Lone Gunman

Paras Chopra, founder of the fairly self-explanatory A/B test­ing com­pany Visual Web­site Opti­mizer, pro­vides an intro­duc­tion to A/B test­ing that is as use­ful for new­com­ers as it is old-timers.

In the arti­cle, Chopra pro­vides a few dos and don’ts, an overview of some A/B test­ing tools, a fan­tas­tic list of resources and a col­lec­tion of “Clas­sic A/B Test­ing Case Stud­ies”, including:

• Dustin Cur­tis’ attempt to increase his Twit­ter fol­low­ers (pre­vi­ously).
• Luke Wroblewski’s “Mad Libs” style form design (I love this).
• Tim Fer­riss describes using Google’s A/B tool.

I’ve only recently taken a look at font retailer FontShop’s col­lec­tion of edu­ca­tional typog­ra­phy ebooks despite hav­ing the site book­marked for months. It’s a won­der­ful (yet small) col­lec­tion, cur­rently con­sist­ing of these five books:

• Meet Your Type: A Field Guide to Typography
• The Typographer’s Glos­sary: Com­mon Type Terminology
• Erik Spiekermann’s Typo Tips: Seven Rules for Bet­ter Typography
• Type Anatomy: A Primer of Typo­graphic Terms
• The Right Font for the Job: Type Selec­tion, Beyond the Look of the Letter

The online Typographer’s Glos­sary will no doubt come in handy for many, too. In fact, just click on every­thing they have under the head­ing ‘Type Resources’–it’s all great.

via @jasonfry

For the increas­ingly com­plex appli­ca­tions that we deal with on a daily basis, progress bars are an impor­tant fea­ture in order to pro­vide users with a con­stant expe­ri­ence of pro­gres­sion, effi­ciency and engagement.

After explain­ing the ben­e­fits of progress bars (see above!), Gavin Davies then delves deeper into the topic, look­ing specif­i­cally at the role of progress bars on the Inter­net.

Pro­vid­ing good (WGet) and bad (Mac OS8) exam­ples of progress bars and describ­ing the tech­ni­cal prob­lems behind cer­tain types, Gavin defines the four cri­te­ria of a good progress bar:

• Accu­rate – watch­ing a bar fill up grad­u­ally only to chug to a halt at around 90% can infu­ri­ate all but the most Zen. Worse still on the hair rip­ping scale are bars that fill up, only to empty and begin anew!
• Respon­sive and smooth – the bar should be updated reg­u­larly to show that things are still work­ing. […] Research shows that a lin­ear, con­sis­tent progress increase is bet­ter than the bar jerk­ing around like a mal­func­tion­ing robot dancer.
• Pre­cise – the bar should show an esti­mate of time remain­ing, and per­haps other data such as per­cent or file size remain­ing so the user knows if he or she should start any long books in the interim.
• Appro­pri­ate – before using a progress bar, con­sider care­fully whether it is appro­pri­ate, both in terms of User Expe­ri­ence and tech­ni­cal feasibility.

It’s been a while since I’ve read a technical(ish) arti­cle that is as acces­si­ble and fun as Mark Pilgrim’s guide to using new HTML5 markup in web forms.

I’m not sure if it’s the doing of ‘Pro­fes­sor Markup’ or this slightly nerdy quip, but I fell in love with Pilgrim’s style:

Ask­ing for a num­ber is trick­ier than ask­ing for an email address or web address. First of all, num­bers are more com­pli­cated than you might think. Quick: pick a num­ber. –1? No, I meant a num­ber between 1 and 10. 7½? No no, not a frac­tion, silly. π? Now you’re just being irrational.

Mark Pilgrim–developer advo­cate for Google, “spe­cial­is­ing in open source and open standards”–has recently released a book on the sub­ject, HTML5: Up & Run­ning. I hope it’s as enter­tain­ing as this.

via @rands, who is ask­ing the same ques­tion as me: “How the hell does Pil­grim make web forms entertaining?”

Note: Mark Pil­grim no longer main­tains the Dive Into HTML5 project. The old site has been removed.

In 1996, while he was still the CEO of NeXT, Steve Jobs was inter­viewed by Wired writer Gary Wolf. The result was a some­times quaint, occa­sion­ally prophetic and often pes­simistic exchange.

In this far-reaching (and some­what lengthy) dis­cus­sion with Steve Jobs, the two dis­cuss the forth­com­ing ubiq­uity of “the web dial tone”, how tech­nol­ogy doesn’t change the world and this on the true mean­ing of design and creativity:

Design is a funny word. Some peo­ple think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Pri­mar­ily, it was how it worked. To design some­thing really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a pas­sion­ate com­mit­ment to really thor­oughly under­stand some­thing, chew it up, not just quickly swal­low it. Most peo­ple don’t take the time to do that.

Cre­ativ­ity is just con­nect­ing things. When you ask cre­ative peo­ple how they did some­thing, they feel a lit­tle guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw some­thing. It seemed obvi­ous to them after a while. That’s because they were able to con­nect expe­ri­ences they’ve had and syn­the­size new things. And the rea­son they were able to do that was that they’ve had more expe­ri­ences or they have thought more about their expe­ri­ences than other people.

Unfor­tu­nately, that’s too rare a com­mod­ity. A lot of peo­ple in our indus­try haven’t had very diverse expe­ri­ences. So they don’t have enough dots to con­nect, and they end up with very lin­ear solu­tions with­out a broad per­spec­tive on the prob­lem. The broader one’s under­stand­ing of the human expe­ri­ence, the bet­ter design we will have.

via @tcarmody