Triple Issue No. 292 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, is all about search.

Testing Search for Relevancy and Precision

by JOHN FERRARA

Despite the fact that site search often receives the most traffic, it’s also the place where the user experience designer bears the least influence. Few tools exist to appraise the quality of the search experience, much less strategize ways to improve it. But relevancy testing and precision testing offer hope. These are two tools you can use to analyze and improve the search user experience.

Internal Site Search Analysis: Simple, Effective, Life Altering!

by AVINASH KAUSHIK

Your search and clickstream data is missing a key ingredient: customer intent. You have all the clicks, the pages people viewed, and where they bailed, but not why they came to the site. Your internal site-search data contains that missing ingredient: intent. Learn five ways to analyze your internal site-search data—data that’s easy to get, to understand, and to act on.

Beyond Goals: Site Search Analytics from the Bottom Up

by LOU ROSENFELD

Top-down analytics are great for creating measurable goals you can use to benchmark and evaluate the performance of your content and designs. But bottom-up analysis teaches you something new and unexpected about your customers—something goal-driven analysis can’t show you. Discover the kinds of information users want, and identify your site’s most urgent mistakes.

Illustration by Kevin Cornell.

Filed under: A List Apart, Publications, Publishing, Search, UX, Web Design

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Reviving an old zeldman.com tradition, we once again present downloadable desktop images for your computer screen and pleasure. First up: Meet Harry.

ShortURL: zeldman.com/?p=2620

Filed under: Design, Desktops, downloads

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At the hospital, where we intended to donate blood, we are turned away. They’ve run out of blood bags.

My Glamorous Life, September 11, 2001.

Filed under: glamorous

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It seems like only yesterday that the HTML5 Super Friends asked the HTML5 working groups to rethink footer’s content model to avoid web developer misuse and frustration. Okay, it wasn’t yesterday, it was Monday. Close enough. Today comes word that footer is indeed being redefined as we requested. This is a wonderful usability improvement to HTML5, and we salute the working group(s) for listening and acting.

• Meyerweb: Nine Into Five
• HTML5 Super Friends
• HTML5 Super Friends Footer Change Request
• HTML5 footer change

Filed under: editorial, Education, HTML, HTML5, Web Design History, Web Standards

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The HTML5 specification runs on for over 900 pages, and much of what it covers, while vital to browser makers, is meaningless to people who create websites. If thousands of irrelevant details in the HTML5 spec have you crossing your eyes and crying for Mama, Michael™ Smith’s HTML 5: The Markup Language is just what the HTML5 doctor ordered: lean, clean, and content-author-focused. Until there’s a plain-language HTML5 Pocket Guide, Smith’s edited presentation of the spec will do. (It’s also available in a single page format.)

ShortURL: zeldman.com/?p=2561

Filed under: editorial, Education, HTML, HTML5, Web Design History, Web Standards

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1. http://webtrendmap.com/ by IA Inc. is farking amazing and beautiful. Congratulations, @iA.
2. OH: “Type means the letters.”
3. http://www.biggestapple.net/ is an exquisite new blog by a Wodehouse fan and non-designer (but you’d never know).
4. My 5-year-old just spent 10 minutes showing me the correct way to massage her foot. My little girl is becoming a woman.
5. HTML5 Super Friends declaration of support: http://www.zeldman.com/superfriends/
6. In the park with the kid and friends, watching the sunlit hours melt away. It is the mellow end of summer and our bodies know it.
7. http://bit.ly/InfXh Installing Snow Leopard: What you need to know. Fewer options make for simpler installation.
8. The difference between marriage and divorce is, in divorce, the person who’ll never have sex with you again has her own apartment.
9. “HTML 5 and me” by Jeremy Keith: http://bit.ly/sOqt7
10. Dreamed about Mackenzie Phillips and woke up with a $500 a day habit.
11. RT @leeclowsbeard Every client wants something new. And three examples of where it’s worked before. (via @Coudal)
12. #twitterwit is now in bookstores. It’s an honor to have my work appear in the same volume as real writers like Ashton Kucher.
13. Laura Dern’s hair is the scariest thing in Blue Velvet.
14. @sourjayne At a certain level, you don’t write a resume, you write a paragraph.
15. @sourjayne A multi-page resume suggests you’re narcissistic or inexperienced. These are not desired qualities in an employee.
16. @sourjayne A 1-page resume shows you’re aware the person reading it has no time to waste — proving you’re experienced + have people skills.
17. Actually, Barnes & Noble, I think I’ll save *100%* on Dan Brown’s follow-up to The Da Vinci Code.

Have another?

ShortURL: zeldman.com/?p=2554

Filed under: Authoring, links, Luls, Microauthoring, Microblogging, Micropublishing, twitter, writing

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On the last night of August, 2009, the MFA in Interaction Design at School of Visual Arts opened its doors to eighteen gifted students. The intense program will be like Project Runway, except that it lasts two years, and nobody will be “out.”

Created and chaired by Liz Danzico and Steven Heller, SVA’s MFA in Interaction Design is one of the only graduate-level degrees dedicated to interaction design in the U.S. Over two years of night classes, the program teaches students from diverse backgrounds (including design, computer programming, architecture, and even majors in English literature) to envision and create experiences across all manner of media, including the real world.

Students in this program will not merely become better web or interaction designers. They will develop user experience conventions in media where no such conventions exist.

In a beautiful post at Bobulate, Liz places the opening of the new program in the context of SVA’s history.

As a faculty member, I attended the opening orientation and have the crummy iPhone pictures to prove it.

It was a thrill to meet these talented students, who will spend the next two years haunting the program’s beautiful new design space at night (most of them after working at their day jobs, an SVA tradition).

To attend the program’s many free events, or simply to enjoy it vicariously, follow twitter.com/svaixd. And keep watching the skies.

ShortURL: zeldman.com/?P=2439

Filed under: Design, Education, IXD, SVA, The Profession

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