It seems every other day I find out about a new tool to get me to the information that matters most. Back in the day, it was “My Yahoo”:http://my.yahoo.com, then it was “NetNewsWire”:http://ranchero.com/netnewswire, then for a while it was “Newsgator”:http://www.newsgator.com, then “Google Home”:http://www.google.com/ig, now “Rojo”:http://rojo.com. Just today I took “Windows Live”:http://www.live.com for a spin before deciding that I liked the much lighter “Microsoft Start”:http://www.start.com. Of the competition, Rojo still wins out (for now), but not because it’s a great product. I love the lightness and ease of use of Microsoft Start, but the portals haven’t quite caught up with the information model suitable for the attention economy.
Everybody loves the idea of a portal: one place, all your information. Get stock quotes, email, weather, global news, local news, website comments, blog entries, Flickr photos, product announcements, local movie times, whatever. Add to that my bank account balance (secure, of course, but we’ll leave those worms in the can for now), upcoming events from my calendar, and task lists and I might be a real happy camper — in charge of all the bits of information that I need to meet my goals for the day. But the problem is that this is all still a lot easier said than done. While the technology is here to tie most of this information together through RSS, portal designers *still* seem to repeat a cardinal sin of web applications, which is to engineer the technology first, and paint on the user interface after.
“These guys”:https://gettingreal.37signals.com/ will tell you that this is the exact *wrong* way to build an app, and I think poignantly so with one that’s intended to emulate a newspaper. With the advent of the information age, we’ve replaced hundreds of years of typography and graphic design insight, with this:
A tiny, constrictive, awkward little idiot box of information nobody wants to read. Spread out another 8 of these little boxes all over your screen in tic-tac-toe formation and, voilà, welcome back to 1999. To really make things horrifying, throw in some Microsoft-issue, 9-point Verdana typeface (will somebody _please_ tell these guys that Verdana is to the web what Times New Roman was to print five years ago?). Now you’ve got something that would send Edward Tufte to the grave just so he could spin in it.
Okay, okay, both Google’s and Microsoft’s custom homepages have been hailed as web 2.0 because of their Ajaxy drag-and-drop, redesign-on-the-fly features. But, really, how often are you supposed to be modifying your screen layout? 10% of the time? That leaves the other 90% of the time that you’re using the screen for it’s main function: _reading it_. The exact functionality that Google and Microsoft both seem to have spent the least amount of time perfecting. Bravo.
Think I’m overreacting? Go build yourself a Google or Microsoft or Yahoo dashboard and come back. Think you’ve got something you can live with? Now go look at “Veerle Pieters’ site redesign”:http://veerle.duoh.com/. You might have built a page that you might not mind looking at day in and day out, but you’re not going to find any tool today that will construct a site for you as compelling and interesting as Veerle’s site. And, remember, the portal is supposedly showing you information _that you care about_.
Well crafted dashboards need to be “designed to be read”:http://www.porsche.com/filestore.aspx/normal.jpg?pool=germany&type=galleryimage&id=d9af94b7-9c30-4ff2-a8c4-9401abf25d76&lang=none&filetype=normal, not to be “consumed”, and certainly not as an afterthought. In the transition from the information economy (“wow, look at all the cool stuff I can read”) to the attention economy (“*good Lord*, how do I get rid of all the noise?!”) design will mean the difference between making a successful web 2.0 app and being an also-ran.
No, you’re not overreacting at all.
However, i’m not sure that the current ‘good web design’ ideas will create a useful application that you can use.
Whenever I spend time thinking about a dashboard type app I always come back to my email client.
you have 3 ‘windows’:
1) Folder list
2) Item List
3) Read/compose area
This works VERY well. You have all your data orginized on the left, with highlighting of some sort to indicate new email. You have all your conversations on the right/top in the form of threaded emails. and you have an area where you can work with a conversation.
Why can’t this model be extended to accomidate more types of information?
RSS? works just as well. Create a new folder, “RSS Feeds”, in side that folder create a new folder for each feed you get and sort the feeds into that folder. Now your familar email client is also your RSS Reader. It can be done with ANY email client, doesn’t even have to understand RSS. Programs such as rss2email do this for you (and you can get different ones that do the same thing on a windows box, you don’t need it to be server side to setup).
What about Instant Messages? This would need a plugin to handle, but why not just create a new folder called “Buddy List” and put all your buddies from all the different protocols into that folder. The log files would be thread conversations up top. Current conversation down in the bottom-right frame.
Bookmarks could be pulled form delicious and dropped into another folder called “Bookmarks” and have nested levels of tags. The top and bottom right panes could be used to navigate your tags (http://johnvey.com/features/deliciousdirector/ for an example of what i mean with navigating tags using the other 2 panes).
I really believe that the current form of the email client could be used for everything. Either as a standalone application or a really well done web2.0 application. Its any easy and intuitive way of working with data that most people know very well, so the learning curve wouldn’t be too great. If it is done modularly it would be easy to add more functionality. Want to add photo’s down the road, no problem, write a plugin that turns it into an iPhoto clone.
(the more i think about it, the more i think a desktop client AND a web interface would be best. Put the client on your home computer and use the web interface when at other computers. Just set it up to sync the data.)
Bravo for mentioning Veerle’s redesign. She has always done great work, but has really raised the bar in this last update.
And you’re right on with this post. Right now Ajax and Ruby on Rails are buzzwords that have potential, but its not useful to implement them just for the sake of having them, they need to be useable. We have a lot of new technology available to us, but before it can fully come to fruition developers need to work closely with designers so that useability is part of the plan, rather than just making really cool websites.
Keep up the great work, your blog is becoming more cool.
Oh, hooray for advocating form AND function. Aesthetics are important! I just started using the google home page, and after the “hey, this is nice that I can rearrange at the drop of a hat!” feeling wore off, I realized that when the NYTimes home page was my home page, I was interested in reading the articles (whereas now that it’s a “tiny, constrictive, awkward little idiot box of information”, I’m uninterested, as you pointed out).
So when will we be able to start downloading and using a Ken Walker Dashboard?
“Mike”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/03/15/return-of-the-portal-how-dashboards-need-to-evolve-in-the-attention-economy/#1278, I agree that the tried-and-true three-pane interface is good for consuming a LOT of information, and it’s a model I use for most of the information I process throughout the day (which is mostly email and RSS).
A dashboard, though, would be able to summarize the most interesting or important data in one view for me so I could scan over it. What I’d really like that dashboard to do is let me drill down _into_ a three-pane interface if I’d like to learn more.
For a good three-pane interface, you might be interested in “FeedLounge”:http://feedlounge.com/ by Alex King.
“Chris”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/03/15/return-of-the-portal-how-dashboards-need-to-evolve-in-the-attention-economy/#1279, thanks.
Yeah, it’s great to see such fun toys come out of the context of what I would call “responsible” web design. The future of the web has a lot of interesting stuff in store.
“Kyleen”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/03/15/return-of-the-portal-how-dashboards-need-to-evolve-in-the-attention-economy/#1280, wow, thanks for sticking around for the geek stuff, too. You hit it on the head: the gee, whiz factor of the Google Homepage only lasts so long. As for the Ken Walker dashboard, well, this might be something where I’m more interested in “buy” (or find an open source project) than “build.” My other “big project”:http://villagechurchnyc.com is taking up quite a bit of my free time these days…
Are you kidding?! I’m a huge wanna-be-geek. Before I moved to New York, nearly all my guy friends were geeks (and most of them work in IT now). Your big project is pretty darn swell, by the way.
Thanks for the great article. I would note that, at the corporate level, the understanding of the need for the UI layer to be organic and not a bolted-on afterthought has finally become entrenched. There is more work than ever for designers, information architects, and other UI specialists on major dashboarding projects. Look through the collection of dashboard screenshots here at http://dashboardspy.wordpress.com to see the emergence of nicely thought out and laid out dashboards in a multitude of industries.