Zoey Kroll's blog

Today is the final day to vote for sessions at Drupalcon San Francisco. My proposed session Show Don't Tell: Guerilla Usability Testing will outline quick usability testing strategies to bring users to the decision-making table.

Idealist.org just hatched a campaign to create a decentralized and adaptable network of idealists. Within the first few days of launch, people from over 140 countries have signed up. For what? Well, I'm not quite sure, and Idealist.org isn't either. This is a network experiment and, as they explain on their site, it will transparently evolve with feedback from the participants.

In addition to its activist merit, the campaign is an example of an ingenious brand-building strategy. Idealist.org's website offers the standard features for sharing the idealist logo on social networking sites and forwarding to friends. More significantly, however, participants conflate a personal attribute and the organization's name as one and the same. Strong brand names offer that kind of potential. I'm an idealist, are you?

I'm part of another decentralized network of idealists: CivicActions. Decentralization provides CivicActions with strategic advantages; the organization can quickly tap local technological and cultural trends, work with the best talent in the world, and communicate with a global audience. I'm a CivicActioner, are you? We love to partner with smart, idealistic organizations and individuals. Contact us and let's get the conversation started.

As part of any major web redesign effort, CivicActions recommends a brand re-assessment. Cone Inc., a communications company specializing in "cause branding," recently stated that because of undeveloped branding efforts, "some organizations may be leaving millions of dollars in potential unearned revenue on the table." The company recently released a report of the 100 top Non-profit brands.

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." . 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?