Fire and Knowledge

Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

–Jeffrey Zeldman, “Understanding Web Design“

Internet Explorer is not a browser—it’s a reader. People spend about 20 percent of the time browsing for information and 80 percent reading or consuming it. The transition has already happened. And we haven’t noticed.

–Ben Hill, as quoted in Newsweek, “The Future of Reading” (Nov 17, 2007)

Buy.com’s shopping cart is one of the worst I’ve seen. It is cluttered with ads, making it difficult to find the products in the cart or how to proceed. The main content the user wants is on the right sidebar — a place usually reserved for non-essential information:

Compare this with Desiring God’s shopping cart:

When we redesigned the Desiring God website last year, we took the opposite approach. We tried to make it as easy as possible for the user to see what they are ordering and how to proceed to the next step. (Genius, huh?)

I know which one I’d rather use when purchasing something online.

This website has an interesting design. Making changes would be pretty difficult, though.

(HT: Abraham P.)

The world of USA Today is a realm of instant fact and no analysis. Hundreds of bits come at us in pieces never lasting more than a few seconds—for the dumb-downers tell us that the average Americans can’t assimilate anything more complex or pay attention to anything longer.

The oddly “democratic” procedure makes all bits equal—the cat who fell off a roof in Topeka (and lived) gets the same space as the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Equality is a magnificent system for human rights and morality in general, but not for the evaluation of information. We are bombarded with too much in our inordinately complex world; if we cannot sort the trivial from the profound, we are lost in terminal overload. The criteria for sorting must involve context and theory—the larger perspective that a good education provides.

–Stephen Jay Gould, “Bully for Brontosaurs” in Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (1991), p. 91

I found this lecture by Andrew Keen very interesting about “Web 2.0,” general media literacy, the need for gatekeepers, etc. I loved his phrase “Twittering ourselves to death.”

The authors also touch on a pet peeve of mine: people who abuse the “Reply All” command. Perhaps you are one of them. You receive a message addressed to many recipients — often a much-recycled joke, story, list, urban myth, etc. There are millions of these floating around; many of us simply delete them unread. But you, the “Reply All” abuser, read it and decide to respond with some clever comment of your own (such as “LOL”). And instead of hitting “Reply,” which would inflict your reply only on the sender, you hit “Reply All,” thereby forcing everybody on the recipient list to receive, and delete, yet another useless piece of e-mail. Please do not take this personally, “Reply All” people, but: everybody hates you. We hate you almost as much as we hate the people who mass-mail this Internet sludge in the first place.

–Dave Berry, “You’ve Got Trouble” (May 6, 2007)

I was logging onto my bank account at Wells Fargo when I was shown an advertisement for a service I did not want. These were the options at the bottom of the ad:

This is a clear example of poor design and carelessness on the part of marketers and web developers. What is the difference between “Show me later” and “Not at this time”? Nothing. If I hit “Not at this time,” they show me later!

The solution, of course, is removing “Not at this time” and replacing it with “Don’t show me again.”