racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

I’m not very fond of Nokias, but I’ve been posting about them like there was no tomorrow. My primary motivation: usability.

My most recent posts on ForeverGeek involve mobile phones and mobile technology (and how they also apply to design concepts outside of mobile telephony). I basically rave about how, no matter how high-tech my mobile goes, I would always go back to using it just as that–a mobile telephone–for calling, texting, and the occasional alarm clock needs.

First, on ForeverGeek, I find it funny how mobile phone junkies (like myself) always have this urge to buy the latest gadget, but end up using the phone’s basic features after the novelty wears off.

Do check out the campaign site of a certain Eric J. Gunderson from Montana, who’s running for a seat in the US House of Representatives this year. <satire mode>I commend whoever developed and designed Mr. Gunerson’s site for the great concept and design</satire mode>. Remember, folks, this is 2006 we’re talking about here. According to the DIGG link, it’s the awesomest campaign site, ever!

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you YOUR next congressman from Montana. All done with CSS positioning — but with vintage mid-90′s flavor and an authentic myspace aftertaste. Take note of the wicked LP-rip that loops on the homepage. I hope he wins!

Here’s a screencap:

It’s the 1990′s all over again. Heh!

I remember my old homepages (here and here, and old J Spot writeup here).

And who could forget my sister’s old homepage and high school class homepage?

Warning: looping MIDI alert!

Ah, the good old days!

Here’s what I think about designing for usability. Design your product / service / software / website with the stupid person in mind. I assure you then, that your site will be the ultimate in usability!

Of course by design, I do not mean only style, which only pertains to the aesthetic aspects of design. Design is everything about the functionality, aesthetics, and concept behind any creation.

Make things as simple as possble. Make things as usable, intuitive, and uncluttered as possible, with the stupidest of people possible in your mind. That’s unless you’re designing an aircraft control panel–but still, you have to remember that your pilot should be comfortable with controls lest you want him to crash the plane.
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It takes more effort to design with usability in mind than just putting in all the bells and whistles in one place. For one, you may have to trim down your work reasonably–in some cases, you may have to hold off on that cool feature you’d been working on for months. And in most cases, it boils down to only keeping the basic stuff (or at least reserving/hiding the snazzy stuff only for advanced users to explore). What’s important, after all, is that your creation works the way it’s intended to, and that your user won’t have to read hundreds of pages of instructions to learn how to work things.

I’m of the opinion that if something is well-designed (hopefully elegantly-designed, too), then there should be no reason for the user to RTFM.

Check it out at ForeverGeek. I do hope you usability advocates out there would agree with me on this one!

Blogs are so cluttered! This is one realization you’ll end up with when you’re in the business of reading (and writing) blogs. Most blogs around are simply too cluttered to be any useful. Many bloggers, quite unfortunately, fall under the mistaken assumption that more information is better. Well, in most cases, it is my opinion that less is more.

Fact is, most users won’t give a damn about most stuff on your blog, anyway. What matters is that you lead them to where they would most likely find the information they might want.

A decade back, Geocities was the free website-host of choice, along with the likes of tripod and all other sites I have long since forgotten.

Yahoo! had acquired Geocities in 1999, and was able to closely integrate the service within its own Yahoo! services and accounts.

Now Google has its own webpage creation/hosting service. No, it’s not blogger. It’s called Google Pages.

We’re testing a new product that makes creating your own web pages as easy as creating a document in a word processor. Google Page Creator is a free tool that lets you create web pages right in your browser and publish them to the web with one click. There’s no software to download and no web designer to hire. The pages you create are hosted on Google servers and are available at http://yourgmailusername.googlepages.com for the world to see.

This looks pretty interesting. But I do hope we don’t get any of those ugly websites that the old Geocities site builder used to churn out. It’s 2006, folks! I’ll have none of those tables and frames and frickin’ popups! I want clean, standards-based and usable websites!

Sign-ups are unavaialble as of the moment though, but I’ve queued up with my email address and am hoping to try out the service once available.