HeidiAllen.com

I used to be an independent IT contractor, and one of the things that I disliked about the job was the difficulty in getting behemoth companies to react to changing technology. There seemed to be three primary reasons for this:

1. The opinions of high level managers trumped the advice from experts. No effort was made to weigh differing opinions against the facts.
2. Pre-existing contracts with fellow behemoth companies made upgrading to current technology legally impossible and/or financially prohibitive.
3. Employees comfortable with the existing technology were so fearful of change that they would impede or even sabotage attempts to bring software and hardware up to date.

This last phenomenon appeared to happen primarily on a subconscious, rather than conscious level. However, there were contractors whose continued lucrative employment depended on the ongoing use of outdated technology. On at least one occassion, a contractor bragged to me that he had so “personalized” his code that the company would have to continue renewing his contract forever if they wanted their technology to work.

Bottom line: The customers of these companies suffered, whether they were aware of it or not. Their data was harder to obtain. Customer Service reps had access to fewer tools, which slowed them down. Websites were designed by third parties with no understanding of specific customer needs and expectations. Lastly, updates rarely happened.

Surfing around the web, I see these problems played out repeatedly. Today, I came across the International Finance Corporation’s page, ‘How To Report Fraud and Corruption‘. The IFC is a member of the World Bank, and is the world’s largest lender for privately financed projects in “developing” nations. Billions of dollars and millions of lives ride of its ability to operate efficiently and effectively. Yet this short, but important webpage features not a form, but a clickable email address.

Why  is that a problem? First of all, users should have some sort of guidance as to the specific information they need to provide when it comes to something this important. Web forms are commonplace these days. A business entity of IFC’s size shouldn’t be using a method that’s at least a decade old.

Of greater concern, spammers have software that “crawls” the web, much like search engines do. This software looks for email addresses. Congratulations, IFC! You’ll receive so much spam that it will be nearly impossible to sort the junk from legitimate fraud complaints.

But my post isn’t intended to target the IFC. Rather, I’m presenting a problem in search of a solution. How do you change entrenched corporate culture? How do you get an elephant to move with the speed of a gazelle? Google does it, so clearly, such a thing is possible. Now the new paradigm needs to propagate… faster.

This simple tip should also work in Jaguar & Panther, but I haven’t tested it.

It’s all too easy to accidentally delete an icon from the Sidebar (left side) of Finder. If you’ve deleted the icon for a hard drive, iDisk, Computer, Network, removable media (like a CD/DVD or USB drive), Connected Servers, Desktop, Home (your user directory) or Applications, simply go to the Finder menu at the top of your screen, select Preferences, then click on Sidebar and check the icon you want to restore.

If you’ve deleted your Documents icon, click on Home (the house icon), find the Documents folder, and drag that folder icon to a spot between other icons in the Sidebar. Go to the same place to restore your Music icon using the Music folder.

You can use this same method to add icons for items not already shown in the Sidebar, like the Movies or Pictures folder.

The Senate will be debating a bill this coming Tuesday that, if passed, would essentially destroy the Internet as we know it. The companies that own the web’s “backbones” would be able to regulate aspects of the Internet infrastructure, and how users access websites, based on their own policies and profit motive.

This could easily lead to separate and unequal Internets… one for the companies that can afford to spend what it takes to get visitors, and one for poorer and non-profit websites.

Send your Senator an email:

Save The Net

(Update: There are times when Flash is useful. Examples include artist and musician websites, and instructional materials. In fact, hiding images in Flash is a great way to make them harder to steal. Unfortunately, the great majority of websites that use Flash have no practical purpose for doing so, and plenty of reasons why they shouldn’t.)

More and more companies are allowing misguided website designers to build them entire sites using Macromedia Flash. With very few exceptions, this will cause the company to actually lose customers. Here’s why:

~ Some users don’t already have Flash installed, and they don’t want to go through the hassle of downloading and installing it just to view your site.

~ According to Arbitron, a little less than half of all internet users still use dial-up. They just want information. If they have to wait for a Flash presentation to load, they’ll probably go elsewhere.

~ The website won’t load unless it’s in the foreground window. You may think this is a good thing, but…

~ Most website users don’t want to be forced to view your Flash intro.

~ They don’t want to have to wait for the ‘Skip Intro’ link to appear.

~ You do have a ‘Skip Intro’ link… don’t you? If not, you’ve just lost potential customers.

~ Many of your visitors are listening to music while surfing the web. When your music automatically loads, it creates audio cacophony. The fastest way for the user to end this cacophony is to close your site.

~ Everytime the visitor returns to your site, they have to wait for the Flash presentation to load again before they can click on ‘Skip Intro’ and get to what they wanted. This gets old fast.

~ Once the user has skipped the intro, Flash sites usually load into frames. This means that your users can’t bookmark a particular page. If the site is large, finding that page again will be such a hassle that the user will probably decide against bookmarking your site at all.

~ When Flash sites open in a new window, the URL and Back/Forward controls are hidden. Most web users aren’t savvy enough to know how to make these important controls display again, and they don’t want to start over. They may leave instead.

~ When users right click on the page, there are no Back/Forward options.

~ When users right click on a page, there is no ‘Add to Favorites’ option.

~ For whatever reason, many Flash site designers seem to have skipped learning how to create a usable website interface with intuitive navigation.

Here’s a fun test: Pretend you’re ready to buy. Try to find useful information about a specific product at this site. Go ahead… I dare you!

A “hard wrap” is the point at which a line of text wraps around to the next line. It’s set to a certain number of characters, including spaces. Different email programs use different default hard wrap settings, and not all of them are adjustable. The result is often messages that are difficult to read.

For example, let’s say that my email program (called a “client” by techies) has a default hard wrap of 65 characters. Now let’s say that your email client, which is a free online service, has a hard wrap of 55 characters. This is what you might see when I send you an email:

I’m increasingly fascinated by how the cultural mind
works. Memes seem to spread
with the greatest of ease, whether they’re based on
fact or not. For example,
even among acquaintances who are proponents of
sustainability, the meme on
everyone’s lips is that renewable energy and
gasoline-free vehicles aren’t ready
for a large-scale rollout, and that coal and nuclear
power may be practical
options. Neither part of this meme is true.

This is just the beginning. If your message has older emails included at the bottom, they’ve been re-hard wrapped several times, so their line lengths are practically random. This also messes up their quote level indicators. You could have three or more different text colors in one sentence!

Add to this the advertising and text notices that your free online service inserts after you hit the ‘Send’ button, and things can really get ugly.

There is a simple solution. Get the email client developers to agree on a single hard wrap default standard. Anyone up for the task?