The Web 2.0 Blog » 2006

The Death of Kiko : The Inquest

This is a really interesting read on the demise of online calendar app kiko. I would thoroughly recommend giving it a once over, and even some of the linked pages. Hopefully you’ll build up a picture of some of the problems web 2.0 startups encounter.

I was really interested to see the author, Richard White (the guy who tried to fix Kiko’s flawed UI), play down the impact of Google Calendar, something which got me to stop using 30 Boxes. The other interesting point is that he identified a lack of a plan to go mainstream as a key factor in the sites downfall. By mainstream, he means out of the tech community and into the realm of Outlook using cubicle dwellers. Dare I say that this seems a tad at-odds with one of the other points that seems to suggest that a specific market segment had not been identfied. Surely the tech sector is a valid market, albeit a demanding one.

Personally, I looked at Kiko ages ago and just found that it didn’t work. The interface was illconceived and it all came across as a bit overdeveloped but underthought. In case you’re interested, the site fetched over $200k on ebay, not a bad night out that.

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Ten reasons why Web Applications are the future

There seems to be this willingness for people to build and invest in web applications but why? And will this trend for web applications continue to grow? Below are ten reasons why I believe we’ll see an ever increasing number of an ever increasing quality. I’ll follow this up with ten reasons why its possible the trend will not continue.

Read on dear reader…

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Google keeping bloggers in business

In an attempt to cement its position as the most blogged about company, ever, Google have release publicly two new services in as many days. You can hear the keyboards tapping away from here.

The first is the excellent Writely online word processing. I’ve been lucky enough to be part of the closed beta for some time but haven’t really bothered writing about it, lets face it, there are a plethora of reviews out there already. Suffice to say its light years ahead of similar services such as AJAX Write. Its collaborative, stable, very usable and oh so Web 2.0.

The other service launched publicly is Google Analytics which is a very comprehensive website visitor statistics package. It offers so many features at such a high level its definately worth a look. If you run a website, it will certainly help you figure out who’s visiting, where they are coming from and what they are reading. You also have the option to set goals (and track your progress against them) as well as linking your stats to your adwords account. Most certainly worth a look.

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Flash Vs AJAX

AJAX is very much the new kid on the block, he’s smart, he’s popular and damn, all the ladies love him. A bit like the Fonz in some respects. One flash of that jacket (read: no refresh forms with fancy effects) and everyone is swooning. The problem with AJAX, much like the Fonz, is that its all too easy to overlook the flaws.

So what exactly are the problems with the Fonz? Well for starters, he was awfully promiscuous, so inevitibly, for the time, was a carrier of multiple STDs, then theres the hair, surely a fire hazard if ever I saw one. Wait, I’ve expanded on the wrong point there (eyyyyyy etc.). So what are the problems with Ajax, and just whats going on in the world of Flash (would Flash be Tom Bosley possibly?). Read on…

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Object Focused Design Versus Function Focused Design

This is the first in a series of posts on usability, attacking the basics of Web applications, and covers breaking down your menus based on the approach your site is taking.

I’m going to use two terms in this article and discuss the merits and drawbacks to both approaches. The first term is Object Focused Design. This is a way of navigating a sites functionality based on objects. To the user, this means that they select the object and then select the action they want to perform on that object. A Function Focused Design is where the user selects the function they want to perform and then chooses the object they want to perform the action on. Two examples are below:

A user selects a contact from their address book and then hits Delete, the contact is deleted. This is Object Focused Design.
A user selects to delete a contact from their address book, the address book displays a list of contact, the user selects one which is then deleted

I’m sure you can all come up with examples of both approaches and probably situations where one was used but it should have been the other. So in what situations should each approach be used, and should there be overlap?

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Blaming Word (Processors) for poor markup?

I was playing about in MS word the other day (thats the wild life I lead btw) and something hit me like a car. Do you web designers out there practice semantic markup in MS word or whichever other Word Processing package you use? It occured to me that I was using Word’s inbuilt styles functionality to control things like headings, bullets and paragraphs semantically, so everything would actually be marked up correctly. The problem came when it came to integrating a colleague’s section into the document, which of course looked extremely messed as they had manually controlled the look of their text. The most noticeable thing to me was putting additional line breaks in between paragraphs. So it was end of paragraph, line break, next line break, start of next paragraph. For me, that just doesn’t work. It should be Paragraph, line break, next paragraph. Thats the way I do it in XHTML and thats the way I do it in Word. You can then control the spacing between paragraphs using the before and after padding options when setting the styles. Easy. Of course, editing word documents lets people fall into the same trap as novice (or lazy) web developers, style the individual pieces of text and to hell with the consequences. It looks good now right? Right!?!? I’ve heard that before…
If you do mark up your documents this way you inherit all the benefits of CSS controlled XHTML web pages. You can control the whole documents style through the style functionality. Which is really fantastic news if you need to make some quick format changes, like expanding line spacing for readability or changing a font (or corporate style). You can also apply defult styles to word documents, which means you can enforce a certain level of conformity throughout the documents you, or your organisation produce. The only problem is, you really need to make other people aware of this new way of working.

So, if your producing documentation, do you follow the same guidelines you do when designing for the web?

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