Usability.gov's Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines lose instant credibility for being available only as a 39.2 MB PDF file, with all of the usability and accessibility problems that brings with it. I'm on a fast connection here so I downloaded them anyway to have a look. There's actually a lot of good things I can say about them - the document is attractively laid out, the guidelines clear and easy to follow and each is backed up by references to academic research (hence the title). There are however some guidelines with which I completely disagree, in particular the ones in chapter 4, entitled "Hardware and Software":

4:1 Design for Common Browsers

Guideline: Design, develop and test for the most common browsers.

Comments: Designers should attempt to accommodate ninety-five percent of all users. Ensure that all testing of a website is done using the most popular browsers.

Rubbish. Designers should attempt to accommodate 100% of all users (in as much as content should be accessible to them), which really isn't difficult if you stick to the standards rather than designing with a particular browser in mind. The 95% statistic is particularly worrying as they link to The Counter.com as a source of browser statistics, which currently shows Internet Explorer as holding 93% of the market.

4:2 Account for Browser Differences

Guideline: Do not assume that all users will have the same browser features, and will have set the same defaults.

Comments: Visually impaired users tend to select larger fonts, and some users may turn off backgrounds, use fewer colors, or use font overrides. The designer should find out what settings most users are using, and specify on the website exactly what assumptions were made about the browser settings.

Great guideline, lousy comment. How does specifying on a site what assumptions were made about the browser settings help anyone? It's almost like having "best viewed in Internet Explorer at 1024x768 with 32 bit colour" plastered on to the front page. No one is going to change their settings for your site, so telling them what is assumed isn't going to help them one iota.

Tellingly, the guidelines make no mention of using web standards or validating pages anywhere in the document. While there's lots of useful stuff in there, this omission (and the clangers highlighted above) mean the overall package should be examined with a critical eye.

1:44:42 PM    

In Comments, Aggregators, and Broadcast Models Liz Lawley  points to a a comments thread on Julia Lerman’s site on posting behavior and aggregators, where Sam Gentile says

Of course, a blog is personal but is very well established that if you don't have a RSS feed you just don't get read. I don't what world you two are in but that is a well established fact by now. The majority of blog readers read blogs through RSS feeds in aggregators. Thats the whole point. No one has the time to go to 100 separate web sites versus one window with 100 feeds. This is so established that I am not going to even debate it. Nor am I going to debate the comments. The tiny amount of commenting that goes on in the blogging world is so small that its insignificant. Most blogs don't even have comments and if they do you see very little if ever leading to the conclusion that most people in the blogging world read feeds and "comment" by blog posts not commenting systems.

I would agree with Liz that the majority of people reading blogs via RSS readers is an assumption. I guess there are many people, who would agree with Liz saying:

And despite the lengthy list of weblogs I read regularly, I still resist using an aggregator, because the visual aspect, the virtual space, of a weblog is important to me.

I believe there is a great number of people who don't know about RSS readers, find them too difficult or simply don't care (e.g. only a quoter of would be bloggers is planning use of news aggregators). Next to it many people find weblogs via Google, read a bit and go away.

Some insights about possible numbers:

• Seb's Poll: how are you reading this blog? shows 38 RSS reader vs. 19 browser at the moment I write it
• my own stats (e.g. September) show that RSS traffic is half of my homepage traffic (RSS hits are 10 times homepage hits)
• for a few qualitative explanations see What do you read?

However, what makes me wondering is not how many people use one or another way, but why do they use it and what does it change.

For example, using news aggregators for reading weblogs

• is more efficient
• focuses on content rather than "decoration"
• makes much easier doing all kinds of "analytics" with weblogs: going back, rearranging, tracing connections, posting
• can be superficial (e.g. scanning through headings to see if there is something important) - in this case weblogs are likely to be treated as news sources (=I'm interested in links and ideas)
• can provide a feeling of "getting to know someone better" with making regular reading of a few weblogs easier - in this case weblogs are likely to be treated as personal stories (=I'm interested in people behind weblogs)
• commenting in original weblog is less likely (because extra click or two are needed to comment)

And there are many other questions as well:

• how use of RSS readers changes our relations with authors of weblogs we read (makes establishing connections easier? helps staying updated? creates an overload?)
• how use of RSS readers changes our writing style? commenting style and place?
• how reading preferences are correlated with weblog designs? (e.g. may be RSS readers think that blogrolls are obsolete and weblog-in-browser readers don't understand the value of full-text RSS and don't care about providing it)

Many people say that RSS feeds and RSS readers are important to distingush weblogs from homepages and that RSS will stay once weblogs fade or integrate with something else. But I still wonder why there is much less discussion about "how RSS reader changed my life" than "how weblogs changed my life" and why I don't know of any research on impact of RSS readers.

I hope I'll have time to come back to these questions. As many others I believe that RSS is a key to weblog uses in business settings, so we'd better get some answers.

This post also appears on channel weblog research

1:43:31 PM    

Classroom teachers can't publically admit in real time their fears and failures without having it thrown back in their face sooner or later by a parent, administrator or student.

The question for me always is, can we write about enough of our thoughts on schools to make blogging a useful and important tool for both ourselves and others in education. Is there enough we can share that blogging really is good for thinking about schools?

I hope the answer to Chris's quesiton is yes, we have enough that we can write about to make this a worthwhile effort. More than enough. I think the sharing that our group of eduBloggers has done over the past couple of years, even if it hasn't been gut wrenching and provacative classroom narrative, has done much to advance our understanding of technology and teaching of writing. And it's opened some new doors of thinking that I think will lead to great things. Yes, we have to be careful, but we also need to keep finding ways to write about what we're doing in ways that can help one another grow. [Weblogg-ed News]

1:42:23 PM