Week 2: Post on Crawford Kilian by Rob Klettke

After the readings last week and this week, I realize that there is so much that can go wrong with websites. The amazing thing is that some of this stuff is so obvious. Why has some of this never occurred to me before? Surely, I've been a victim of bad websites: empty promises, overloaded pages, all-flash-but-no-substance pages, link rot (I like that one). But I've apparently never been too upset for any of this to have scarred me. Or, maybe I'm just too complacent. Or maybe I'm just not self-reflective.

What is interesting about these web writing guidelines is how closely they follow what we have already learned in other classes. We've learned in our technical writing class and our research reports class about the importance of headings for helping readers navigate a document and find the information they're seeking. We learned about user-focused writing in those classes, too.

The most interesting (to me) point that Crawford Kilian makes in this book is about clarity. He asks "Are you using long complicated words just because you can, when shorter ones would really be more clear and straightforward?" This statement reminds me of something we read in our language studies class. An experiment was conducted using writers who were novices and writers who were extremely comfortable in their roles. The new writers tended to use long, $5 words and complex sentence structures, while the experienced, more comfortable writers used simple words in short sentences. The theory was that the inexperienced writers inflated their language to cover up their inexperience.

This makes me wonder: considering that the internet is so young compared to other kinds of written communication, maybe it's its youth which is causing these kinds of overinflated errors in the use of language. I think it's that, and the fact that the software makes it easy for people to write and publish for themselves. There's nothing holding people back from using all the bells and whistles, possibly to disguise the fact that they don't know what they're doing.

Now, let's talk about web sites. I became familiar with these web sites after picking up books which were written by each web sites' author. You'll notice that I chose carefully the verb I used in that previous sentence because after picking up the books, I read one and I gave up on the other. Why? Because like the web sites, one of the books was more user-friendly.

I like this one because I think that it is designed well (and because if you watch the home page for long enough, you'll see a naughty illustration of dinousaurs). There is good, useful information on this web site, and she conveys it with intelligence and humour.

On the other hand, I don't like this one because I don't think that it was designed well. The home page is visually loud...it is the modern equivalent of those really old posters which used a different font for each line. There is too much on the home page, and, visitors have to (gasp!) scroll. I find this extremely ironic because Mr. Tufte is apparently a guru of information design.

So you can probably guess that I read the "Thinking with Type" book (which I recommend to everyone), and I really like that website. This means that I didn't read the Edward R. Tufte book which I found in a used bookstore in Bellingham. It's dense (I am NOT!) and confusing and quite unreadable. So is the website.

My first thought is that this guy needs to take some tech writing classes. He needs to distinguish between regular text and special terms by highlighting or italicizing them. The third paragraph in the first section (Bad search) is a bit confusing because the sentence starts with the word "search" which is being used as a noun and not as a verb. It was a bit of a stumble for me. I found this interesting because he's preaching about usability, and this seemed incongruous.

I like this point: "A good grasp of past navigation helps you understand your current location, since it's the culmination of your journey." It makes sense, and really evokes the notion of a world wide web and of the concept/layout of a website. It also evokes the notion of "searching" which is what people are usually doing when they're on the internet.

Here are some samples:
http://www.eopd.com/
This web site, for a police department, is too much about the animation, which makes it look like an advertisement (Mistake #7)

http://www.customhousenumbers.com/
This web site, ironically, doesn't allow users to adjust the font size (except for the toolbar). Do they think that old people may not want to buy custom house numbers?

I got these two websites from this website: http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/dailysucker/, which is one person's personal attack on bad web design. Enjoy!