abaci introduced the current numbering system we are familiar with (0, 1, 2, etc) to Europe. Fibonacci didn’t invent it, and wasn’t the first European to come across it, but he introduced the concept in a concise and accessible way and can be mostly credited with the adoption of the Arabic system that we used today. He not only introduced it in this book, but showed how it could be used for day to day applications such as book keeping, calculating profit margins, and calculating interest payments, showing the relevance and beauty of this new numbering system - just a new way of describing what was already there.

All the principles we know today in mathematics were all equally possible before, but by having a new way of expressing them made it more accessible, and enabled people to work more easily with them. Modern science probably wouldn’t be anywhere near as advanced if we were still using the Roman numbering system - it was just simply harder to talk about and express the mathematical concepts without a good way of doing so.

What does this have to do with AJAX and Web 2.0? The most common complaint I hear against these two terms, especially from technical people, is that neither of them represent anything new. AJAX type concepts have existed for a while (I remember doing AJAX style development back in IE4.0 days, 1999 I think), and Web 2.0 is nothing much than a different way of looking at the web.

The thing is: they are terms to grab hold of. They allow people to talk about them. Language is an important concept. By giving it a name, there’s an easy to reference point for people, even if that term is slightly ambiguous at times.

I’m interested in purchasing a vehicle which uses petrol and electric batteries for the energy used to power internal-combustion engines and electric motors. But it’s much easier if I talk about a hybrid vehicle. Sure, some hybrid vehicles work a bit differently from others, but it’s a term that enables people to talk and to simply think about these things, which enables the ideas to be thrown around, discuss, reported on, and yes, misrepresented, but also taken to the next level, more easily agreed on and adopted.

So, the ideas and technologies AJAX and Web 2.0 represent aren’t new. But the terms, which so many people seem to have taken objection to, are important. I’m as adverse to buzzwords as the next guy, but I think these ones transcend the buzzword category they have been labelled with and actually represent something important enough to be collectively packaged and named.

I’m off to use my assembly of a processor mounted on a main circuit board connected to a hard disk and monitor, interfaced via a keyboard and an optical pointing device in order to connect to a global network of interconnected computers, and running a software package to check if any messages have been transmitted to me via the SMTP protocol. Or, I’m going to use my PC to check my email, whichever.

(and apologies to William Burroughs for taking his quote “Language is a Virus” somewhat out of context).

So, as I mentioned, I was in Arizona for a few days. Amongst other things, I met up with the great guys from Pinnacle Cart - but that’s another story.

I was driving to Sedona, North of Phoenix on Sunday. I stopped at a lookout to admire the amazing view of the mountains in the distance. The view was truly stunning, one of the best I’ve seen in my life. While I was standing there, a minibus pulled up, with its engine still running. I could see 7 or 8 people in the bus through tinted windows. One window wound down, someone leaned out, took a photo, the window wound back up, and the bus drove off.

Now, I’m not going to get into nature appreciation here. What I am going to get to is how people visit your website. People don’t care that much about how pretty your site is. Sure, you’ll get comments on a nice site (and an ugly site). But is there a strong correlation between how pretty your site is and how much traffic you get? The court is out on that one, but Google, Ebay and Yahoo all seem to have done ok for themselves on what are in my opinion pretty ugly sites (although studies show that there is a connection between trust and “professionalism” of design).

This post is just a simple reminder of a mistake we all have made (I sure have!): people like design, but they stay because you give them something - functionality, content, interaction, whatever it might be. I should stick that above my computer, to remind me every day.

DMNews.com has an interesting article entitled Marketers Must Give Up Some Control (which I found via Alex).

What do blogs, RSS and search engines have in common?

… “They require marketers to give up a degree of control.”

This is a tough pill for many marketers to swallow. It seems like a classic disruptive technology. It’s unfortunate, but the past suggests that in most (but not all) cases, people would rather hang on to the old ways of doing things (and typically, the old profit margins associated with them) and eventually be made redundant rather than adapt.

However, I think a lot of people focus on what they lose, and ignore what they gain.

Blogs:
Lose full control over corporate tone and messaging.
Gain a believable, accessible human voice; direct customer feedback to where it counts; credibility in the market place (directly related to the human voice).

RSS:
Lose control over the medium, the ability to “push” at will.
Gain customers that truly want your messages - the ultimate opt-in medium.
transforming marketer controlled push (such as DM and email) into user controlled push. The user is in charge. Better make sure you are giving them something they want!

Search engines
Lose the ability to dominate the conversation. Search engines, to some extent, bring about the great frictionless economy where people can find what they want when they want. Search engines can still be gamed to some extent, so money can still speak. They are working hard to make this less and less true, but I doubt they’ll ever get rid of it.
Gain a more level playing field for smaller players. The ability for products customers like to be rewarded with good search placements.

Let me know your thoughts. Think I’ve missed something? Let me know.