Sites you like (or don't)
As you may know, I am in the midst of leading HASTAC through a complete overhaul of our web site. Our small staff has begun discussing some other web sites we like, especially in terms of their functionality and how content is presented on their front pages.
Since the HASTAC community is full of leading edge thinkers about technology (especially as it actually gets used by humans) we thought you would have good suggestions for us. What are some of your favorite sites (or least favorite) and why? What makes them understandable and usable, and what makes you keep coming back?
Please let us know your thoughts in the comments. Thanks!
- Ruby Sinreich's blog
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Websites?
The only websites I visit regularly are Google Reader, Wikipedia, Gmail, and Facebook. Otherwise, I get all my information from Twitter. That's not a terribly helpful answer, though, but do people really visit websites as primary destinations anymore? If so, I think Ars Technica has a really nice design and layout. Lots of ways to filter its diverse content. Huffington Post is somewhat similar with its topic categories, even if the quality of its content has gone downhill. So, I guess more ways of filtering, especially the huge number of blog posts this site sees, would be a wonderful usability addition.
Useful
Actually I think that's quite helpful. It's a reminder that we need to make sure our content is open and available in a variety of formats, especially RSS feeds. Maybe we should even think about making Google widgets or spending more time on our Facebook group, for example.
I also agree with your point on filtering. Great content is one of the wonderful things we have going for this site, but there's a ton we could do to make it more findable and usable.
Thanks for the suggestions!
Favorite Sites
A website and archive that I have returned to again and again is UBUWEB. My life would be lacking without it.
Poetic collections
Thanks, Jim. I assume you are referring to http://www.ubu.com? I'm just checking it out now.
They seem to keep it simple, which makes aesthetic and functional sense given their poetic content. It's interesting to see how they utilize collections, something we are thinking about incorporating in the new hastac.org.
Collections
Yes Ruby, ubu.com is it. I see the dividing line with online collections to be whether they are user driven or not. MyMedia and archive.org are also good examples. MyMedia seems to be totally user driven while the archive.org site mixes both user derived content with acquisitions. UBUWEb has published "a document containing methodical considerations of why and how the website has been archived”. It is worth reading I think...
Archiving Ubu
Wow - a whole website about managing the archives of another web site! Quite pertinent and useful for our process right now. Thanks again for the tip!
question is a big vague
The question is a bit vague: Like or don't like? Any particular categories?
As far as sites that aggregate a lot of different kinds of rich content, I like AVclub.com. Nice presentation of new content, well integrated commenting functionality, lots of ways to fly through the articles and postings.
As far as community sites go, I like Ravelry. It's a nice balance between curated content and community contributions, with ways to see what is happening on the site right now.
Good stuff
Excellent question and suggestions, Rik. To be more specific, the qualities I'm thinking of for "sites you like" are features and functionality, layout, navigation, content, interface, and aesthetics (roughly in that order. I'm also interested in how organizations with deep and varied content present themselves on their front pages.
A site I don't like? That's
A site I don't like? That's easy: http://www.pathguy.com/ . He has updated the home page to be fairly concise, with columns and headers. But click on one of the subjects (like Nutrition) and what you get is an incredibly loooong page without sections or headers. The only way to find anything to do search for it.
That may be picking low-hanging fruit. What I _like_ in a site is a) easy-to-find headers for common functions (for instance, most college or university websites have a cluster of options on their first page for directory/people search, library, departments, etc.), b) an easy-to-find search bar with good return power (think Google=good, Yahoo search=bad), c) quick load time, d) few/no (flashing) ads (duh!). See also www.slate.com for its columns allowing you to find a lot of information via a variety of channels (author, section, pub date, what's popular). Those are just some off-the-cuff thoughts. Thanks for asking!
OK, this may not be at all
OK, this may not be at all helpful!!!
One site I have not found useful is hastac.org. While I've been running OpenHistoryProject.org and related efforts for years, and applied for HASTAC grants, I've never "got" what hastac is about or whether it is related to my concerns or not.
One big point: the fonts are too small, the columns too wide. Even when my eyes were 20/13, this page would not have been readible. Why? The human brain generally can take in about 56 characters in a line. Blog posts here have more than twice that.
A related improvement--but probably not fixable by you the designer--would be proper sentence construction. Consider this on under a headline I found compelling:
The other reason that is hard to create assessment tools for measuring game-based learning is that game is not a self-contained educational system that guarantees positive learning outcomes. Because games are interactive systems, and sometimes the results of certain interactions might generate negative emotions in kids. The dissemination of these negative emotions can be guided to a greater learning moment in my experience.
Sites I do like? The EdWeek blogs are readable. Though the comment reading mechanism was better before they changed engines: you could get a hyperlink for each comment. Extremely useful. (Yeah, my sentences are no better).
Opinionjournal.com remains the most readable and understandable of sites. They've now busied it up for hyperactive readers. Still, they keep to the same understanding of reading that has kept the newspaper a leading national paper for a century.
rubyonrails.org offers a great example of a tech site that introduces new readers to what lies ahead. The blog there keeps experienced users current.
For disccussions, the Classroom 2.0 ning has built 45,000 members in a couple years.
articulating goals is primary
I agree with Michael Widner's comments. I also do like ubuweb but it is for something very different than what I might presume a HASTAC site is for. This leads me to rikomatic's comment, which I also agree with: articulating your needs. What are your goals for the website? To be found via google? To keep interested parties aware of developments? To encourage public engagement in discussion? To develop course content? To To host private stakeholder conversations? Etc.
While I too have started web development projects by asking stakeholders what they like I think other approaches will work better. You may want to, for example, analyze your web traffic patterns to better understand your users. You may also want to see such data for how people enter and exit through Google and Facebook and Twitter and Youtube in particular. Also ask people what they like and don't like about your web site. Finally what are the websites of HASTAC's peers, competitors, etc.?
Also, finally, what is it about Facebook and Twitter? They give people trusted networks for delivering good/pre-approved content. People do still use content hubs outside of the giant web 2.0 sites though that is a fading phenomenon. And this leads me to an important point: how does HASTAC envision the role of the web? Answering that might lead you to consider doing new things, things people haven't done before. Do something with your website that no one else does, that you could do, that will drive your audience to your site or at the very least to your content and ultimately your name.
Ravelry is a tremendous site! Also I agree with the accessibility concerns from Ed Jones. It would be helpful to HASTAC to have internationalization features as well.
Support Collaboration by Difference
Following up on the theme of articulate your features, it would be interesting to me if you had (or embraced 3rd party) a feature set that was aimed at fostering collaboration by difference.
You need some discovery/joining elements such as:
RSS, Trackback for blogs, commenting without an account (you'll need something like Akismet to help with spam control)
You'd also want some kind of peer-review/reputation capacity. SlashDot comes to mind. It would be nice if this was more than thumbs up/down. I've recently taken a liking to the Amazon.com product reviews with the option to read the most useful postive review and the most useful negative review.
Tracking a user's contribtions across the site, a la, the user's contribution feature of Wikipedia.
I like Diigo for social bookmarking because of its feature to highlight and comment on a specific aspect of a page -- which is approximated by the Google SideWiki - see http://communitylearning.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/backu-dml-competition-...