Mercedes have today announced that they’ve bought 75.1% of the Brawn GP team and will race as Mercedes Grand Prix in 2010.
The BBC seem to think that this means Jenson Button is on his way to McLaren next year so that Nick Heidfeld can be slotted in alongside (the as yet unannounced) Nico Rosberg in a German superteam.
Can’t see that myself — I think Mercedes would be mad to throw away the chance to race with the number 1 on their car in their first year as a bona fide F1 manufacturer in 55 years.
So it’s official — Williams will use Cosworth engines in 2010. Not a massive surprise (although personally speaking I was hoping for a switch to Renault. Williams Renault just sounds great…)
Most telling from the interview FW gave to the Gulf News newspaper was this wee tidbit (emphasis added):
“[Cosworth] are 50 miles away from Williams which is very convenient. Besides we also like our independence. We will be not under the influence, not that Toyota ever bossed around, but we’ve just gone a private and independent route.”
Not that Toyota bossed you around, they just told you who to have in the second seat. Not so with Cosworth.
Good for you Frank.
Another year, another great Brazilian GP and another British F1 world champion.
Button pulled off some awesome overtaking moves that had me cringing and holding my breath — Kobayashi looked more than capable of taking them both off when Button was trying to get past.
The race was a great example of the different strategies at play — for the likes of Button, Vettel and Hamilton to finish where they did given their qualifying positions was a great example of clever strategies by their teams.
A top drive from Jenson and a fantastic year for F1.
From the BBC:
Microsoft Corporate Vice President Roz Ho says that all data will be restored, beginning with personal contacts.
The biggest casualty in all of this is Microsoft’s credibility as a cloud services provider.
October 15th, 2009 •
Geekery
I am not a fan of Jakob Neilsen. Whenever I read his work I get the overwhelming sense that he feels that change is always bad. I think a lot of what he writes needs to be taken in context with wider trends, learning behaviours and user tolerance levels.
Take his latest piece, Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign, for example. Right from the first paragraph he makes a huge sweeping statement to setup the rest of the article:
You often hear design team members (or their management) say, “We need a fresh design.” This usually gets redesign projects off on a wrong footing, with the wrong goals and strategy.
I have never heard a designer, manager or other team member say “we need a fresh design” for the sake of it, which is what this statement implies. I think it’s the word ‘fresh’ that’s grating — ‘new’ would be much more accurate. ‘Fresh’ brings connotations of aligning a site to recent trends or buzzes; implementing a poorly thought through idea simply because it’s popular.
New sites arise as a result of businesses evolving and maturing their online strategies to meet their ever changing business requirements as well as their continual drive to meet the needs of their users. If the current design isn’t meeting the objectives of the business (or the user) then it obviously needs changing. Such changes are often so involved that you’re unlikely to hear such an utterance from any semi-savvy client.
His next paragraph sums up Neilsen for me:
Typically, a fresh design will be a worse design simply because it’s new and thus breaks user expectations. A better strategy is to play up familiarity and build on users’ existing knowledge of how a system works.
If everyone thought like that nothing would ever change — and this is the biggest problem I have with Neilsen. It’s his job to point this sort of thing out but I just don’t buy it — you can take reasonable steps to ensure that the transition from old to new design is smooth and as painless as possible for the user.
I’m reminded of some initial reviews of the Mac back in 1984 when it made it’s debut. John C. Dvorak wrote:
The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a “mouse.” There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I don’t want one of these new fangled devices.
Can you imagine controlling a computer without a mouse? It has been a fundamental conduit between man and computer for 25 years. And yet it was written off by some as ‘new fangled’.
Why users want a familiar design
Neilsen says:
When people are visiting websites or using applications, they don’t spend their time analyzing or admiring the design. They focus their attention on the task, the content, and their own data or documents.
Thus, people love a design when they know the features and can immediately locate the ones they need. That is, they love a familiar design.
It’s true that users are likely to be able to accomplish their tasks more efficiently using a design or layout that’s familiar. However, my view is that it doesn’t matter whether a design is familiar or not, as long as it’s usable.
In fact, anytime you release a redesign, prepare for a flood of angry email from customers. It’s a law of nature that users hate change, and they’ll complain every time you move anything around or otherwise reduce their ability to just do what they’ve always done.
Yes if you reduce their ability to do what they’ve always done you’re going to annoy customers. But that shouldn’t prohibit new designs or ideas from emerging — as long as they’re usable.
Think of the recent changes to Facebook — it polarised people. But that was based on a wholesale reshuffle of the content presented when you logged in. The new design mixed in a whole heap of content types on the main page and this didn’t go down well with users — the site was not meeting their needs as well and they couldn’t figure out how to complete previously easy-to-do tasks.
(Having users complain about a redesign doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s bad; if the new design actually has better usability, people will eventually grow to like it. Customer complaints are thus not a reason to avoid all redesigns; they’re simply a reason to avoid changing the design purely to “stay fresh.”)
Yes! There we go! If you’d put that at the top of the article I wouldn’t have felt compelled to write this one.
Neilsen actually makes some good points in his article — evolve UI changes gently, make sure you get the basics right first — but it doesn’t seem framed in the right way to me.
Change is good. Evolution is necessary. Making sure you go about it the right way is what’s crucial.
October 14th, 2009 •
Design,
Geekery,
Usability
Yes, it’s a new design. Well, an evolution of the old one. I felt like a change from Helvetica so have opted for some Hoefler Text loveliness!
I have designed (and attempted to code) to a baseline grid — the design was easy enough to do but the coding isn’t quite there yet. What this means from a look & feel perspective is fairly small — but it’ll help me sleep better at night! It’s a zen thing.
UPDATE: Well I think I sorted it. Had a little tweak of the stylesheet this evening to make sure everything lines up to the baseline. Of course you’re not to know this unless I decide to make the baseline grid part of the background — maybe I will one day.
Another thing to note is that if you’re looking at this on a PC you’re not getting any of the Hoefler Text loveliness. You’ll be looking at Georgia and Arial instead of Hoefler Text and Helvetica. Not much I can do about that unfortunately.
October 14th, 2009 •
Geekery
We went out at the weekend for mine & Paul’s birthday (we’re only a week apart). We started at Finn McCool’s (such a great name for a bar) and moved onto another place (who’s name I cannot remember) and then finished at a sushi bar. Yeah, a sushi bar. We only went in for drinks as there was nowhere else open!
Make with the click & photo viewage.
Sap won tickets to a Cubs game at work (nice one!) for last Thursday. Hard to believe that despite being here for nearly a year we’ve yet to see a Cubs game!
Unfortunately the game was rained off but we did get to see about 30 minutes of baseball.
See lots of photos of rain on Flickr.
Sap and I visited Nayan Bhai and Hemali Bhabi in Indianapolis the other week. We had a great weekend starting with the journey down there on the Megabus. We managed to get seats at the front on the upper deck. Yes, I was like a child!
The highlight of the weekend for me was visiting the Indianapolis Speedway. The place is just massive! We took a bus trip around the track (yes, you can get on a bus and get driven around the track) and stopped at various points, including the famous bricks on the start/finish straight.
The museum at the track houses a fantastic array of cars and motorcycles from all types of racing — there’s even a Benetton F1 car there from 1991.