Category Archives: inspiration

The new Google Bar introduces logo based navigation

Posted on by
Reply

In the process to unify all their web apps Google has now introduced a new way to navigate all their web apps – the new Google Bar. If you hover your mouse over the logo, it shows a menu with links to the main Google apps and a submenu for the rest. To me, that looks very exciting since it’s a whole new way to navigate. Here’s the video from the blog.

Over the last years, people came to expect that the website logo is always a link back to a websites’ homepage. It’s a standard now that helps lots of users go “back to start”. The Google approach goes even further and is not only a link to the homepage but also to other important areas (in case of Google – web apps). That saves space and also makes the logo the first stop for the navigation.

However, as new as this seems, if we look at operating systems we see something similar. A button to access the systems apps and functions. And now there’s the Google operating system button. Looking into the future I’d expect that lots of other websites will use that feature.

Website performance and Apollo 13 (the movie)

Posted on by
Reply

Since the Google announced that they will include site speed in their ranking algorithm, the issue of website, especially, homepage performance, is now something you definitely have to consider. However, many websites already did a good job in the time before. About half a year ago I also did some research and experimentation on that topic.

When improving the load speed of a website there’s a lot you have to care about. A good overview is Yahoo!s “Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Website“. And there’s actually no one solution or a right solution, there are many ways and you have to look at what your websites purpose and the main paths are. For example, if you need a lot of Javascript but don’t need all code on the homepage, you can postpone loading the big chunks.

After some time thinking about different solutions for a project, I was reminded of the “Apollo 13” movie. During the flight to the moon the space module is damaged and they have to shut some part of the spacecraft down. The main problem before going back is that they may not have enough energy remaining. So they need to figure out the best order to turn parts of the system on and not going over a specific limit. Doesn’t that sound similar? It’s almost the same thing you do when trying to make you page load faster.

Don’t think business or design – think outside the box.

Posted on by
Reply

In his article “Why Design Thinking Won’t Save You” Peter Merholz discusses business and design thinking in helping in innovation. While business thinking is a lot about spreadsheets and data analysis, design thinking is what all the creative people do when ideating new concepts.

At the end of his article, he concludes that you not only need need a view of both, business and design, but also other disciplines such as journalism, arts, library and so forth. I agree with that because a limited view is always something to avoid. Instead one should focus in thinking outside the box, with box your business, design, or any other thinking.

As an example he mentions Brandon Schauer who has an MBA and is a Master of Design. Hence, he is trained to have at least two, sometimes opposing, views. But what if you don’t have two degrees and can’t get another one?

The key is now to get many views in a single person, so it’s actually something one has to do on his own. How? Take every chance to do something that you haven’t done before, buy a book about a topic that draws your attention, go to places you would usually not go, or talk to people that are not part of your normal live. Just be open to new things and curious. Or as Steve Jobs says it in his 2005 commencement address: “Stay hungry, stay foolish”.

Is there a crowd of wisdoms? Better ask experts.

Posted on by
Reply

In his article about “The Wisdom of Community” Derek Powazek discusses many topics related to a very important concept of the web as of today. He covers simplicity, interface, aggregation, participation, just to name a few, and is definetly worth reading.

Especially this quote is interesting to me:

The Wisdom of Crowds (WOC) theory does not mean that people are smart in groups—they’re not.

As he explains, WOC works best if the participation is very few and there is no discussion going on.

Conversational inputs are too complex for Wisdom of Crowds systems. Online discussion systems do not lead to wisdom on their own.

In other words, a crowd of widsoms doesn’t work. They don’t work because everyone part of the discussion is usually interessted in getting his own idea out, may not have complete knowledge of the problem, or it’s just hard to have a complete view of a discussion where opinions are often shared. Or, participants discuss opinions with each other and miss the importance to get back to the problem.

Instead of a crowd of wisdoms I’d prefer to have just a few experts that will understand my problem and provide me with a set of solutions and a recommendation. In addition I’d like to have someone to discuss with me and not with some other folks.

So, if you can’t use the wisdom of the crowds as descibed in Derek Powazeks article, better stick to experts instead of a crowd of wisdoms.

Reboot 9.0 – “Human”

Posted on by
2

Long awaited and now finally there it is – reboot 9.0. The last two events have been amazing, the city and especially the venue. Don’t wait too long to register.

What is reboot about? Reboot is an event where people from all over the world, but especially Europe, gather and share ideas, opinions and discussions about the web, the world and lots of other things.

This year’s theme is “human”.