Of the larger companies fueling the progress of Web2.0 technologies, Yahoo! is a major player. Besides their acquisition and support of the biggest technologies – Upcoming, Flickr, del.icio.us – they’re also giving back to the community in big ways, like the PHP and JavaScript Development Centers. Yahoo! is providing a positive model of how a growing company can support a global information-driven economy.
Also, Yahoo has helped the Chinese government find and arrest pro-democracy dissidents. Information drawn from recovered “Draft” email proved that the suspect was planning with a “Freedom and Democracy Party”. The conseqences for him will be very severe. (In all fairness: it’s a lot easier to look out at the politcal natures of other countries, rather than make a clear judgement call about our own societies.)
Could this have been done better? I’m not sure. Business operating in a foreign government need to operate by their rules to stay open, and it’s not clear that denying Chinese citizens access to technology would help anyone, even if this technology is under the sway of the government. There might not be an easy solution here, and I wouldn’t argue for one.
However, I would argue against any utopian technologist who would suggest that networks are some silver bullet for freedom and progress. They can help, or they can just as easily be co-opted by the status quo, and for this reason a good technologist should always keep a good reality check at her side.
Google’s frontpage is often described as extremely elegant and simple; Don Norman suggests that “the truth about Google’s so-called simplicity” is simply deception and hiding of features, rather than actual simplicity and ease of use. Chris McEvoy tried to implement a vision of a simpler Google. Try it for yourself: Simply Google.
I’m afraid that this new attempt isn’t very “simple”, or more importantly, easy. The page dumps nearly every option of entire Google endeavor into a single consolidated page. I can appreciate how this is great for power users, and while it’s not aesthetically perfect, much of that could be aided by some prettifying of the layout. However, you can’t get away from the fact that there’s a row of over 20 buttons marked “Search”, and a flood of links at both sides. If anything, this UI feels hyperactive.
This experiment feels like a far cry from usability, so perhaps high usability is not identical to simplicity. If this was the first page someone saw, there’s a good odds that they just wouldn’t soak more time into the page. Usability is, roughly, making the page’s functionality flow naturally into the user’s expectation. I’m find myself agreeing with Don’t Make Me Think* principles, and I don’t think this site follows that standard of maximizing user flow.
In the comments, Chris agrees that this isn’t an end-state of usability:
Design-wise, it is at the other extreme from the ’simple’ official google homepage and shows that the most usable version is probably somewhere in-between the two.
And Google’s UI approach isn’t the end-all either (The idea of “home page googlization” seems like the case where everything looks like a nail for your GoogleHammer.) I’m skeptical that this flattening of all features is moving the page towards greater usability, but I look forward to seeing how these experiments progress, and what they come up with,
* See also: Don’t Make Me Think : A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (2nd Edition)
I really like sourdough bread: is a complex, challenging and ultimately dangerous sort of bread, and I’ve only found satisfactory sourdough from San Fransisco. If I get it elsewhere, it’s just a loaf of tragedy.
I just don’t dig rye. I feel like it tries too hard to be special with those damn seeds but, seriously, it’s just trying too hard, and I’m not feeling that caraway vibe.
Potato bread is basically a plain white bread with delusions of grandeur. Sure, it seems more nuanced and delicious at first. But after a loaf or so, it’s just like another bland white bread, and perhaps even more disillusioning as what was once delicious – the taste of potato – is itself dominated with the blandness. By now I sorta wish I’d never bothered with potato bread. All that bread chewing got me to same point of disillusionment with the whole bread thing.
But still, I gotta eat bread, right? So anyway, Whole Wheat Bread gives good, tasty traditional pop-punk offerings. It doesn’t break new ground, but nonetheless it’s pop-punk done right, and that’s more than enough.
