Month: May 2003

…but that doesn’t make me any less BLAZINGLY JEALOUS of people who have actual communities of writers to participate in. that is all.

(today turned out grey and chilly. figures…but we spent most of it watching movies, anyway.)

I kept going on my work breaking up the novel, and ran into something I’d forgotten about that just about stopped me cold: “RETYPE LOST DRAFT HERE.” Um, yeah. Which means that it’s a section that I lost when a disk died, imploded, or something. I know it’s in the big printed draft, but that does mean that there’s an unspecified number of pages that need to be typed. arg. and I have this vague memory of it being a fairly long section, too.

I just finished breaking up the first two sections of my long-suffering scifi novel into “scenes” – although I realized at some point in the middle that I have some chunk that are in other files besides the massive canonical version I’ve been primarily working off of for at least the last three-four years (since we first got a PC, at least), and possibly some material is still in paper notebooks and/or my novel blog (not linked, for lots of reasons). and I’m cleaning up all the old files scattered through that folder, figuring out what belongs where, etc., etc.

no actual writing, of course, but lots of thinking about the structure of the thing, which is perhaps more to the point right now.

today summer, the preface of it anyway, burst upon us with temps in the high 60s (?) and a pale sky, mildly humid. I went down to the library in the late afternoon/early evening on the bus (C was biking), and then wandered around downtown for a bit – iced mocha at B&B (odd moment: at the table next to me, two women were talking mostly in German about American politics, as far as I could tell from the English bits), walk down Capitol (Way? Blvd.?) where there were lots of sale tables out on the sidewalk. picked up a pair of strappy leather sandals for $10. woohoo!

and tonight I’m on my own, so it’s been KUOW all evening so far, lots of tweaks to the site design – my own plus and minus graphics and more readable text. I’d just like to say again, for the record, how much it irritates me that Blogger Pro generates line breaks instead of paragraphs. (I’d prefer to drop the bottom paragraph margin entirely and use text-indent, but it looks all wrong.)

but I’m going to stop with the Web stuff – a little reading & ice cream, then maybe finish the movie I was watching last night, or possibly other projects, which I’d just as soon not jinx by mentioning. 😉

C picked me up on his way to an appointment, and I got a shower when I got home. so I’m feeling a little more positive, even if none of the below has changed.

I’m tired and irritable. $income < $what_Id_like_to_spend. not writing. in between things to read. lots of stuff on my to-do lists, most of which I’d rather not do, or have been procrastinating on, or both. getting a sore throat. mole (?) dug up one of the plants in my garden. feeling bad about myself for not being more vocal about my beliefs and my passions. (assuming I remember what they are.)

Go read what Gus says, and then come back in a few days. I’ll be much better, honest.

yeah, I finally got annoyed with my last design. those little boxes were weird to right-click on, and they never lined up quite right except (maybe) in my primary home browser. so I’m playing around with one of the squidfingers patters and a photo of my own as the main elements. not quite happy with the layout yet – too much scrolling, way more “sidebar” stuff than content on most section. (not this one, though.)

– gotta do something different with the sidebar boxes. I’m resigning myself to having a pretty standard two-column layout, and trying hard not to go to three-column.
– needs some navigation right up at the top. (skip links all ’round, too.) hmmm, maybe I’ll use that “click to expand” thing that I set up for the school’s new home page. that’d be cool.
– better display of most recent album picture. that code is messy, too; I’d like to wrangle it into something tighter & more intelligible.
– then, of course, some tweaks of the actual text formatting. more distinction of blog entry titles, larger line-height.

and I didn’t get home until pretty late last night, which is why I’m writing now.

last week we got a call from someone connected with our credit union, asking whether C wanted to participate in a focus group related to their website. strangely, they kept missing him when they called, so it wasn’t until they’d called a couple of times leaving no message that I finally asked what was up. when I heard, I knew intuitively that he wouldn’t be terribly interested. he doesn’t do surveys – for several months we were on the Dept of Commerce’s list to call for stats, and he was rather consistently rude to them. I, on the other hand, love doing surveys – if they’re at all interesting. I had a great conversation with the DoC guy once about our computer use habits. (advising him, back in ’98(?), to get off of AOL, among other things.)

and of course in this case I had a professional interest. plus, their current site sucks.

so C drove me way the hell out to this place by the Oly airport, where I waited in the lobby with about a dozen other people. I kinda wish I had the notes I was scrawling to myself to keep from smothering in boredom, because it was a classically awkward scene. then we were herded into a room with long tables in the middle and a dozen computers.

it was very much like the procedures in the Krug book that I have (which my boss borrowed a while back, and judging from my work bookshelf, still has) – a couple of video cameras, with leads into an adjacent room. the guy leading the group talked us through what was going to happen, said it wasn’t our fault if we found something confusing, be honest, etc., etc. we all had stapled-together sets of feedback forms, which we filled out one page at a time, starting with some basic information (how long we’d been members of the credit union, how much we used the site, how long we’d been using the ‘net (I always wonder if they mean just web pages, or email too), age, name).

we did three tasks on the current site, talking through it the whole way. two were agonizing, the third (find the branch closest to your house) was dead easy, if only because that’s the only part of the site aside from the online banking that I use with any sort of regularity – I can never remember bank hours. I so loathe the navigation scheme of their site. then filling out a feedback form.

then we went to the draft of the new site. first off, it was a vast improvement over the current, design-wise. very pretty, clear, pictures of people, a large logo in the upper left. great colors – blue, green, accented with a reddish-orange.

then we went through some tasks, which pulled out the weaknesses of the new site. the tiniest font, everywhere; I thought I was gonna go blind. and of course it was css pixel-sized font, so I couldn’t resize it on the test computer (IE: the Netscape 4 of the 21st century!); I did complain vociferously, and I wasn’t the only one. (they actually had to adjust the resolution for one person, who said that she has poor eyesight.) and lots of places where the important information was buried in “fluff” – not even my word, but from the guy sitting next to me.

I was intrigued at the number of people who said they wanted to see things in bullet points. something to remember.

also something to remember: most people liked the concept of drop-down menus. who knew? this came up when we looked at a fake account in the online banking section – which was also vastly improved, but didn’t clearly delineate the program-like functions of the online banking system from the marketing-like navigation elements to the rest of the site. several people said that a drop-down would’ve been good there. I wonder if that’s because it’s a program-like space, and drop-downs (javascript-style, not form-element style) are more native to that conceptual space? the only people who expressed a strong opinion against dropdowns were me and one other guy (more about that later).

also, on very long pages, there was a strong preference for a bullet-point list at the top with in-page links to stuff further down, with a “return to top” link under each item. still a fairly strong prejudice against scrolling, which as a heavy blog-reader I don’t really have anymore – but a couple of people noted that the scrolling in combo with the tiny text was problematic.

on the new site, we filled out a feedback form for each page. one thing that bugged me – the middle position (3) on the rating items was listed as “no opinion” – I’d’ve preferred “neutral,” because it’s not that I don’t have an opinion, it’s that I don’t feel very strongly either way. neutrality is still an opinion: in my case, it was mostly that a given item was a mixed bag, some good points and some bad points, and so they cancelled each other out.

I did notice a few other accessibility issues, which I didn’t bring up in conversation because I knew they were a little too wonky, not really related to my actual experience. although I was quick to point out what the problem was when someone noticed “a lot of white space on the right hand side” – fixed-width layout! (the gal with the low resolution had a horizontal scroll, too.) yes, it was table-based as well, but I didn’t get a good enough look at the source to know if it was a crazy table layout or a sensible one. (did have a doctype, though, which is a good start. Dreamweaver MX?) and I’m not sure if everything had correct alt text – I saw a lot of alt=”” but couldn’t tell if those were just for the spacers, or for the text-as-pictures as well (lots of that in tabs and headers).

extra wonkiness: on the feedback form for the “find your branch on the new site” task, when I saw a table that I knew would linearize badly, I recommended that they get a copy of Joe Clark’s book – which doesn’t seem to be in my office either. did I take it home on my last telework day?

one interesting thing towards the end: the moderator asked what was our favorite and least favorite things about the credit union in general, and several people said that the website was their least favorite thing.

afterwards, I talked to the moderator for a minute or two – turns out that, yes, Krug’s methods were very influencial in their process. and while I was talking to him, one of the other participants came up and asked if I was a developer as well. turns out he’s a web guy for the Department of Revenue…he was the other person who was strongly against javascript drop-downs. 🙂 we who have tried them know what a royal pain in the @ss they are.

so all in all, I’m happy I got to participate – both because I hope it’ll improve a website I use on a regular basis, and because I think I learned a few things for my own work. (that, and I had a brilliant idea for a redesign for this site that won’t be quite so crazy-making.)

this time, I’m just waiting for sheets to dry, with Speed Racer playing low in the background.

today was one of those immensely beautiful days that start in every year about this time. I wore shorts and sandals, even sunscreen, and for a little while, a straw hat. Spent the morning with C helping B around the corner put in tile floor. Strange how much the back-of-the-envelope style of calculation that I’ve gotten used to creating CSS layouts turned out to be helpful in figuring out how to lay out the tile. And as I told C, at least the size of the tile and the room doesn’t change depending on what kind of house you’re in. 🙂

I’m glad to have helped; there’s a difference between seeing something like that on TV, and seeing it in person, still more with actually doing it yourself. (I was mostly the eye in the sky, and hander-off of tile, but also spread a little mastic and laid a few tiles myself.)

after we ran out of mastic, we came back here and I puttered around in the tiny square that I consider my “garden” of the otherwise wild yard, transplanting a few things from pots into the ground, weeding, taking pictures. then C went for a bike ride, and I sat out in my butterfly chair, reading and drinking punch. (that would be the moment for the straw hat.) toes in the grass, classical music in the air: happiness.

of course, by evening, the clouds were rolling in, and we even got a tiny spattering of rain. but that’s good; less need to water the plants.

so much do I not want to go to work tomorrow. 😉