[Sigia-l] new Yahoo! search

[Christina Wodtke]

Warning: probably very dull stuff.. skip as needed.


> I thought your blog was "www.eleganthack.com" (which is, ironically, one
of the least navigable sites I've ever visited, followed closely by the
boxes and arrows site).


EH is my blog. Boxes and Arrows is not my blog, but rather the zine I
founded, and it is run by a group of dedicated folks, whom I thought might
be amused by the screenshot-- seemed nicer than pointing to my little
sandbox. I could have gone full ho and pointed to the book site, but B&A is
such a cool little effort from folks who donate their free time with very
little recognition just because they think it's important for design to grow
and prosper...

Re: navigation-- Eleganthack is my personal site when I play and goof around
and so on. No usability testing, no standard design just me talking to
myself as is my pleasure. If others enjoy that, so be it.
http://www.eleganthack.com/archives/000794.html
If not, not. You can say what you want about it (many have) but honestly it
is my spot to be as stupid as I need to be.

As for B&A, I think our articles have grown to the point it's going to be
time for a rearchitecture soon. But I imagine it's not so very hard to find
out what's new, find the comments on those articles. Only topical archiving
is still weak, and that is mostly due to our tool-- remember that B&A is not
funded. We hacked a preexisting blog tool into working which is not ideal--
far from it. Every person has only a couple free hours a week to work on the
site-- we have to choose between editing new content and hand organizing it.
If we hand organized it, we wouldn't have content to organize. ;-) We've
also had a number of volunteers who might have helped, flake. It's been
painful-- but the core team just keeps on publishing.

I think the real secret here is that many many people bitch and snipe from
the sidelines, but very few sit down to the arduous task of building
something new. As you do, suddenly you find that there are compromises if
you really want to have your work see the light of day. Pure valid html/css
sounds great, but suddenly as you go through the browser list, you may find
you have to choose. A great faceted classification may sound wonderful, but
you discover it would take 100+ hours you don't have and suddenly you are
back to old standbys like alphanumeric and chronological.

In fact, most people don't even take the time to write a good complaint--
what if the previous complaint was not "the most unnavigatable site" for
which I can do nothing to fix, in public where it is merely posturing  to
instead writing me with a list of problems finding certain items, and even
advice on how it could be fixed?

"Your site is unnavigaable" is not helpful.
"I can't look up topics on articles I found before, such as personas" is
getting more helpful-- I now have something to try to figure out.
"I can't look up topics on articles I found before, such as personas. Did
you know atomz has a useful free search engine" or "I notice you haven't
implemented movable type's search feature-- I've be happy to offer a weekend
to get it running" are both helpful.

If you genuinely like things to get better, it's good to try to couch things
in a way that is constructive and more importantly, actionable. If you just
like to complain, go for it.But don't be surprised when nothing changes.