eewBay

My first eBay purchase because my phone stopped working recently.

Why is eBay so ugly and why is the user interaction in almost every aspect of their site so archaic. It is a slow and ugly interface which is inconsistent and often breaks a standard browser view size. In terms of interaction the number of times pages have to be reloaded is much higher than could be necessary, not just in the main use of the service but also in the preferences and many of the other pages a user may commonly see. Preferences are often not great in web services but in the case of eBay it is as though they have tried really hard to make them especially bad.

I do not get why this is the case. They are a large company with a lot of money and a lot of engineers, why is it not better?

Rant over.

User Centred Dogma vs. Design that is Good

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So this is a really lovely talk by some guy. I completely recommend everyone in the world watches it. It is about an hour and fifteen minutes long but I think it is worth it.

Just in case you were wondering, it is about how user centred design is not as effectual as it is claimed to be and is often used to justify useless endeavours. The speaker (who is actually Jared Spool) claims that simple good design with a strong interaction with people actually using the outcomes is a better model.

I agree. But hey I love doing dissemination maps so I am not going to drop trying to work out how people think yet. Also, I think his model is a good proposition but I think it could be made better by tailoring methods for this kind of work; "Release Early, Release Often" as Google often says.

Persistence of Vision with Tag Clouds and Whatever

I was just thinking, setting stronger standards in where, for instance, a specific tag is found on a blog post or whatever item we are talking about is could make a nice difference to workflow. I was thinking specifically in the context of Highrise in which contacts have tags referencing their importance and I thought if it was possible to do something like put common tags in the same relative place per contact it would be a lot easier to quickly analyse the list. 

I don't actually use Highrise but I think this kind of interface optimisation would be useful in a lot of contexts. 

I wonder if there is a way to implement such a thing in Blogger.