Richard Florida is perhaps best known for his 2003 book The Rise of the Creative Class in which he proposed that the future fortunes of modern cities would depend on their ability to attract innovative, white-collar professionals. He labeled this group of workers the “creative class” but noted that this group extends far beyond artists and designers to include scientists, engineers, and other problem solvers who use outside-the-box thinking to overcome challenges in their fields. 

A friend of mine from high school recently posted a study of his 2.5-year-old using the iPad and then wrote a blog entry about it called “What My 2.5-Year-Old’s First Encounter with an iPad Can Teach the Tech Industry.” One of the points he makes is that consistency matters. He makes the point that simple things like uniform standards for buttons and sliders are very important. This is something that has broad applications in everything from street signs to Web navigation to course-design elements. While many will argue that standardizing these things eliminates creativity, one can argue, successfully I believe, that consistency in the design means better usability.

Take a look at the list of finalists in the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Competition. Each entry listing includes a description of the project entry, and some have an explanatory video. Public commenting ends April 22 and public voting will be held in early May.

"But why write about this K–12 competition in a university blog!" IDDBlog readers may exclaim. First, there actually are some college-level entries.

But the main reason is simple: We look to the K–12 experience because these students will be our students very soon.

In case you haven’t heard, Steve Jobs has been waging an increasingly wounding war for years on Adobe’s Flash platform. It all began with Apple’s initial release of the iPhone, which was conspicuously lacking Flash support. At the time, hardcore techies poked fun at Apple’s iPhone ads that promoted it as the smartphone that finally offered “all the parts of the Internet.” The phone’s lack of support for Flash (and Java) even prompted Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority to label the ads as misleading and insist that Apple stop airing the ads in the UK.

Being the sports fan that I am, I have taken note of the recent outbreak of Twitter-related disciplinary actions involving athletes. Those of you who follow the NFL or NBA are familiar with the Chad Ochocincos and Gilbert Arenases of the world. And the trend has filtered down into the collegiate and high-school ranks as well. The Texas Tech football team was banned from tweeting last season, and just last week, a University of Idaho basketball player was suspended for tweets critical of his coaches and teammates. The rational for the disciplinary action is nearly always that the tweet is “conduct detrimental to the team.”

A week or two ago, I sat in a meeting where we attempted to weigh the intelligence of our faculty and students. Oh, we were too polite to call it that exactly; ostensibly at least, we were discussing how we could make our wikis more user-friendly. The discussion covered a range of possible cures for the perceived disease, from more intensive faculty training to student scaffolding to more and better tutorials. All well and good, this desire to make things easier for our end users. As a fairly recent convert to Usability, I embrace its tenets and evangelize for its centrality in our design process. Still, I wonder if things are really so difficult for our users, and if so, for whom and how many? Are we looking at a usability issue or a user issue? Are we simply reacting to the squeakiest wheel?

When instructors who have years of experience teaching face-to-face classes start teaching online, it’s tempting to try to simply “port” their traditional classes into the online environment—that is, to convert their existing classes to a new medium with no modification. These instructors have developed well-tested teaching techniques, sometimes through a painstaking trial-and-error process, and are often understandably hesitant to change them.

Good-looking Web pages—the ones with stylish layouts and eye-pleasing images—are more likely to retain viewers and even get people to perform actions like buying something or submitting a form than the ones that are plain and makeup free. Is this true or false?

Some interesting research on this question was performed recently by John Broady of Omniture Digital, who ran multivariate tests on “Request for Information” forms for two online universities. For each test, the goal was to increase the number of users who completed the Request for Information form. For the same content, one site had stylized page design, “hero images” (glamour shots of good-looking people in seemingly natural settings), colored buttons, and benefits message while the other had just information in text.

With any product, the goal of a good designer is to anticipate and meet the needs of the user, since it is the user who holds purchasing power.  It is difficult (or impossible) to fully anticipate what a user will do with a product—think of the warning labels on products like irons, which may seem ridiculous (i.e., “Do not use the iron on clothes that you are wearing.”) but which show how far companies must go to protect themselves from the “ingenuity” of users.  However, it is often user manipulation of a product that can lead to improvements in the technology, which is why so many companies clamor for consumer opinions and ideas about how their products can be used.

Writers and urban planners for years have mapped and envisioned the ideal society through designing utopian metropolises. This is my own interpretation and glimpse into a version of a “webtopia,” a re-imagining meant as a prompt for discussing democracy and citizenship on the Web.