Category Archives: Blog

Academic Papers Artwork baby names Blog blogging democracy Design ethics Facebook firefox Flickr folksonomies Google Google Docs Google Spreadsheets how-to information-architecture information-retrieval information design internet iphone journalism listserv mailing list maps mass media Online News Papers Photography plugin poll social-bookmarking social networking social software spam tagging trust Twitter Usability web-development Web2.0 webspam web standards WordPress Writing

I Can Actually Understand This! Contract and Legal Document Usability

Blog, , , , , , ,

How many times a week do you agree to some endless block of legal terms and conditions in order to access a website or install some software? How often does your phone company, stock broker, or credit card company send you changes to some contract in the mail?

Of those, what percentage of the time do you actually read and understand the blobs of tiny print?

I logged in to iStockPhoto for the first time in a while and was confronted by a change to the artists’ agreement. I was shocked, absolutely flabbergasted, to find the document clear and easy to read. I’m not sure this has ever happened before. I actually understood what they were talking about. Here’s a screenshot:

usable-legal-terms

A few pointers on how to construct a similarly user-friendly legal document:

  • Put a quick, “plain language” description at the top.
  • Highlight text changes by coloring the new sections and visibly crossing out the removed text.
  • Include convenient contact information at the bottom for further help and information. By convenient, I mean convenient for the reader, not convenient for your company.

Legal document usability is so bad at this point that I would advocate changing the law so that any terms document that didn’t meet the three point above would be automatically null and void. Kudos to iStockPhoto for getting it right.

Getting the word out about spam profiles and other social network abuse

Blog, , , , , ,

Just a quick post to point out an article I wrote on the Google Webmaster Central Blog, Spam2.0: Fake user accounts and spam profiles. This is a large and growing problem but a lot of folks I’ve talked to didn’t realize they had fake user accounts on their own sites. Excerpt:

Spammers create fake profiles for a number of nefarious purposes. Sometimes they’re just a way to reach users internally on a social networking site. This is somewhat similar to the way email spam works – the point is to send your users messages or friend invites and trick them into following a link, making a purchase, or downloading malware by sending a fake or low-quality proposition.

Spammers are also using spam profiles as yet another avenue to generate webspam on otherwise good domains. They scour the web for opportunities to get their links, redirects, and malware to users. They use your site because it’s no cost to them and they hope to piggyback off your good reputation.

The article got a write up in Information Week, which is pretty cool. Any way to let more people know about the issue.

Recommendations for an easy, automatic blogging system?

Blog, , , , , , , , , , ,

DSC_0066 I’m looking for some help and suggestions, but first a little background on my latest project.

I’m a bit of a map geek – I’m fascinated by maps and how data can be illustrated with maps. I periodically post things on this blog but I actually run across a lot more cool map apps than I can share in mid- to long-form blog posts here.

I use a number of different social bookmarking and social news sites – it’s a research interest of mine, so I probably have accounts on far too many of them. When I come across a blog post on a cool old map or some interesting new real estate geodata site I’ll save/share it in a number of places, including StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit, and sometimes others. I also share things via Google Reader.

This is far to diffuse, so I thought I might make a separate mini-blog just for map geekery. But I already spend more than enough time with the blogs and services I’m using now – I’m only able to support another blog if I can automate some part of this giant messy workflow.

This would be pretty similar to how I manage my microblogging / status updates now. I have my Google Reader items posted to FriendFeed, which updates Twitter, which updates Facebook via the Facebook Twitter app. Convoluted, but now that it’s set up I can post something once and have it seen by friends on different services.

I’ve played around with a few different services:

Tumblr – Tumblr makes it very easy to import feeds, which is great for what I’m looking for. The only drawbacks are that so far I can’t narrow down some feeds to really target map bookmarks and I don’t see any easy way to add geodata.

Vox – I’ve only played around with it a bit, but I’m not sure what sets Vox apart from other blog hosts.

WordPress.com – Actually, I thought this would be perfect given the right plugins, but wordpress.com doesn’t have plugins. Setting up and managing yet another WordPress instance doesn’t sound too appealing.

Blogger – Blogger is great, and I should probably use it a bit more considering it’s a Google product. Unfortunately everything I saw in a quick search about posting to Blogger from RSS showed up on somewhat questionable SEO blogs, so I’m wary.

So I’m still looking. Any recommendations on what would be the easiest tiny-blog system to use?