CivicActions

Website Redesign Glossary - Entry 5

Breadcrumb: An element on a web page (usually directly below the page title) showing the click path a user traveled to arrive at the current page. For example: Home > About Us > Our Staff Usually the terms are active links, which enable the user to retrace their click path (or skip back several clicks). Breadcrumbs, especially in deep sites with multiple levels of navigation, improve usability because they help users understand where they are now as well as the overall structure of the site, and navigate back to the pages they've visited.

The term "breadcrumb" comes from the trail Hansel and Gretel left to try to find their way back home.

Website Redesign Glossary - Entry 4

Related Content: Content that is related to the main topic featured on the page. These links may be manually determined (by the content editor) or may be populated by the content management system based on predefined tags (e.g. a particular issue or region).

Links to Related Content are often displayed on a narrow column to the right of the main body copy on the page. The idea is "If you are interested in the article on this page, you may want to read additional articles on similar subjects." This is in contrast to "Read More" which usually refers to "reading more" of the article you are currently reading, by going to a page with the full article.

Farmcore: Join the urban homesteader movement! Revel in the beauty of dirt, connect with your neighbor, work with what you have. Seed trade here>.

Geekcore: bloggers, virtual revolutionaries, nerdnetizens. Commmonly seen at: NetSquared, CivicActions, NTen, and the Web of Change Conference.

Here's the start of a subjective Usability Glossary.

Information Architecture. Think of it this way: You are building a community center. You want to make sure to build enough bathrooms to accommodate everyone, that the meeting room for seniors is on the ground floor for maximum accessibility, that you put the computer room on the side of the building with the least light.

The Information Architect designs the "blueprints" for this virtual "community center", a place that will become the foundation for your community to gather.

Usability Principle #1: You can't join the party if you can't find the front door.

Monday night, after using the three-day weekend to re-landscape my front yard and launch my new un-business, I faced the reality that I had to get to San Jose for the NetSquared Mashup Conference at 8am. (The day after a three-day weekend seemed a strange scheduling choice.)

I went to the NetSquared site to find the conference location.

This proved surprisingly difficult, as I couldn't find any link referencing the logistics of the conference. After clicking back and forth through 20 other links featured above the fold, I found it discretely hidden in a side bar labeled "Hot Spot."

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What I didn't realize until later was that the address didn't identify the building number (Cisco has 2 blocks of buidlings with the same general address). None of the the employees I asked in the parking lot had any idea where the "Vineyard Conference Center" was. Should I be looking for grape vines?

Aaron Pava and I are at the NetSquared Conference, a gathering of social changemakers and geeks. This year the conference focuses on "mashups" for social good. Web mashups combine data and functionality from two distinct sources. Two iconic mashups include (Oakland Crimespotting, which maps crime data to Google maps, and Mapskrieg, which combines Craigslist apartment listings with Google maps.)

My buddy JD Leahy presented The Rosetta Project--an awesome endeavor to preserve endangered languages. Their mashup is considered to be in the "hackable" phase because it already maps audio and data about these languages onto Google Earth. At the conference, passers-by gazed at the crystal ball of alphabets and the 3" disk archive of 14,000 pages of language documentation on 2500 languages.

We just heard two-minute intros of the featured mashups. Some themes: Transparency in government (congressional bills), transparency in corporate practices (Know More, a Firefox add-on that indicates a companies environmental rating you when you're on the company's site). Recycling consumer goods (Freecycle: community-based cyber-curbside). New Orleans restoration. And all things related to maps (Green Map). I want to check out my local GreenMap group... obsess over map iconography, and invite people to participate in the EcoCitizen Trading Card project.

I WANT YOU TO READ MORE

The CivicActions team is in the process of redesigning our website at this very moment. In my role as information architect, I am helping to design the site's navigation and page structure so that users can meet their goals. Here are some sample scenarios:

• A potential client wants to find a savvy web consulting firm to transform their site and increase their audience and fundraising base.
• A job-seeker wants to find a cool place to work.
• A CivicActions team member wants to be sought after in their area of expertise, and more broadly, wants to express their ideas and get feedback from creative, brilliant people.

Click on the tiny Read more link on the far right side of the next line.

I just tried to log-in to Edible Office, my urban farm blog, but ran up against the usual roadblocks caused by a combination of multiple virtual identities, internet mergers, and my reverse-reverse-psychology password protection program.

Staring forlornly at the empty password box on the right of Blogger's screen, I mentally retraced my Google login history for the day (Blogger and Google share my secrets). A moving interface element drew my eye to the left side of the screen to a ticker featuring the names of blogs updated as of one minute ago: "Couch Potato Revolution," "The People's Pundit", "Idle Thoughts", money-making scheme blogs, blogs with Chinese characters, blogs with Russian characters.... The names keep scrolling, even as we speak. While I usually hate moving parts on the screen (try reading under a strobe light), the Blogger ticker worked for me (a la Twitter or YouTube: the seductive promise of instant gratification).

Here's my thought-tracking usability study as I watch the scrolling list of blog names:

• Something is happening here!
• People just like me blog! People nothing like me blog! Everyone is blogging!
• I can blog too!

I want to see the name of my blog on the list, dancing in shimmering neon lights across the blogosphere! (Now if only I could log in...) We all want to feel like we're part of something. Web applications and online campaigns inspire us when they help us feel connected and whole. We want reminders that we exist, that our opinions matter. In other words, we want to see that when we put something into the machine, something comes out. And when it comes out, we want to be able to show it off: "Look ma, I'm a blogger!"