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So that was fun! While this blog will remain on WordPress, I’m planning on using my original edtech Tumblog again. My apologies for the confusion, but I hope you’ll follow me to back to Web of Shadows. Thanks, all!

Updating Web Design Resources

I’ve been working with a variety of students recently on their web projects for the gen. ed. computer/web class that (most) students at St. Ed’s are required to take. These students are mostly non-technical majors who have to learn basic HTML, CSS and even a smidge of JavaScript in order to code a simple website as their final project in this course.

While compiling some favorite online resources and tools for a student coming in today, it inspired me to update my old web design resources page. Please have a look at it and let me know what sites, books, videos, etc you’d recommend for web beginners.

Tell me your favorites in the comments!

W3Schools Drama Timeline [Recap]

So I totally missed the drama surrounding W3Schools in January.

It was brought to my attention when I found a link to an article in the email I received from about.com’s Jennifer Kyrnin, who manage’s the sites web design/HTML section. The first article linked in her email digest caught my attention: Don’t Be Fooled by W3Schools. I guess I’m glad Jennifer was late on this too since I wouldn’t have found out about it either.

This got me to thinking, what are the issues here? How did this go down? Here’s what I’ve pieced together:

1. January 14, 2011: the date signed by the authors of w3fools.com, which critiques W3Schools and recommends alternate tutorial sources and ways to save and improve W3Schools itself.
2. Same day: a forum thread is posted on W3Schools discussing the site: “Errors found in w3schools contents“. While many users concede that no tutorial site is perfect (especially such a large one), and that the certificates offered are dodgy, the forum users disagree with W3Fools’ method of critique and found it overly harsh.
3. Same day: ReadWriteWeb publishes an article about W3Fools, W3Fools Takes on W3Schools, spreading the word.
4. January 15th: A blog post goes up summarizing the position of W3Schools’ supporters, as written by one of their forum mods.
5. January 17th: W3Schools responds to ReadWriteWeb’s request for comment. Reddit also weighs in.

So what?

What was learned here? I think there are a few takeaways most commenters agreed with:

• W3Schools should clearly indicate (at least) on the homepage that they are NOT affiliated with the W3C. As of this writing, is not even stated in the homepage’s small disclaimer at the bottom of the page. This was very misleading for me, as I thought this site was affiliated with the W3C until I read up on all this.
• It seems like W3School’s certification offerings are not much more than a money grab. If that sounds harsh, check out the certification process. If W3Schools wants to run a legit certification program, it should be a more formal process then “I promise to have someone stand over me while I’m taking the test so I don’t cheat and I promise not to steal the certification badge image that you say I shouldn’t link to until after I pass the test.” And even so, would you even be proud to have that badge on your site? I think it’d be great if this site could offer a certification program worthy of this site’s popularity, but it’s not there yet.
• I and other commenters understand how keeping such a large site up-to-date is difficult, so I think W3Schools (and other sites’) inaccuracies is a reminder to not let one source be your “end all, be all” of web education. Diversifying the sources you learn from will only help, and in time the student will begin to recognize what works and what doesn’t.
• I love the idea of a wiki version of W3Schools. While I don’t see W3Schools doing this, I would encourage the industry to build one. This is a great way to get the community more involved in educating itself and students alike, and would promote keeping the content as up-to-date as possible.

All and all, Klint Finley of ReadWriteWeb said it best:

The best outcome of all of this would be for W3Schools to improve its tutorials – which is the stated goal of W3Fools. That seems to be happening, if slowly.

It would also probably be best for everyone if W3Schools acknowledged on its front page that it is not associated with the W3C.

Catching up around the Web [Link List]

Time to catch up on all things webby that students and pros should know! Without further ado in no particular order:

• Build your Social Media Embassies [SEOMoz] – using the metaphor of national embassies to drive home how social media should support your official website.
• UCG Gets an A+ on Google Test with Panda Update [SEOMoz via YOUMoz] – My former SEO Manager had her post featured on the main SEOMoz blog, and for good reason! Learn how Google values aggregated UGC (User Generated Content)!
• Page Speed for Chrome, and in 40 Languages! [Google Webmaster Central Blog] – We know how important having a fast page load time is, and now you can measure and improve your pages’ load time using Google’s tools for testing in all major browsers. Huzzah!
• A Checklist for Content Work [A List Apart] – While teaching HTML/CSS is one thing, I can’t write your content. Here’s an excellent guide when it comes to preparing content for your site. (This is an excerpt of the book The Elements of Content Strategy)
• Adobe InDesign Tips I Wish I’d Known When Starting Out [Smashing Magazine] – We’re teaching InDesign to a record number of students (it feels like), so this is an excellent resource I’ll be recommending in future classes.

Now for your moment of techie zen:

Keyword Researching? Here’s My Annotated Resource List

A student is coming in today for some training on SEO and particularly researching and choosing keywords. Here’s some helpful online guides and resources I’d recommend for him, and anyone doing the same for their small business.

It’s no secret my favorite SEO site is SEOMoz – here’s their chapter on keyword research, but I recommend reading their entire guide! Also see The Professional’s Keyword Research Guide.

Five Steps to Effective Keyword Research is a great article covering the process of keyword research specifically aimed a small business, and Search Engine Guide has an even more in-depth series of posts on keyword research available at the Comprehensive Guide to Keyword Research, Selection & Organization.

As Lisa Barone says, here’s your goal for choosing the best key words:

You want to narrow your list to only include highly attainable, sought-after phrases that will bring the most qualified traffic to your site.

Keyword Research for Web Writers and Content Producers from Copyblogger is another helpful series of posts on keyword research.

3 Ways To Use Google’s Search Results For Keyword Research is great for some fast research, and is a good place to start if you’re really stuck for ideas.

If you really get into it, tear into some data with 10 Steps to Advanced Keyword Research.

While I try to stay up on SEO and a variety of web industries, I may miss some great resources – which ones would you recommend for someone new to the keyword research process?

Steve Krug Explains It All for You [Liveblogging SXSWi]

First off: you’ll enjoy this more and get more out of this session if you’re not multitasking (note-taking being the exception because it’s tied closely to the content).

Ten years ago: “Don’t Make Me Think” – trying to figure out what advice to give, and I found that the way to pull someone outside of their perspective and team role is for everyone, the designer/developer/marketer/etc, to watch someone do usability testing. Make testing so simple that anyone can do it with little training.

All sites have serious usability problems. Can you go through a few days without running into annoying usability issues?? Problems persist because we don’t have the time and/or resources to fix them. Here’s why we should do in-house testing: Most sites don’t get tested because outsourcing testing is expensive, it takes time, and they’re aren’t enough professionals. If you have the money, do it, but most of us don’t.

Krug’s intent for today: You should be testing yourself, and testing more often.

Do-it-yourself Usability Testing:

• Start testing earlier than you think makes sense – we often wait till the end of the development process. Problem is by that point you can’t use the info you receive. You want to find out issues as early as possible – start showing off sketches. Also consider testing competitors and/or similar designs.
• Three users per round, one morning a month – they’ll uncover more stuff than you can fix in a month, and you can do it again next month
• No lab or mirrors – do it at your location because you want team members to observe the test in person. set up a monitor in another room so the development team can watch. Make it a spectator sport. Krug doesn’t like the “squirm cam” – you don’t need to see the person’s face to know their frustration – watch the cursor and listen to their voice – get a USB mic, and good speakers in the observation room which plug into any computer. Also, get snacks! This will bring people to observe.
• don’t worry so much about recruiting from the right demographic
• record with Camtasia or Morae or CamStudio
• no stats, no exit questions, no faux validity, no big report – admit that there’s no statistical reliability but produces great insights. Debrief over lunch instead! What problems did we observe and what are we going to do about it?
• don’t do testing in translation – you and the tester should both speak the same language.
• don’t necessarily go for the low-hanging fruit – focus ruthlessly on fixing a small number of the most important problems before the next round of testing.
• When fixing problems, do the least you can do – what’s the smallest change we can make that might solve the problem or make it far less serious? *don’t get sucked into a major re-design*

A Demo Test: the SXSW schedule page. Wasn’t picked because it had more problems, but I picked it because you the audience would be familiar with it as if it were your own site.

1. Download Krug’s Usability Test Script, read it verbatim and print it out in large type so it’s easy to read.
2. Sign recording permission form (and NDA if you have to, send it to the person before the session).
3. Have them look at the site and describe it and what they think the intention is.
4. Describe the task and give them a paper copy of the task to read. Have them describe their thought process aloud, then at the end ask them questions “probing” – don’t interrupt the tester during testing unless they’re really stuck or way off. Just ask “what are you thinking?” and note their top 3 usability issues.
5. Check out a complete demo online at sensible.com, or Steve Krug’s YouTube channel, about 24 min.

Buy Rocket Surgery Made Easy at peachpit.com and use the discount code SXSW2011 for 35% off and free shipping. Krug will also start blogging at someslightlyirregular.com

Techies Can Save the World: Why Aren’t They? [Liveblogging SXSWi]

Surui Carbon Project – updating Google Earth with climate and environmental data with the help of the local Surui tribe in S. America. The native groups become the “carbon monitors” and are empowered to document and track environmental issues and illegal deforestation.

Recycle Match: help companies sell and give away extra stock and trash – “the eBay of trash”

We need great IT, green power and new business models (the lacking part) – think automobiles. Right now, the thought is, “we all need to own our cars,” what if we shared? Let’s re-think how we consume and collaborate, not just about optimizing solar power.

It’s hard to recruit IT’ers to non-sexy projects like dealing with recycling trash, etc. especially with regards to wanting Google-like jobs and salaries. There’s this idea that green business isn’t profitable. (But Google is recruiting for thousands of engineer jobs for their “earth engine” project.)

Clean Tech 1.0 in California, circa 2001 – rolling blackouts, 9/11, climate change awareness. With the .com collapse, let’s go solve some problems. But then, we didn’t have these platforms so we focused on what we knew like developing solar. Now we’re shifting to a more mature market of energy – but now we need platforms and applications to get this out to market faster (Clean Tech 2.0) – educating and mobilizing people.

In terms of innovation, we often look to tech cities, but what happened was that we saw innovation globally, like in China, driving down the price of solar faster than Silicon Valley. We could design apps for our electrical cars – the wormhole has been created for techies to get involved in these spaces. Developing the app should be more than a marketing ploy, 1/3 to 1/2 of the pitches Treehugger gets are not sustainable or helpful. It’s just a lack of knowledge and a lot of good small companies are nervous about tooting their own horn.

What gets more done in the world – philanthropy or starting from a cause-based perspective? Third option: the local communities – that’s where the forests and lakes are – Google wants to democratize this access, like the Surui Amazon tribe using Google Earth to stop illegal environmental operations.

Companies, do something more than just generating sustainability reports and patting yourself on the back. Let’s move beyond that to taking your passion and knowledge and techie people and tackle a real problem to make a more significant impact. Why is Plan A for Haiti to rebuild it using fossil fuels? Why aren’t these companies using that money to rebuild with sustainable infrastructure?? Let’s combine forces across industries and companies rather than chipping away in isolation.

Is it hypocritical to work on solving environmental problems with more and more technology, which takes a lot of power and resources? It’s case by case, it can be wasteful or not – look at Kindle for books, it’s the difference between going through one a year vs keeping one for 5 years. Also, sharing resources – why keep a drill, a tent, a car you only need sometimes when you could just share those things with others? Look at China, if they bought cars the way they did, we could never support a billion cars! We need collaborative consumption solutions.

Opening to the floor:

• Another issue is that people don’t know what sustainability really is, and there’s people who are spreading misinformation about sustainability. We need tools for transparency. We also need to educate techies and inspire them – techies have the tools to reach people with info and data and metrics.
• Let’s make clean tech sexy and interesting – clean tech isn’t rejected, but they’re just not on techies’ radar. Let’s have a “Clean Tech” track at SXSW Interactive! Recommend more clean tech panels.

 

Keynote: Blake Mycoskie of TOMS Shoes [Liveblogging SXSWi]

Blake’s story:

Goes to Argentina for a month to experience the culture, and met some volunteers doing a shoe drive to give used shoes to children. He goes with them on the shoe drive, literally putting shoes on kids’ feet. It bothered him about what happens when kids wear out the shoes or they grow out of them, “why are charities only responsible? What about entrepreneurs?” He partnered with a friend to learn how to make Argentinean shoes and he showed his female friends the colorful shoes to see what they thought. They helped me with pricing, design ideas and stores to sell them in LA.

Store owner: “I love your shoes, but it’s your story.” Then in LA fashion writer picked up the story and 2,200 pairs sold overnight though I only had an inventory of 140 pairs, but my Argentinean shoemaker Jose could only do 200 pairs a month so we got to where we could make 800 pairs a week.

July 2006, Anna Wintour calls and runs a story in Vouge, and every retailer calls. We sold 10,000 pairs of shoes. Time to go back to Argentina and hand place them on every child’s foot. TOMS shoes didn’t change my life, the shoe delivery in Argentina did. Having shoes meant these children could attend school.

The Philosophy for Business:

• Giving feels good and it’s a good business strategy and for our personal brand, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Your customers and employees stick around, and you do good.
• Your customers become your greatest marketers – they support us, they become involved, they tell our story and evangelize. We didn’t have to focus on advertising, but on giving.
• You also attract and retain the best employees in the world – they do it not for the money but because they want to be a part of something.
• Not everyone can do this but you can take time to volunteer as a business – it helps others, helps your employees, helps your work culture.
• When you incorporate giving, you attract amazing partners as well, like us and Ralph Lauren. AT&T did a commercial and told our story and showed how technology and communication helps make it happen.

Two Questions I always get:

1. I always answer: Who is Tom? There is no Tom. It’s TOMS shoes as in “Tomorrow shoes”.
2. I never answered this in public before: What is next for TOMS? I knew since 2007, there are so many other needs. Let’s talk about the next chapter of “One for One” – the next product (shows the mystery box) will be released on June 7, 2011. We are no longer a shoe company.

Can Design and Technology Fix America’s Education Problem? [Liveblogging SXSWi]

Jon Kolko @jkolko from ac4d – Austin Center for Design

75% HS grad rate, 56% college grad rate – that sucks. But that’s okay, Apple will save education right??

Technology is a red herring – Tech will not fix the crisis of higher ed, but rather teaching students: Three Pedagogical Tenants at ac4d

• Sense-making through Rapid Prototyping – ideas are free but until you have a “thing,” it is not real and you haven’t made sense of the world around you
• Empathy – a skill that take rigor
• Abductive reasoning – argument for best explanation, depending on circumstances and experience
  • deductive – output will be true if the premise is true
  • inductive – good evidence that a conclusion is true – it’s true until it’s not
• These three tenants bring us to solving problems worth solving, 3rd world education, homelessness.

Steven Tomlinson @speelunk of UT: How tech can scale the best things happening in education right now.

The Acton School of Business MBA program:

• people learn best from people who have done it
• easier to train industry people to be good teachers than to train academics
• practicing like you play
• integrate electives in with the core in a more efficient way
• we created the school we wish we had gone to
• this needs to scale, not just the 40 people a year – so many create cool small boutique programs, how do we share it without creating an online half-baked experience?

Here’s what we did:

1. simulate and create tools people can use on their own before they even show up to class (browser games) – get the knowledge into their reflexes. using games to learn basic building blocks, and now we even have kids playing them
2. create opportunities to meet industry pros- mentorship program with clear expectations
3. design the path into chunks that add up: break education into smallest chunks that pay off fast and get students wanting to learn
4. give students a way to meet others on the same journey – our students all meet each other 3 months early before class starts in their online study groups, etc. – students want to establish a reputation and fit into the tribe.
5. always keep the human element in mind, harness the motivation students already have
6. teachers as coaches, not a parent/child relationship – we take your motivation as our starting point

Dennis Littky @Dennis_Littky: every 13 seconds over the summer students are dropping out of school

The solutions are way off – tweaking around the edges, asking the wrong questions that are too “in the box”

What they should be asking: “How do students learn best? What is learning?” – finding your passions & meeting people

I got to invent my own school: re-defining learning

• Ask 9th graders what they want to learn/what’s your passion – then send them out to work in the community for 2 days a week then bring them back to improve their experiences and do real projects.
• Every 10 weeks the students have to present in exhibitions to their community, parents and peers.
• A 9th grader who’s passion was Tupac ended up studying Nelson Mandela and leading a peace conference in Africa.
• amazing graduate, attendance rates.
• scaling up – the Gates Foundation gave us $5 million dollars and said give us 10 more schools, and now we have dozens of schools
• we follow our kids through college as well – and now I’m mad about them dropping out of college & student loan debt, so…
• College Unbound – same philosophy

Q&A:

What do you think of MoodleShare and spreading classes like this? It’s the MP3 to the music industry. We’re finding students prefer a well-designed online course than sitting in a class. Kolko doesn’t care if students love it, are they really learning? Puts it all on the student – they’re missing the interaction and projects. This tech should not be “instead of”. Students need to find purpose and the people and the real-world projects to motivate, then use the tech to find the info they need – it’s not taking a course but using tech for what they need. We shouldn’t confuse education (what helps people learn) and the education business (which will be disrupted).

Dennis: How do you handle teacher and mentor burnout? We learned you can be 24/7 in different ways. Burnout comes from feeling unsatisfied. Some teachers will set their own pace and over 90% will come back after their first 4 year class.

We’re bring back apprenticeship – can you talk about do we need to keep campuses? Kolko appreciates the generalist/mentor tied to the student and apprenticeships that students seeks out. Tomlinson’s campus is optimized as an open plan for meeting and working on projects. There will always be a need for creating these kinds of places. We’re so often either/or than and/both. These young people benefit from a community.

As an individual without backing and money, can I just show up to a school and offer to help? It’s good that you’re fed up with the dream job thing, meanwhile the world is collapsing around us – how do I do what I do for good? Take a volunteer approach, and take an authoritative tone with empathy to offer strategies to how you can help in your community beyond just building them a website.

Parents? Dennis: They’re an equal player in our school, helping to design the curriculum. So often schools don’t let parents really impact their kid’s education. It’s part of our job is “we enroll families” to encourage parents and kids on the importance of learning. Tomlinson talks about experiments where low income parents are paid based on their kid’s school performance and there are measurable results; parents can take more time to help their kids.

How do we disrupt the center? Making and enforcing other credible ways of displaying skill like portfolios other than arbitrary grades/degrees. Kolko is not interesting in scaling his work, but he hope that his students will spread their learning.

How do we tell the story of non-traditional education? Dennis: you just gotta keep doing it. Our country is one size fits all when in realty one size fits no one. Tomlinson: Make it easier to credibly signal their skills to the world. Business will support it because they want what works.

Long After the Thrill: Sustaining Passionate Users [Liveblogging SXSWi]

Presenter: Stephen P. Anderson, @stephenanderson, #sixd – “Seductive Interaction Design“

Are you in a long-term relationship? would you like to stay in that relationship? Think of it like a human – “how do we get to first base with our users?”

How do we get people to fall in love and stay in love with our applications/service?

• motivating consumers with game mechanics? no - motivatinghuman behavior with psychology with appropriate challenges

Sustaining passionate users through delightful challenges. Teacher/Designer Attitudes:

• Apply yourself - figure it out yourself: “This stuff is boring but you’ll have to work and apply yourself to get something out of this class”
• Sugar-coating/Gamification – a new layer of fun: “This stuff isn’t all interesting but I’ve added some activities to the content that will make it more fun.”
  • play and challenges (conflicts and choices) + feedback loops + goals and rewards = game –> but many shift the focus from the challenges to focusing on rewards (external motivations); focus on the intrinsic motivations – play, challenges, conflicts, choices, feedback loops
  • Ex: making a time tracking app – think of a game and apply it’s mechanics to encourage people to use the app. Or a music app developing challenges to encourage people to listen to music, Old Navy hiding easter eggs on their site, etc. But the flaw with this exercise is adding a layer of fun to the core challenge (see next section).
• Mastery: “This stuff is interesting! I’m going to show you why this is important but first I have a challenge for you…” In one class, the info is presented to encourage concensus, and another class
  • performance goals (getting an A in French class) vs learning challenge –> mastery (learning to speak French)

How do you identify the core challenge? ex: Why are you here for SXSW?

• The 5 why’s – keep asking yourself why you need to do this and eventually you’ll drill down to what you really want to get out of the project – ex: “I want to make a time-tracking app to better estimate my time.”
• Your game mechanics should be in service to meeting your core challenge.

Psychological Concepts:

• set completion – the closer we are to completing a set of goals, the more motivated you are to finish (like getting all of your emails done for the day)
• status – leaderboards, reputation, best streak (don’t break the chain – 750 words)
• competition
• scarcity – ex: you can only upload so many times a month on Dribbble to encourage quality submissions
• The one secret to changing human behavior? Feedback loops let the user know how they’re doing. Tightening this loop encourages change, like knowing how much water you use in a day, rather than once a month, or showing your MPG on your car’s dashboard. Or the fitbit. Attaching a measure to anything turns it into a game. Feedback shouldn’t just be numbers, but give feedback that will engage – conceptual metaphor, visual imagery.

But games usually have an ending. Delighting users with challenges only last so long. So why stick around an application for years?

• It works, and continually update/improve the application.
• My friends use it.
• There isn’t another option.
• It’s not complicated.
• Does one particular thing well.
• The application is trustworthy and valuable.

The Kano Model: Over time, delight/excitement becomes less so – like getting flowers from a lover every week, you’re less delighted than you were originally.

 

So how do we get people to stay in love?

• Social proof – we tend to go where our friends are, what most people are using.
• Stories – personal narratives we construct
• look for the “game” already in the activity
• focus on intrinsic motivations
• goals and rewards should be in service to the core activity

The full slides for this presentation: