is there a web 2.0 aesthetic?

This week's reading of Web 2.0: Mistaking the Forest for the Trees? by Dave Rogers raised more questions than it answered for me about web 2.0. I keep wondering if there's a visual style definitively associated with web 2.0.

I've probably read 15-20 articles about it, and I'm still not clear on what web 2.0 is. User-driven--I get that; Amazon, Google, YouTube MySpace as primary examples--ok; encompassing web-based services; yes. But it seems to be a term bandied about by just about anybody on the hi-tech wagon and used in a multitude of ways.

Tim Reilly, inventor of the term (according to the very web 2.0 Wikipedia site) currently defines it this way:

"Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.". [3]

Hmm. . . sounds pretty open-ended and vague.

web site genre--class assignment

Our genre was government websites. I'm not sure we had a chance to agree on how to define the genre, but some commonalities we found in the sites were:

.gov domains
public-funded
department and agency listings
emergency, regulatory, and elected representative links
search boxes
aggregators to other government sites
bad slogans (say wa?)
options for viewing in multiple languages
section 508 compatibility
Federal sites had a tendency to use a red/white/blue color scheme
Washington state and local sites showed a lot of green and nature

Some sites we looked at were:
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (formerly INS) (www.uscis.gov)
Internal Revenue Service www.irs.gov
Access Washington http://access.wa.gov/
King County http://www.metrokc.gov/

I also looked at
City of Woodinville http://www.ci.woodinville.wa.us/index.asp
Washington State Board for Technical and Community Colleges http://www.sbctc.ctc.edu/

I especially like the Access Washington site. That could be in part because I'm a little familiar with it. From a citizen's point of view it's accessible, including the "how do I" list of quick links on the homepage, prominent search box, tabbed browsing, and homepage access to multiple languages. From a work standpoint I've accessed it to look at job data for my students and look at business license regulations.

City of Woodinville site is pretty decent for a smallish local government site, with links to councilmember email addresses, a list of upcoming events, community profile, and regulations (building codes and permits are hot topics in the city right now, with an imminent rezone with major implications). About 18 months ago, I needed to research the draft comprehensive plan for a piece I wrote about the commercial, residential, and parks & recreation future of the city, and had difficulty locating the information I needed. (Aside: the design definitely says small-town--I'd like to see it look more professional.)

The SBCTC site claims it's recently redesigned with "enhanced usability." It looks better organized than in the past, with links targeted to specific users such as board of trustees members, faculty, administrators, and students. Let's hope so. I've had past trouble locating the information I was looking for on this site.

Final comment: it seems that even more than other genres, it's incumbent upon government sites to think from a user's perspective. What questions do citizens want answered? How can use of confusing acronyms and "gov-speak" be minimized? What level of writing (8th grade? 11th grade) will be understandable to the general public, yet specific enough to answer sometimes-complicated questions? How can citizens contact elected and staff officials? A well-designed government website certainly saves taxpayer dollars by reducing the need to staff phone lines and email-response units.

account and password overload

I think I've finally hit the wall. This week I failed to log into two of my online bank accounts and had to reset them, and I kept entering the wrong password into the "old" blogger, so it forced me to upgrade to the "new" blogger, which took 20 frustrating minutes of trying to figure out what it was asking for. I think I've exceeded the "standard" seven pieces of information we can hold in our heads, and need to move to fingerprint or iris identification to log in to my many accounts.

Anyway, I went through the painful upgrade process just so I could post a quote from Robert Bringhurst, one of my favorite writers on type design, in which he compares type on a screen vs. type in print:

"The screen mimics the sky, not the earth. It bombards the eye with light instead of waiting to repay the gift of vision. It is not simultaneously restful and lively, like a field full of flowers, or the face of a thinking human being, or a well-made typographic page. And we read the screen the way we read the sky: in quick sweeps, guessing at the weather from the changing shapes of clouds, or like astronomers, in magnified small bits, examining details. We look to it for clues and revelations more than wisdom. The makes it an attractive place for advertising and dogmatizing, but not so good a place for thoughtful text."

My other tidbit of the week is this YouTube video called Introducing the Book, which makes perfect sense in the context of "conventions" we've been talking about this quarter, and last quarter's discussion of technology adoption. (I actually think they should have dispensed with the laugh track: it insults the poor monk, who has no idea that books need to be read left to right. Humorous to us, but really, how would he know? Future netizens will laugh just as much at us.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRjVeRbhtRU

prioritizing web usability

Well, I just finished a 4-hour brain-dump about Jakob Nielsen's book, and I'd rather not rehash it here. More about it in Tuesday's class.

But what I will observe, having just turned my InDesign document to a .pdf with some interactive links, is how the "gulf of execution" we learned about in class is very much in evidence in the print-to-web world. InDesign allows capturing weblinks for export into Acrobat, which actually knows what to do with them, but it's nowhere near as simple or elegant as it is to add a hyperlink in Blogger or other online tools. I found the "cognitive load" involved in getting the interactive tools to work gave me a three-Advil headache.

One word: blech.

usability experts are left-brained, designers are right-brained

Well, the actual title was Usability experts are from Mars, graphic designers are from Venus, but I found the feminine connotation of designers from Venus inaccurate: I've had many talented male students who had a very masculine approach to design. So I'd categorize it as left- and right-brained.

While stereotypes are always risky, let's live dangerously for a moment. There seems to be the lack of a math gene in many of my design students, while the art gene is beautifully and abundantly evident. In fact, one of my favorite stories is of my colleague, an incredibly talented teacher and artist named Beth, who is terrified of math and has the worst sense of direction I've ever seen. Beth has a complementary twin: she is an accountant, with no artistic sense whatsoever. Beth is thin with curly hair; she tells me her twin is stout with straight hair. They must have made an amazingly complete duo in utero.

My students are nearly universally dismayed by math and often put it off until the end of their studies, only to reluctantly find they need remedial study before they can get to college-level math and graduate. They are similarly intimidated by HTML and other forms of coding. Once in a while I get a programmer who wants to learn about design, and they are equally wary of the elements of design (line, shape, color, value, texture, space, and form) and principles (balance, unity, harmony, variety, and emphasis).

The piece articulates the tension between design and structure quite nicely. (It's not much of a stretch to correlate math and coding ability with structure.) I am one of those weird people who has both left- and right-brained traits--I've both written code and designed. This may sound like a good thing, but sometimes I feel like a "Jill of all trades, mistress of none." To translate this saying for our Asian classmates, this sort of means that I can do many things, but none of them especially well.

The required reading for this week, Blueprints for the Web: Organization for the Masses, was less enlightening to me. I've been a sorter since I can remember. When I was a kid, I would periodically dump my piggybank or seashell collection (I grew up near the beaches of Southern California) on the floor and sort, sort, sort. To this day it calms me to sort things, whether it's bills, design books, student work, or categories our college's website redesign (I'm on the redesign committee). Course organization has been one of my focuses in the online classes I teach, and I often get feedback that students like the courses specifically for that reason.

Certainly the point in the article is well-taken that it's enlightening to have many different user perspectives on sorting. One person's Grandma's Recipes is another's Summer Berry Pies.