Typing addresses into Google Maps on a U.S. English keyboard in Norway (maps.google.no)? No matter. Google has you covered. Click to embiggen.

However, making such a sweeping change to a fundamental user interaction could present serious problems. Consider some contexts in which a password might need to be entered in front of a large group of people, such as while using a conference room projector. And many years of web experience have set user expectations on how form elements should work. People understood that password masking was invented for their security. Failing to meet that expectation might undermine confidence, and we cannot afford to lose our users’ trust.

I agree with Nielsen here, and suggest that if you need to enter a password while using a conference room projector, you should have logged-in before your presentation.

Password masking prevents users from making sure the password is correct before sending it to the server. If you, like you should and I do, pick long, hard-to-guess passwords, an unknown mistype can be a source of frustration.

Password masking also provides a false sense of security, particularly on unencrypted connections. Sure it prevents a person peeking over your shoulder. But it doesn’t stop her from watching you type it on a keyboard. Nor does it stop someone from intercepting it with a packet sniffer if the password is sent as plain text.

In other words: password masking is a bad convention.

So what’s the answer? Password unmasking — a toggle that allows users to choose whether or not to show the password. It’s a fairly recent convention that’s become widely used for WiFi set-up screens. Jeremy Keith described one method of password masking last summer. Mullican covers a similar technique in his A List Apart piece.

When a site launches, your audience arrives to learn more about what you know most about. It’s critical to create a content experience with purpose, that is consistent and contextual. This helps to assert your brand’s authority, establishes relationships with your audience, and secures a return visit based on your content’s value. The content strategist-as-curator is the one who makes this happen. How?

From Erin Scime’s article The Content Strategist as Digital Curator in the latest issue of A List Apart

Cecily drives the point home with a Slideshare deck.

Tor Mac OS X Installation instructions

More anonymous web surfing using Tor, Vidalia (a Tor GUI and Privoxy. (And the Torbutton extension for Firefox.)

Cultural differences in gameland

i18n and l10n of games based on cultural frameworks. [Hi-jacked from Rebecca's Pocket]

Screen Resolution and Page Layout

Jakob Nielsen gives the go ahead to ‘optimize’ your layout for a 1024-by-728 pixel resolution, but make it work with all.

For more on internationalization, you can also check out the W3C Internationalization Activity group.

Now I always pictured my readers as 25+ adults. Not 14-year-old children. But part of the magic of the Internet is the ability to stumble across a site from anywhere and come to any page entirely removed from its context. I’m quite sure it doesn’t help that my site has a 6th grade-ish pink stars theme (I had old school roller rinks in mind when I came up with it).

I always assumed that it was obvious to people that a page was part of a larger site. Each page has links to previous and next posts. Each page has a global navigation header. But if the Romeo/Bow wow entry was all you saw, I can see how you might assume I was a 16 year old girl, or that this was a celebrity-worshipping site.

The problem with not having enough context, as I’m starting to understand, is that visitors (particularly new or infrequent ones) may define your entire site by a single page. For example, interracial personals sites contacted me a half-dozen times about advertising on Blackfeminism.org based on exactly two posts about pop culture depictions of interracial relationships. I also received hate mail about those two pages. And that’s two pages out of over 400 posts hundred posts. Again: not enough context.

In an attempt to give visitors some context, I added a simple message to each post. You will now notice three short paragraphs on the right side of each page.

This page is part of a web log (or blog) written by Tiffany B. Brown.

I write about web design and development with frequent forays into pop culture, internet life, politics, travel and personal stuff.

You can find the latest entry on my home page.

I’m sure some folks won’t care about a page’s context, even if it’s there. And I’m just as sure that some others will miss it entirely. Still, I think it’s helpful information to have. My hope is that it will prompt people to think before they type something that is off-base, off-topic or out-of-context.

Have you noticed or experienced this problem with context? How have you managed it or designed around it?

Technorati-ism: usability, web design

If, as rules of grammar tell us, you’s supposed to underline titles of books, and, as rules of usability tell us, you’re not supposed to underline anything that isn’t a link, how do you properly represent book titles in an online environment (when they don’t link to an Amazon.com entry)?

I have opted to use quote marks and/or italics. But somehow, it just doesn’t seem right.

Andrew tells me that italics are the way to go:

The history of italics vs. underlining is thus. Typesetters always italicized book titles — after all, there were only roman and italicized characters to set, no batch of underlined characters existed. But then came the typewriter, which had no keys for italics, so people were forced to hand-underline book titles. People began to assume that underlining was how it had always been.

Today, fortunately for writing on the web, italicizing is regaining its rightful place!

AJAX: Time for the Transformation of Web Applications
Steve Benfield of ClearNova delivers a presentation on AJAX and its business applications.
When: Thu, Sept 22, 6:30 p.m.
Where: Macquarium, 1800 Peachtree St, Suite 250, Atlanta
How much? FREE

I won’t go in to what makes a good page title, or why page titles are important. But perhaps Google should add the title attribute — featuring the complete page title — to each link. When a user moused-over, the complete title would appear.

And the code would look like this:

<a href="http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/52/breadcrumb.htm"
title="Usability News - 5.2 2003 -- Breadcrumb Navigation: Further
Investigation of Usage">Usability News - 5.2 2003 -- Breadcrumb
<b>Navigation</b>: Further ...</a>

Of particular interest is the link to Hofstede’s Dimension of Culture Scales, which give you a sense of how hierarchical and individualistic (among other traits) a particular society is.

I realized at this point that the log in I was using just wasn’t working. But I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t getting an error message.

I use Mozilla and I have Javascript for popup windows disabled. That can cause problems for a few web sites. So I fired up Internet Explorer.

Know what the problem was? Fleet’s error message is a pop-up window.

I mean, it’’s easy enough to program an error message into a login script. Why make it a pop up window and confuse the hell out of someone?