How it works: I used Dapper to ’scrape’ search.twitter.com and output an RSS feed. I then tried to feed this into TwitterFeed but that didn’t work because TwitterFeed requires each RSS item to have a date or a GUID. So, in an effort to stay with the web mash-up spirit I tried to use Yahoo! Pipes to copy the <link> of each RSS item into the <guid>. I nearly got it working but in the end I gave up and just used a custom PHP script on my website to do it.

If there’s demand I may improve the script to filter out very similar words (i.e. “Olympic” vs “Olympics”) and keep track of historical trends but in the meantime, try it out and let me know how you get on.

Download Mixtape vol. 8 - “Yes” and/or subscribe in iTunes.

1. Headman - Moisture
2. Amplive - Reckonerz (ft. Charli2na)
3. Safety Scissors - Untitled
4. Jel - Thrashin
5. The Postal Service - This Place Is a Prison
6. The Glitzy Baghags - Borat vs. Super Sharp Shooter
7. The Yardbirds - A Certain Girl
8. Booka Shade - Pong pang
9. Hot Chip - Don’t Dance
10. Bedrock - For What You Dream Of
11. Sigur Rós - Ný Batterí

Although most URLs are now quoted without the leading “http://www.” the remaining portion is still pretty unfriendly. Consider top level domains (TLDs): .com, .net, .org., .info, .biz, .edu, .ac.uk… there are hundreds and plans to add more. Why do we need all these? Most people still think that only non-profit organisations can buy .org domains. Then the rules for what characters are allowed are different for the domain portion (the bit up to and including the .com) and the path portion (the optional bit after the first /). The domain is not case-sensitive but the path often is (but not always).

Last week I noticed that PM on BBC Radio 4 have stopped giving out the URL of their blog. Instead, Eddie Mair says “type pm blog into any search engine to find it”. This is easier to remember but also easier to say in a natural way compared to “bee bee see dot co dot you kay slash blogs slash pee em”.

Then later that day I noticed that the current Orange ad campaign (somehow piggybacking on the achievements of people who mostly have nothing to do with Orange) also quotes search terms rather than a URL. The bottom left of the posters say “Search online for ‘i am’” which, as several people have noticed, yields some amusing results.

Could this be the beginning of the end for URLs? No, probably not, but there’s no harm in hoping.

It’s essentially a notice of price increases but instead of simply stating the new unit price, Dale Vince (Managing Director of Ecotricity) attempts to explain the global economic forces behind the increase. After mentioning the growing demand for fossil fuels from the developing world and how the rising prices are exacerbated by the futures markets, he explains why a green energy supplier should be affected at all:

I know that it can seem counter intuitive to some of our customers, that we should be affected by rising prices for fossil fuels. But until we generate the majority of our own power from green sources we will remain affected by the ‘market’ and the same is true of the UK as a whole.

The tone of the letter is really honest, and does not shy away from admitting the company’s weakness:

Our policy, indeed our promise, is to match exactly the price of the Big Six in each area, and so we need to raise our own prices. But this is not just a matter of policy and we won’t be adding to our profits from this. It’s a matter of necessity that we raise prices to match our increased costs. For the last few months we have been absorbing significantly higher costs. Following EDF’s price increase now will allow us to restore our position. Quite honestly, we could not have gone for many more weeks without raising prices, even if EDF had not.

It’s stuff like this that makes me love my electricity supplier - and that’s probably not a phrase you’re likely to hear very often!

Myself, Sam & Matt went out to Sheffield city centre on Monday afternoon for a spot of user testing. It’s the first user test I’ve run in the wild, previous times have been with friends & family or work colleagues. It was an interesting afternoon and we certainly learned a lot.

Firstly, for those not familiar with the term, user testing is a design technique which involves watching people use the product you are designing and noting down their reactions, comments and any problems which arise. The term is a little misleading since it isn’t the users who are being tested but the product. It’s a particularly powerful method because it is all too easy for the designers and programmers who make websites to forget how ‘real people’ use computers. In this case we were tesing wireframes (essentially pictures of a website) for the current My Account redesign.

So, after Starbucks turned us down, the manager of Ha Ha agreed to let us use a table in exchange for some increased custom. While I set up the laptop & camera, Sam & Matt went out into the street with placards offering “Free Coffee for 15 minutes of your time”. After a few minutes Sam returned with our first victim and over the course of 2 hours or so I went through the wireframes with 5 different people. It seems that free coffee is only a sufficient incentive to attract college students. Unfortunately this meant that all our participants were from a very similar demographic with a similar level of internet use (when I asked for favourite sites, all but one mentioned Facebook, Myspace or Bebo). Perhaps next time we should extend the offer to “Free coffee and a £5 book voucher”

The first thing I noticed when watching users attempt the tasks I set them is that wireframes are awkward. Because they are images rather than real interactive web pages, I found myself constantly having to call on the users’ imaginations. “Imagine that’s a real text box.” “That’s a sample error. Imagine that you’ve typed it correctly this time.” “Imagine that the address fields are real, what would you put in each one?” Most users were quite good at imagining but one imagined maybe a little too much: pressing backspace to delete some imaginary text in an imaginary text box, she was genuinely taken back to the previous screen (backspace is a shortcut for the back button in most web browsers).

I found that asking people what they think of a page out of context isn’t very helpful. After the introductions, my first question was to display the wireframe and ask the users “What do you think this site is and what does it do.” Responses ranged from complete incomprehension to comments on the colour scheme and graphic design. Although such a question is appropriate when testing a site home page, in the case of a control panel section it is reasonable to expect that real users would have been provided with some context from the previously viewed pages.

Every web designer knows that nobody reads instructions on the web but it’s still surprising to see users completely ignore your carefully written hints & help. One guy even commented “It would be useful if the page said how long my password needs be” while staring at a big yellow box stating exactly that information. Of course, one of my mantras is “If it needs instructions, it’s badly designed” and the fact that people won’t read the instructions anyway is just one more reason to think carefully when designing web pages. If it’s self-evident then instructions aren’t needed.

Instead of updating the existing wireframes with the changes suggested by the user testing, we decided to move up to the next level of fidelity and start building XHTML prototypes. This will allow us to test again in a more realistic environment in which users can interact with all form elements and input real data.

Thanks to all our participants and special thanks to Sam & Matt for braving the rain and finding those participants! I’m looking forward to doing it again.

I signed into Lively with my normal Google account and was then prompted to choose a username. I tried ‘tamlyn’ and click ‘Check Availability’ and was met with the following:

The error is a bit small and in the wrong place but it’s visible enough. So I tried adding a dot:

This message makes no sense. Firstly it doesn’t tell me what’s wrong. Then it lists a whole load of rules for choosing a valid username, none of which I have broken! So I tried again and, this time, succeeded:

Except that the success message is displayed in the same place and in the same red colour as the previous error messages. Rubbish.

Once I managed to sign-up, the first thing I was offered seemed to be some kind of Hebrew virtual sex room which seemed a little out of place for a site which is unlikely to appeal to anyone above the age of 14. Undeterred I tried a few other rooms but couldn’t get any of them to work.

I must admit I really don’t know where Google are going with this product.

• A copy of Grazia from 2007
• An A1 size poster for Prison Break
• A sock
• A piece of wood
• One and a half UK road atlases
• An empty bottle of Ribena
• A 33cl bottle of Vittel
• A jar of Sainsbury’s sugocasa best before August 2008
• Three golf clubs (wedge, 9-iron, putter)
• Four golf balls
• Three and a half golf tees
• A tent peg
• A toothbrush
• Two pairs of sun glasses
• An old-style Nokia charger (the cigarette lighter socket was stolen with the CD player)
• Various vacuum cleaner attachments (but no vacuum cleaner)
• A camping stove
• The lock from someone’s front door
• A key (which doesn’t fit the lock)
• A 50 drachma coin
• Some kind of sherbert in a lemon-shaped plastic container
• A scarf
• A blanket
• A picnic blanket
• Duran Duran collectors edition CD (free with the Daily Mail)
• A plastic foot

38% of the page is adverts. 10% is content (18% if you count the picture). As if that wasn’t bad enough, they use such a huge font that they only manage to fit 49 words of content on an entire screen!

It also has some cute design features such as the progress meter on each chapter title page:

Another neat feature is that all the book’s screenshots are available on Flickr with a creative commons license. Interestingly, ordering the physical book also entitles you to an immediately downloadable PDF version of the book which has been reformatted for screen use. However I find the choice of font used in the PDF strange. This shows a few lines of text from the PDF book at 100% zoom on Acrobat Reader 8/Windows XP:

The typography is all over the place and makes the book almost unreadable on screen. Surely a sans serif font would have been a better choice?

This small gripe aside, Web Form Design is an excellent book and I highly recommend it for anyone involved in building websites.

Of course, it would require support from the website owner but, in the case of popular sites like Gmail and Facebook for which thousands of user scripts already exist, the increase in customer satisfaction would surely be worth the minimal effort. Also this would only work on sites that require a login since you need to know who to serve which scripts to.

A quick search led me to Monkeygrease but that’s not at all what I have in mind. They use a Java servelet to preprocess pages rendered by closed source web applications.

My suggestion is much simpler:

1. Create a JavaScript version of the Greasemonkey environment which can be included into any HTML page
2. Create an interface to allow users of the site to upload user scripts
3. Store the scripts on the server
4. Append the Greasemonkey environment and all installed user scripts to every HTML page served to the user

Is there a reason this doesn’t already exist? Does anyone know of any projects going on in this area?