General Web gubbins

Where to get Wiki

Scraped from the Sigia-L mailing list... lots of good places to get Wiki.

• PHP wiki - http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/
• Kwiki - http://www.kwiki.org/
• Twiki - http://www.twiki.org/
• Moin wiki - http://moin.sourceforge.net/
• UseMod wiki - http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl
• Wacko wiki - http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WackoWiki and a blog about how to install it

Visualising Information

Links to Information Visualisation things from Stamford university and Cybergeography's equivalent. This site also has lots of lush topics like 'Network Topology Maps' and 'Global Internet Diffusion'... ooer, don't that sound fancy?

FAQs about FAQs answered

Here is some info on FAQs that Steve Schang pulled together... and was kindly posted to an IA list I subscribe to by Samantha Bailey

FAQ Research
No empirical research identifying best practices in FAQs was found. Anecdotal evidence for FAQ design was identified in several message threads on the SIG-IA and SIG-CHI listservs. In addition FAQs are mentioned in Jakob Nielsen‚s "Top-Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2002" and the Yale Web Style Guide.

FAQ Themes identified:

Content

• Use actual questions that users ask
• Do not use questions that the business want users to ask
• Do not use marketing information
  Placement/Use of FAQs
• Provide FAQs when the user would ask the question based on user tasks/goals
• Make FAQs searchable

Format/Layout

• Provide contextual link title. (i.e. Frequently Asked Questions About Opening a Checking Account) The link should not just be called FAQs
  
• Do not use the FAQ acronym, instead spell out Frequently Asked Questions
  
• Logically group and order questions
  
• Ensure visual layout of FAQs is readable and scannable
  
• Bold key phrases not entire sentences or paragraphs

Process

• Gather FAQs by asking call center what questions customers are asking
  
• Use FAQ research to drive site design by making requested information more accessible
  
• Update FAQs, remove questions that are no longer frequently asked and add new questions that are being asked
  
• FAQs are a tool to reduce support type demands on staff

References:
Yale Web Style Guide
The Web and other Internet-based media have evolved a unique institution, the FAQ or "frequently asked questions" page, where the most commonly asked questions from users are listed along with answers. FAQ pages are ideal for Web sites designed to provide support and information to a working group within an institution or to a professional or trade group that maintains a central office staff. Most questions from new users have been asked and answered many times before. A well-designed FAQ page can improve users' understanding of the information and services offered and reduce demands on your support staff.

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, December 23, 2002:
Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002
#7 Infrequently Asked Questions in FAQ
Too many websites have FAQs that list questions the company wished users would ask. No good. FAQs have a simplistic information design that does not scale well. They must be reserved for frequently asked questions, since that's the only thing that makes a FAQ a useful website feature. Infrequently asked questions undermine users' trust in the website and damage their understanding of its navigation.

CHI-WEB Summary post for FAQ Design Tips

• Use actual questions customers ask not what marketing wants you to know
  
• Provide several different ways to display FAQs
  
• One large scrollable list of FAQs
  
• Integrated with search
  
• Put FAQs in context of product
  
• Map FAQs to user goals/tasks
  
• Integrate FAQs at the right place and time based on user goals and tasks
  
• The term FAQ should die. It does not provide context for the user
  
• Bold essential phrases to facilitate scanning. Don‚t bold entire paragraphs or sentences.
  
• Use the question and answer format.
  
• Logically order questions. (i.e. listing top five most asked questions first and then alphabetically or categorically.)
  
• Index and make FAQs searchable

CHI-WEB Summary post for In-line Help vs. Separate Help Documentation

• Use inline help for complicated, infrequent tasks
  
• Use separate help documentation for simple, frequent tasks.
  
• Context sensitive help is more useful because it does not take user out of initial context.
  
• Adjust FAQs frequently. They represent actual questions asked.
  
• Contextual help may clutter screen and reduce user efficiency

SIG-IA Labeling an FAQ link (link 2)
FAQ name describes a format for content, question and answer, rather than being descriptive of the content.

A usability test of Internet savvy users showed that most of them could not accurately define what an FAQ was. Resulting in the designers spelling out "Frequently Asked Questions" in the site's navigation.

SIG-IA FAQ Design Tips
Advocates linking to pieces of the FAQs to users at the moment they may have the question.

SIG-IA FAQ Strategy

• Ensure that the layout of the FAQ is readable and scannable.
  
• Arrange FAQs in multiple places around the site. Have fewer contextually relevant FAQs versus long lists.
  
• Make sure they are questions people really asked not just questions we would like them to ask. (Gather data from multiple source ˆ call centers, website feedback, etc.)
  
• Use FAQ data to drive site redesign, making most requested information more accessible. Site design driven by making requested information more accessible requires updating the FAQs highlight what the new frequently asked questions are.

SIG-IA Writing for the Web

• Link relevant documents from the FAQs.
  
• Make FAQs searchable.

Writing for the Web

A checklist for when writing for the web from Clearwater Communications. Its a concise and evolving list of sound concepts.

RSS

Very good article all about RSS Feeds.

Wifi and bad B.A.

Just got back from the USA. Am feeling jetlagged and grumpy as British Airways did a fairly average job of getting me from there to here. Stuck faffing about on the runway for 2 hours in Denver becuase they knew that a strong tailwind would save them a few hours on the journey. What with that, hardly any water service on the trip itself, mistimed inflight video (so you got to see half of a movie before it was switched off for descent) with constant announcements interrupting it and finally 'congestion' at heathrow terminal delaying us another 20 minutes... and then another 10 because the ground crew pissed off before attaching the gangway... I feel that their good reputation is ill deserved. Give me Malaysian Air any day.

Met a nice chap on the shuttle who was also headed for London. We got chatting about free wifi and where to get it in London among other things. It prompted me to do some research. Here's what I found.

News story on ZDNetUK on WarChalking

Matt Jones (founder of WarChalking)

Official WarChalking site

Map of Wifi nodes in London

And finally, a bunch of other good resources from Gavin.

Image Rotation

Random Image Rotation on A List Apart which has also been redesigned.

Thanks to Dan Hill who's blog bought me this nugget.

The coolest sound-scape software

This is the very coolest sound-scape software I've seen in ages. By Amit Pitaru, it uses a pressure sensitive digitising tablet to make sound on a kinda rotating interface. See the demo here. WOW!

No need for a 'print page' button

Nice tutorial on using xhtml and css to rid us of having to make 'print this page' pages. It can only be a good thing. Going to Print by Eric Meyer.

Tim Berners-Lee

Went to a lecture at The Royal Society given by Tim Berners-Lee this evening. He made some interesting points in a frenetic and charasmatic style. The main thing I took away was that his initial vision of the web was bourne of the requirements for a document control and sharing protocol. A founding principle of this was independence from software or hardware platform, network accessibility, application, language, culture, disability... and so on.

"To seperate content from form is good design." was one statement that I've heard before, but rarely has it had as much resonance as when put in context of the lofty goals of what the architects of the web set out to achieve. The standards laid out by WC3 have been a little lost on me in my more ignorant past. Over time I have realised that the standard is our friend and to deny it for aesthetics, economy or perceived flexibility, is short sighted.

Tim Berners-Lee made me realise that web ubiquity will only be achieved through a combination of standards and goal directed design. This is what will lead us to his vision of The Semantic Web. He uses the metaphor of the London Underground tube map to illustrate a web connected by RDF ontologies. Different lines represent different data properties of a relational database (e.g. calendar or event). Where those properties intersect (represented by an interchange on the tube map) with a subject (e.g. time or location), we find a value which is of real usefulness in our everyday lives. At the moment, those properties and subjects do not intersect to create values in terms of the aforementioned application and platform independence. Instead, we have to 'manually' connect them in our heads. In this regard, we are still pre-web (if we go by the measure of what the web set out to achieve).

You should be able to find his whole presentation here. You can also find a less cumbersome explaination some of what I'm rambling about at Paul's blog.