Posted by: Carl Smith on Thursday January 21, 2010
Update
This was originally posted on August 16th, 2006. Recently we were talking about the great resource Useit.com is and I thought I’d check to see if anything had changed. Nope. Read on.
Just so everyone knows, I am a fan of Jakob Nielsen. I’ve recently been studying different viewpoints on when and how to best implement an effective search feature into your website. Obviously Jakob was part of this research and after reading something in his new book I wanted to see if he had followup info on his site.
When I got there I was pretty shocked to find out his site consistently violated one of the rules he harped on in his new book.
According to Jakob, here are the top three things users expect from search:
- A box where they can type words
- A button labeled search that they click on to run the search
- A list of top results that’s linear, prioritized, and appears on a new page
OK, the search box is the focus of what got me puzzled. On the next page of the book Jakob says, “The (search) box should definitely be on the homepage, but ideally it will be on every page of the site.” The alternative to the search box would be a link that just takes you to a search box. I agree with him, that’s pretty pointless.
He then goes on to say, “when Search is not a box, users tend to overlook it.” Yep, that makes sense too. Any idea what happens next?
You got it, on Jakob’s own site he doesn’t pay attention to this rule. The search feature on his site (located in the upper right) switches from a box to a link on a whim. It even switches within sections. It’s not based on a date, because some articles from 2002 have the box, and then some from 2003 don’t.
A lot of people have had fun picking on useit.com. And obviously there are a lot of things that could be improved. But why wouldn’t he follow his own rules?
I’ll still follow the research he’s done because I really believe in it. I just wish he would too.
0 Comment(s) Filed under: Interweb
Posted by: Fred Boyle on Thursday January 14, 2010
Developing software to be consumed by the general public is always a tricky situation. So many things have to come into play that you might not have worried about if the software was for internal use only. All these factors end up creating an interesting situation when it comes to supporting the software.
With paid commercial software, support is an expected service and should be professional and prompt. With free software, however, this same expectation can’t be met. Without revenue from sales it limits how much time can be spent on support and new feature development. So how do I do it and still maintain a good relationship with our users? Balance and setting the proper expectation.
Let’s start with balance; what does this mean? It simply means taking the time without derailing other work. I work on developing our free software, such as the ExpressionEngine add-on nGen File, as I have time while working on our paid client work. Some weeks this means I get to spend a chunk of time, others none at all. Once in a while I’ll even put in a bit of time after hours. On occasion I’ll also schedule time to work on our software, sometimes a serious bug shows up or we have an internal need for a change. Keeping things in balance and properly prioritized.
What about expectations? This is where many free software developers fall a bit short. Expectations help establish the perception your user will have of you. If you constantly set unrealistic expectations and fall short, users will lose faith in you. However, if you set the proper expectations and meet or exceed them, it’s a big win in the eyes of your users.
So how do I avoid over-committing myself on support issues? I set time aside during the week to look at support issues, making an effort to at least respond and either get more information or offer a possible solution. These are usually quick and don’t take much time, although once in a while there’s a tough one that requires more time. In such situations, I will try to gather as much information as possible so that I can investigate later when time permits. Armed with this, I can also set a realistic expectation that I will look into the issue when time permits, which could be the same day or later in the week. Thus far, I’ve had no complaints and nothing but praise for the assistance.
By supporting our free products this way we’ve been able to continue offering great software and a positive relationship with our users. This is important — since we want users of our software to be happy, it helps us contribute positively to the ExpressionEngine community and even learn of ways our products are being used that we hadn’t even thought of.
One unexpected thing with free software and its support, however, are the tools available to offer a good support experience. Currently we use e-mail and Twitter as a means of contact. We also use the ExpressionEngine forums to a certain degree, but this has become inefficient and cumbersome. So what are we to do? There are several services available such as Tender and Get Satisfaction, but these aren’t free and without revenue from software sales to help offset the cost, it isn’t easy to justify. Our software has grown in popularity, our nGen File add-on was runner-up for devot:ee’s 2009 Extension of the Year, and is the third most favorite add-on as well. We’re trying to find the best support method to make things easier for everyone.
Do you have any suggestions or personal experiences you’d like to share? Post a comment and let us know.
6 Comment(s) Filed under: Interweb, Process
Posted by: Carl Smith on Friday January 8, 2010
Over the winter break I took a strategic look at all of the tools we had used to run the business side of nGen Works in 2009. My major realization was that I often pick tools based on what they can do, not how I work. Those tools always fail through no fault of their own. So as you read below about the changes I’m making in 2010 realize that what I’m doing may not work for you. You have to be honest about how you work and if you’ll keep using a new tool when you get slammed. This is the year of simplicity for me personally, so with that in mind let’s look at my toolbox.
Organizational (GTD) Tools
Things
Most of 2009 I was a Things junkie. It’s a great application and allows you to organize your to-dos based on the GTD approach. Look at your lists a bunch of different ways, whether it’s where you are, how much time you have, by project, etc. It really is an amazing tool. It also synced well with the iPhone early on although that got buggy later. Towards the end of the year I had really slowed down on using Things, mainly because of the homepage. While I could always select to just show items for today, it still showed every project or category. Basically it felt like there was a ton to do and that weighed on me. As a result I played around with TeuxDeux for awhile. It is sexy but it wasn’t easy enough for me. Especially moving tasks into the future.
Gootodo
Looking over all the to-do list systems I had used since starting nGen Works, I realized Gootodo was the one I worked best with. All of the others were solid, but Gootodo was based on turning emails into to-dos. I pretty much live in email so it works for me. The main benefit is it only shows what’s going on today. My brain can let everything else go knowing it’s captured for review in the future. It’s not sitting there looking at me. And it encourages you to procrastinate without losing the task. So if it’s the end of the day and I don’t want to reply to that email I just send it to next week. BAM! Yes, all to-do lists allow you to shift tasks around. But for me Gootodo feels easy.
Financial Tools
Pulse
Most of you who have met me have heard me rant about the importance of understanding your company’s cash flow. I didn’t for a long time and it made my life terrifying. I really couldn’t make financial decisions without a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Then I found Pulse. Pulse walks me through entering the info and allows a simple or complete view of what’s going on. It’s easy to set up repeating costs or payments. It’s easy to shift expenses and receivables into the future or zero them out. Basically it’s easy and that keeps it up-to-date and lets me sleep peacefully.
Excel
When we hired our accounting firm my only request was that I never have to look at Quickbooks ever again. They asked if I would be willing to keep a simple ledger using Excel. All they wanted was who, what, when, how much and the balance. Using the ledger with Pulse I have a great feeling for what’s going on today and what to expect tomorrow.
Harvest
Harvest helps us manage all of our invoicing as well as tracking incurred time versus estimates. It’s the cornerstone of watching projects for profitability. I also have to say that the team at Iridesco listens and acts on the input from their community. If we have issues I’m confident that they’re working on a solution. If we have an idea we know they’ll consider it. Good job fellas.
Co-op
Also from Iridesco, Co-op is Twitter for time tracking and team collaboration. It allows us to know what’s going on that day and syncs that information into Harvest. We know exactly where we are in a project financially real time. If a client calls and asks I don’t have to say let me call you back, I say hold on a sec. That’s pretty bad ass. Being that on top of where we are also allows us to identify issues early and correct them.
New Business Management
Pipeline Deals
I became aware of Pipeline Deals in the middle of 2009, after spending time with Highrise. I felt Highrise was too simple and didn’t give me enough. So I switched to Pipeline Deals which gave me the ability to create process flow templates and see status data in a graphical format. In the end though I didn’t use either system because keeping them up-to-date was a pain for me. This may rub traditional salespeople the wrong way, but the best system for me is keeping new biz to-dos in Gootodo with all the other things in my work life. We are still using Pipeline Deals to manage our client/prospect database but that may change before too long.
Project Management Tools
Basecamp
If you’re reading this you probably already know about Basecamp so I won’t go into detail. It works great as a central place for managing all project communications, tasks and files with both the internal and client teams.
Signup Bot
Signup Bot has been a big help for us in scheduling user interviews and remote user testing. Rather than spending time chasing users and trying to find appropriate times to get together, they just log in and pick a time. It’s extremely simple and is shaving hours off of projects.
I’d love to hear about the tools that are making it easier for you to run your small business, as well as any questions or suggestions you may have for us.
8 Comment(s) Filed under: Business, Resources
Posted by: Carl Smith on Friday January 1, 2010
Normally I write an end of the year post, but that wasn’t in the cards for 2009. Not that I didn’t have time, or didn’t try. It just didn’t feel right.
This first morning of the new decade however, feels like the perfect time to talk. As many of you know, 2009 was a year of transition for nGen Works. We watched some good friends move on to great new opportunities, and we welcomed new nGeneers who have kept us moving forward.
While this transition was a little scary, it gave us an opportunity to reinvent ourselves. We bonded as a team. We focused more on users and our clients. We started paying attention to the messages we were creating as well as the presentation and technology behind them. We had fun!
Remarkably, the business side of things got easier. We posted some of our most profitable months without feeling like we worked any harder. New projects were lining up as prospects could sense things something different in our team – something special.
So as you approach whatever is in front of you in 2010, look at every challenge as an opportunity. Let go of old notions of how things have to be. Forget rules you may have established, or goals that may have you so focused you miss the obvious. In every situation trust in yourself and the people you’ve surrounded yourself with to do the right thing. Embrace change rather than fear it. And no matter what happens, laugh and have fun!
1 Comment(s) Filed under: nGen News
Posted by: Fred Boyle on Tuesday November 17, 2009
Recently I had the need to turn a DIV into a clickable link. This sounded like a fairly easy task until I got into it and ran into a few issues with Internet Explorer (IE). One of the challenges also was that I wanted to avoid using Javascript… I felt this needed to function without the need for Javascript. I’ve included a jQuery solution from Jeff Croft at the end of this post for reference.
Here’s the code I came up with to make things function:
<div class="project">
<a href="/link/to/project" class="block-link"> </a>
<a href="/link/to/project"><img src="/img/project-thumb.jpg" alt="Thumb for project X" /></a>
<h3><a href="/link/to/project">Project name</a></h3>
<p>This project let use flex our design and code muscles to create a truly cool site.</p>
</div>
.project { position: relative; }
.project .block-link {
display: block;
text-indent: -9999px;
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
}
This gave me a nice DIV to hold my content while making the whole thing clickable. Things worked great in Safari and Firefox, however when I went to check in IE6 and IE7 life wasn’t so good. What ended up happening in IE was that my clickable overlay was underneath the image and text. Doing some searching on Google yielded various fixes to the problematic way IE handles z-index. No amount of z-index value changing or other variety of documented fixes were working in my situation.
So I started doing some trial and error research to see what might trigger a resolution. Because my clickable overlay was empty I thought content may help resolve the issue. I tested this theory and found that having a background color made things work as expected and as they behaved in the other browsers. Finally I was getting somewhere, so I ended up adding a transparent PNG background to the clickable overlay and all was good. So it seems IE doesn’t like DIVs lacking content to be above other elements, so faking content with a transparent background resolved the issue I encountered.
With this I can now nicely create an overlay for repeatable div elements that can occur on a listing page. I hope this helps some of you out there!
// Allow elements with the class “clickable” to be, well, clickable.
// This basically emulates HTML 5 functionality that isn’t very well-supported yet.
$(”.clickable”).click(function(event) {
event.preventDefault(); window.location = $(this).attr(“href”);
});
5 Comment(s) Filed under: Code, Interweb, Technology
Posted by: nGen Works on Thursday November 12, 2009
At nGen Works we’re working on a new project and we want to hear about the problems you’re having with companies, websites or applications. So do us a favor if you don’t mind.
Email us your bitchiest gripes to . Tell us what happened, what you thought should have happened and anything you’ve done to try and correct the problem. Also, feel free to add the hashtag #breakingtrust to tweets about things that just aren’t right. We’ll follow-up if it looks like a good fit.
We’ll be launching the new project in 2010 and will give you credit if your content is used. Hell, we’re even gonna try to help you solve the problem or at least warn others about the issue you had.
Together we can make the interwebs a force for good!
1 Comment(s) Filed under: Interweb
Posted by: Carl Smith on Tuesday October 27, 2009
We’ll be out and about for the rest of the year so show up and say hello!
October 29th – Atlanta Web Design Group
November 4th – University of North Florida Marketing Society
November 14th – American Advertising Federation District Fall Conference
November 18th – UF Senior Class Series This is a closed session, but let’s get drinks after!
December 4th – Flash Camp Phoenix This event link will be updated soon.
Hope you can come out!
0 Comment(s) Filed under: Business, nGen News, Usability
Posted by: Carl Smith on Tuesday October 20, 2009
Update
From time to time we look into the archives and bring back an old post. This is one of those times. Here is the original post on RFPs from April of 2006. Enjoy!
Since starting nGen Works, we’ve received a lot of RFPs. Early on we answered quite a few of them, spending hours answering questions that didn’t always make sense.
A few of my favorites:
- How many websites have you built with more than 20 pages?
- List websites you’ve built that have 5 – 7 points of navigation.
- How much experience do you have with java-based roll-overs?
But I’m not here to poke fun. (OK, maybe a little.) I’m here to talk about the problem with RFPs themselves. Most RFPs are put together by a team at a company who don’t really know what they need to ask, so they ask a lot of questions. Evidently, there’s some comfort in quantity.
This means anyone who is going to answer the RFP will have to spend countless hours tracking down information and having others waste time reviewing the response before it goes back, where nothing happens for weeks. And if you’re lucky, they ask you to put together a presentation that will take more hours, still with no promise of being hired.
Before nGen, I worked on RFPs that took more than 40 hours to complete. Where did that time come from? From the clients who had already paid for our services.
So you have to choose. Either run around answering the wrong questions for people who don’t know you at the expense of the people who believe in you or respond politely to the people who have sent the RFP explaining to them that you would be happy to have lunch and discuss their questions, but putting together an official response would be a bad use of your time, which is dedicated to your clients.
Many clients, specifically government clients, don’t have a choice because of procedures and other nonsense. While I feel for them, that mentality will be there for the entire project, scrutinizing the work you do every step of the way. It’s just the nature of those beasties. And it’s rarely pleasant because they work in a bad environment and need a dog to kick. (Here puppy puppy.)
So, the next time you sit down and get ready to respond to an RFP, ask yourself this question: “How long is this going to take and what opportunities am I going to miss focusing on it?” You may be surprised what giving those hours to an existing client will do for you.
Who knows, you may even get some new business out of it.
2 Comment(s) Filed under: Interweb
Posted by: Fred Boyle on Friday September 25, 2009
This Friday, Oct. 2 is the EE Roadshow in Seattle. I’m excited to not just be attending but to be a panelist for the Developing & Marketing EE Add-Ons session.
If you’re attending, don’t be shy and introduce yourself! If you’re not attending, get a ticket now and immerse yourself in ExpressionEngine for a day of great talks, learning, and socializing.
See you there!
0 Comment(s) Filed under: ExpressionEngine, Interweb, nGen News
Posted by: Mary McDonald on Wednesday September 23, 2009
New nGeneers are always invited to share their early impressions of life within the nGenverse, but in the spirit of full disclosure, I must ‘fess up: I already knew and liked these people. Some of us worked together in our long-ago ad agency days and more recently during my freelance writing career, a great gig I would only have left for an even better one. This is it, and this is how it looks from here:
Usually, when three or more people hang together with any frequency, you may as well make room for those sides of personalities you’d rather not even see, much less sit next to. Here, though, egos aren’t simply checked at the door — they apparently don’t even make the morning commute. That’s what happens when processes are shaped around people, honesty is the only policy, and no one feels threatened by turf wars, blame games or other bullshit skirmishes that get in the way of almost everything good. No weird filters are needed to know what people really mean, because the air stays clean.
Am I painting a rosy scene because I’m bucking for a raise already? Nah. (Timing is everything.) Is life here perfect? Of course not. (There’s the whole coffee consumption thing, for instance: We can’t possibly be meeting the RDA for an office. Weird.) But things make a boatload of sense, the music’s great, the work is challenging, the group is diverse and the future has a nice sheen to it.
Watch this space. It’s a good one.
1 Comment(s) Filed under: Interweb
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