which reminds me of Bruce Wyman's reaction to that

jtrant — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 00:00:13 +0000

when i first posted (and i haven't moved comments from the old blog platform) Bruce Wyman and I had the following exchange:

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Ah, how quickly people lose historical perspective. Back in 1995, when domain names were new to people, after a round of user testing (n=~10), people had a really hard time typing www.newenglandaquarium.org without inserting spaces. People just weren't yet used to URLs. And, it was universally agreed, at the time, that the name was simply too long and that the aquarium should be using something short. NEAq had been used for years by the aquarium's members and visitors as a fairly common acronym, frequently appearing in publications and advertising. So, at the time, the decision didn't seem to be unfounded and domain names weren't a dime a dozen to register and maintain.

Posted by: Bruce Wyman | November 10, 2005 04:58 PM

... which reminds me of one of my biggest problems with the philosophy of "user centered design" and the reliance on user testing. Users ' needs, wants and abilities are temporally based. They evolve. If we design for current abilities aren't we precluding possibilities that will seem banal in a reasonably short time?

Posted by: j trant | November 10, 2005 09:29 PM

yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, she's totally right now, and if I were still doing stuff there, I would have purchased the alternate domain names years ago and had them redirect.

Heh, I just checked - newenglandaqaurium.org does redirect to neaq.org.

So, I'm a little less sympathetic for our drunken friend. I'm curious how she fared with a search engine.

But, if you're going to bust on NEAq, you need to also give crap to the met, moma, sfmoma, etc ... almost any museum which rarely use their full name as their url.

Posted by: Bruce Wyman | November 10, 2005 09:59 PM

museumsandtheweb.com - Comments for "www.neaq.org -- and the power of meaningful URLs"

which reminds me of Bruce Wyman's reaction to that

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