Slashdot Mirror

I don't think I have ever enjoyed browsing a site that has exclusively used flash. One of the biggest benefits of HTML is a standardization of GUI controls, with flash that goes right out the window. The only flash sites I have seen that are not totally annoying and worthless are from car manufacturers, they have huge budgets to spend on design and development of their sites, even then they are substandard to HTML sites in usability.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001029.html
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/main.html
http://dack.com/web/flash_evil.html

Point taken, and I don't see anything wrong with creating/expressing art in your web design. Actually I think that those that do, have a better understanding of how web pages work.

I like to reference Alertbox not to piss the artistic liberal types but to have something to show the managers and team leaders of your typical corporate web projects. Because the tips are all too obvious (maybe arrogant) and mostly common sense it is very hard to argue against them and prevents anybody from reinventing the wheel and leaving a maintenance nightmare behind.

I wish they could some day be formalized somehow as a basic web portal/web commerce convention and allow us to move on. I guess we will have to wait until that 15 year old girl finishes highschool first and goes through her first break up! :-D

I agree 100%. What seems to happen is for web owners and designers is to be a little more aware (i.e. less arrogant) of their user's needs and follow common accepted practices. Some of these recommendations have been around since the beginning of the internet.

I can't believe this guy is a design/usability guru.

Check out this rewrite of Jakob Nielsen's alertbox on Guidelines for link design.
Original: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040510.html
Rewrite: http://www.designbyfire.com/deye_web/alertbox.htm

I don't know what made Jakob Nielsen such a "guru," but all I ever hear from him is outdated advice or advice that suggests that we should jump back several years or so in technology. From what I've read about him, he believes that the world isn't ready for the majority of the technology that we use on the Internet.

He still believes that "most users have access speeds on the order of 28.8 kbps," which he uses as one of his excuses for having a graphic-free and ill-designed website. It seems to me that his website is proof enough that this guy isn't an expert on design and usability.

If you ask me, I think any site that requires the author to explain why he uses arrows instead of colons is a poorly designed website.

Google, Yahoo, Slashdot, and just about the rest of the Web understand that aesthetics and special features matter, and designing for a 28.8k demographic isn't going to help anyone. If we all listened to this Nielsen guy, we wouldn't have technologies like AJAX and Flash enhancing our online experience.

His view on RSS feeds and blogging implies that the majority of the world can't keep up with the times. So while 10-year-olds are owning cellphones and posting about their lives on LiveJournal, the rest of society isn't capable of learning how to use RSS feeds and blogs? It may take time for the general public to get used to something like RSS feeds, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't use it.

He's gone into more detail in his latest Alertbox column. One thing that caught my eye:

Finally, some of our users resented the fact that news feeds are divorced from the context of the publisher's website. They preferred the serendipity that came from visiting a full-fledged website that offered additional content beyond the current headlines.

This makes no sense whatsoever. If you are reading a feed, the website is a click away. If you are reading an email newsletter, the website is a click away. In both cases you aren't reading the information on the website.

It only make sense once you substitute "some of our users" for "some publishers". Email newsletters don't really have a strong tradition of including the entire article in the notification email, but plenty of people complain if you only provide partial feeds as opposed to full-text feeds.

I've seen a lot of resentment from some publishers because they think that because the person is reading their article, that they should be able to dictate that they read it on the website. But I've never seen any users complain that Atom/RSS feeds aren't "serendipitous enough". That makes no sense.

you may still not be impressed, but but he does explain his reasoning for the absence of graphics.

I can't believe this guy is a design/usability guru. His web site is easily one of the most garish and unfriendly pages I've ever seen.

Except that it's not really "just my opinion" at all, nor even just the opinion of many professionals in the industry.

Regarding the typography, academic studies of both perceived readability (which font people prefer to look at) and actual readability (how fast and accurately people can read text in different fonts) have been carried out. Several factors appear to affect both, not always correlated as directly as one might assume, and there are no known algorithms that effectively optimise some of those factors (optimal kerning to give even colour, for one).

Likewise, there is a whole industry, albeit a relatively small one, dedicated to usability. Jakob Nielsen's useit.com is probably the best-known web site on the subject, even if it's not what it used to be these days, and there are many more. These people perform quantitative studies on how effectively user interfaces work. Again, their conclusions don't always agree with what "everyone knows", but those conclusions are typically based on objective studies of what users actually do, not reading some big company's handbook of UI design standards.

So no, this is not based on idle conjecture. My opinions have been formed after studying this field for several years, and the sources I'm most interested in are those that are not hypothetical but based on objective evidence.

What's more, it seems like Microsoft is building some of the most ambitious security components of Windows Vista not for its customers, but for itself.

I think too many companies focus just on heuristic evaluation. That's basically paying a UI expert to tell you what to do and what not to do. A lot of companies won't even hire a usability expert, instead relying on their own engineers to "read a lot of books" and try to wing it.

This is bad.

But it is a start.

In an ideal world we'd all be at stage 5 or better. Unfortunatly, some of us are still at Stage 1 and spending 50% of our development time just fighting political battles simply to stop developers adding modes and non-standard interface features (like entering YES/NO into textfields rather than using a checkbox).

So my aim at the moment is is to get interface development out of the hands of one particular development group. Then I hope to start refactoring the interface and applying heuristic evaluation before I even consider getting any kind of useability testing or outside expertise going.

I'm even battling the interface testers, who have loads of regression tests for the current interface and dont want to have to start again. Testing mostly constists of checking a new feature is implemented, not whether its implemented well.

I think too many companies focus just on heuristic evaluation. That's basically paying a UI expert to tell you what to do and what not to do. A lot of companies won't even hire a usability expert, instead relying on their own engineers to "read a lot of books" and try to wing it.

This is bad.

But it is a start.

In an ideal world we'd all be at stage 5 or better. Unfortunatly, some of us are still at Stage 1 and spending 50% of our development time just fighting political battles simply to stop developers adding modes and non-standard interface features (like entering YES/NO into textfields rather than using a checkbox).

So my aim at the moment is is to get interface development out of the hands of one particular development group. Then I hope to start refactoring the interface and applying heuristic evaluation before I even consider getting any kind of useability testing or outside expertise going.

I'm even battling the interface testers, who have loads of regression tests for the current interface and dont want to have to start again. Testing mostly constists of checking a new feature is implemented, not whether its implemented well.

Read Nielson's essays. Then do what they say. Specifically conduct usability testing in the manner he prescribes - anything else is a waste of time and money.

These are two guys who have some good stuff to say about usability - Jakob Nielsen (http://www.useit.com/) and Don Norman (http://www.jnd.org/) - Don Norman is the author of 'The Design of Everyday Things', mentioned above.
Also worth a mention is Joel Spolsky - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/

It's 20th century thinking, raking in 21st century dollars. AND today's web designers have to pass an IQ test - anything over a 99 disqualifies them.

Witness all the pages that require flash, use CSS that doesn't work correctly in the world's worst yet most widely used browser (hello, /., I'm at work and one post covers the next, besides this it doesn't look any different than the old html /.), FLASHING BLINKING BULLSHIT (they removed the <blink> tag for a reason, kids), splash pages and doorways, and on and on. Some idiot webmasters on some mainstream, high traffic sites split text into columns on the same page! Scroll down, scroll back up... GAH!!

Back in the last millineum, Jacob Nielson stated (correctly at the time) that people didn't know how to scroll, so you should split pages. Also, back in the last century a too-long page would crash some browsers.

Nielson has revised this, but I guess webmasters stopped reading useit last century. Newer computers and browsers (Still using Netscape 3?) don't crash on long pages.

News.com is the worst at this, afaik.

How, exactly, can a 3D Web be useful in any way?

I agree, it's ridiculous. The web already has many more dimensions than three; compressing it down to a VR representation seems to be coming from people with a shiny GPU hammer looking for nails to pound. And this meme keeps cropping up; it was circa 1990 when somebody did the first 3D browser for the Gopher space. As now, the coolness of the idea carried you through about the first 15 seconds of use before you realized it was idiotic.

The 3D web guys are making the same fundamental mistake that early web designers did when they force everybody through a set of splash pages. People don't open up a web browser because they want an experience; they want to get things done. Nearly a decade ago smart people realized that changed things as fundamental as how you write text. I wish the 3D geeks (and while we're at it, the remaining goofs installing Flash intro pages) would catch up with what the rest of us figured out in the late 90s.

Very good examples, and good point.

I have one question on your examples, it is whether it's better to put the "Save" button on the left (like Windows often does) or right (like this Mac example).

I also wonder if there are real serious studies on usability done for Windows interfaces, and where can I read about them.

I read some articles by Jakob Nielsen http://www.useit.com/ but I find that his webpage doesn't actually make me confident in his knowledge (I find it repulsive and not that good in highlighting useful information) and also visited this funny website http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/ but I still feel I haven't learned much about usability.

It's a convention, which means that it should be broken in certain circumstances. Lists of links, particularly a list whose formating indicates that a certain section of the page will ALWAYS have a link (eg. a column in a table, for instance), can have the underline taken away, and it's still clear that they're links. In border-collapse tables, this is especially useful, because you end up with a lot of text that's separated by two separate lines (one line for the underline, one line for the cell separator).

Actually, bullet points are not a bad idea in contracts. An agreement that is hard to understand is hard to agree to.

If we demand clarity in user interfaces and in coding, why not in contracts?

I'd love to see some eye-camera studies of people reading EULAs ... Paging Jakob Nielsen >

First, while counting errors is easy, it's not sufficient for evaluating a publication's quality. Given time constraints, it's also important that a topic's coverage emphasizes the most important points so readers aren't bogged down in minutiae. Writing style and clarity matter as well, as does point of view. All of these are more a matter of editorial judgment, and are not as easily scored as factual errors.

Growing a Business Website: Fix the Basics First
Summary:
Offering clear content, simple navigation, and answers to customer questions have the biggest impact on business value. Advanced technology matters much less.

If I'm running service on TCP80, does that mean you're invited to scan UDP10000-65535 to see what doors may be inadvertently unlocked?

If you were not running any service on TCP port 80, would it be ok to ... try different URLs? After all, the URL is a user interface and the only way to learn more about the resource a URL points to is to give it a try and access it.

Of course, there are easier ways to trick people into landing on your site. Apparently just taking out an ad for your site with the keywords "download firefox" is enough to confuse some people and get them to think you're the official Firefox download site.

This, I think, lends a bit more credence to Jakob Nielsen's anti-search diatribe earlier this year.

All that said, I agree with your point that in the long run, it's easier and more effective to write good content and do the necessary promotion than it is to try to cheat the system.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010610.html PDF should die a horrible dead alone for the, seemingly practical joke that whenever it launches it will come up with a reason NOT to show the document, preferably by announcing its, seemingly hourly version update.

If you are obsessed with addictions, There are just as many women that don't are posting too right now, who cares if you are addicted to the internet, I mean hell, if it makes you happy, why not?

I don't know, the internet is just like anything else in life you can become addicted to, work, sex, gambling, money. It is just to find a balance I guess, make sure you pay your bills, do all of your stuff, if you work or not, you have to take care of your life, that's all. I mean it is your free time, and plus we probably steal about hmm, I would say 10% of the work day for bs surfs on the net. It is called INFO SNACKING That is the term for it in 2005, here is a link to check out.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040816.html

I think if you can handle your life and still screw around on the internet, great. If you can't handle all of it, eh you have a problem there and stop for awhile, or just get rid of the internet, that will solve the problem in a big way LOL...

Both Google and Yahoo have been getting a lot of bad press lately so they need to do something. It's good to see yahoo follow Googles "high ground" even if Google's straying a bit. This is much better PR than re-running analysis on turning people over to oppressive foreign governments (Yahoo) or collaborating with governments to cover up and control information and make sure the truthspeech gets out (Google).

It's goingt to be a long road for both of them as growing resentment http://www.useit.com/alertbox/search_engines.html to their status as gatekeepers builds up.

Blatant plug! Death to the gatekeepers!!
Step 2 ??? Step 3 $$$$ - Forget Tech, you need candy http://www.ilovefundraising.com/

Multi-point gesture interfaces go back a whole lot further than 2001. What's so special and original about Diamond Touch? Other than the obvious advantage s of being built out of modern technology, how does it compare with Myron Krueger's work, which goes back to 1969?

-Don

I mean special in the sense of comparing multi-point input to normal single-point touch screens. Some people who haven't read the article are asking questions like "There have been touchscreen keyboards for quite some time now... So what's so special about this?" I am certainly aware of previous multi-point input systems. (See the excerpt about Myron Krueger's Videpplace I posted from Jakok Nielson's CHI'88 trip report, and the description of the Exploratorium exhibit from the early 90's).

-Don

Here's a description of Myron Krueger's classic Videodesk system, from Jakob Nielson's CHI'88 Trip Report (in which he also described our presentation of pie menus).

-Don

Videodesk: Computing on the Desktop

Current marketing trends in the personal computer business emphasize "desktop this" and "desktop that" - desktop publishing, desktop presentations, desktop video, desktop CAD... as a catch phrase for doing things on small, desktop computers. It is also possible, however, to actually do computing on the desktop itself. This was demonstrated by Myron Krueger from the Artificial Reality Corporation in the Videodesk system: Videodesk consists of a large surface over which you move your arms, hands, and fingers. A video camera mounted over the desk picks up these movements and use them as input to the computer which then shows then as an outline on the display. This display is currently separate from the desktop surface but one might imagine that a future system would feel even more natural to the user by having the output display projected directly onto the input surface.

Several applications were shown. One of the most immediately understandable was a finger painting system where the color used was determined by the number of fingers shown. I asked Krueger why the system deposited the paint over the user's finger rather than under it which might have seemed more natural. His answer was that sometimes one would not want the hand to obscure the work being drawn.

The painting was cleared by spreading all fingers. Some of these gestures seemed very natural, including the clearing gesture. Gestures in other applications were not that obvious but still frequently very nice, such as having a straight line appear between two fingertips in a CAD-system. One problem they had in developing their gestural language was in parsing hand movements to determine when you just want to move your hand to another part of the screen and when you want to issue a command. In general, there seemed not to be much consistency in the interaction techniques used in the different parts of the system with the exception of the technique of reaching to the upper right corner of the screen to pull out the main menu.

Videodesk is really a special version of the older Videoplace system where the computer is an entire room which you enter to use your body as input device. As such, Videodesk was yet another example of the evolutionary trend at this CHI. The full Videoplace system was not available for the conference as it was installed as part of a large exhibit on Computers and Art at the IBM Building in New York. This was a very interesting exhibition which I had seen by accident before coming to Washington: I had originally jumped on the M2 bus to go uptown to the Metropolitan Museum when I looked out the window and saw a poster at the IBM Building for their special exhibition. Yet another advantage of not using a constrained "transport interface" like the subway: You can change your mind.

When will interface designers learn that it's faster if you don't have to take your hands off the keyboard every three seconds?

Actually, there are a large number of studies that say the opposite is generally true, even for expert users who know the keystroke commands from memory (indeed, one could argue that the letter and symbol keys on a keyboard are all examples of this). The time 'saved' by keeping your hands on the home row is more than wasted by the time that it takes to recall a key-combination. It doesn't seem that way because you are actively thinking about the command, so your time sense is focused on the activity, whereas the time spent mousing around is more or less 'blank time', since the hand-eye coordination needed to match the pointer to the pointed item is more or less 'handled in hardware' once the decision of which command to use is made.

Naturally, there are several cases where keyboard commands are faster than menus, however. One is when there is a very common operation which has a permanently assigned action key, with no key-combos. Another is in the case of an expert user entering a complex, multi-operation command line, versus having to gesture the same actions; however, a case such as that is generally complex enough that the real optimal solution is to create a script of the command, even for a single use instance (some systems, such as Oberon, facilitate this by allowing you to invoke any arbitrary selected text as a script - indeed, in Oberon a menu item is nothing more than a section of text that is pinned to a given location and 'pre-selected' so that it activates on a single click). Third, multi-level menus require the user to select and target successive items, which is the same cause of slow-down in keystroke commands. Fourth, there are many cases of poorly considered 'graphical' tools that require multiple passes to home in on the target (Raskin's example of a 'visual thermometer' that requires you to adjust the height of the 'mercury' column versus simply entering the degrees into a textbox, comes to mind). Finally, 'adaptive' menus are invariably worse than keystrokes, because the changes disrupt the pattern of actions. In each of these last three cases, the reason the mouse is slower is because the layout of the UI stymies the ability of the user to habituate to them, making it a matter of design rather than a flaw with pointing devices themselves.

Ironically enough, given all the 'quick bars' around in certain systems, the worst response time in most cases is for using icons. The problem is that you have to associate the icon with not only the image it represents, but also the action it causes, and the connection between them is not always as obvious to a user as it was to the developers. The difficulty increases rapidly with the number if icons on the screen, especially if there are two or more similar icon images that need to be differentiated. Many design theorists today argue that icons should only be used sparingly, and only to represent specific physical devices (i.e., a disk drive).

What we really need are more designers who understand usability analysis, and actually use it to determine how much effort a given design takes to use.


Usability in Website and Software Design
AskTog Interaction Design Section
The Raskin Center for User Interface Design
Human-Computer Interface Institute at CMU
Human-Computer Interaction Resources on the Net
Bibliography of Human-Computer Interface Studies
Usability Tips and Tricks
Overiview of GOMS Analysis
Us

Jacob Neilsen was on the advisory board at google, right back in the early days before they had advertising etc.
cite: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990905.html

He was the reason I started using google, back in 1999.

He is a largely reason google is so simple to use. With the clean homepage, simple search results, the goooooogle page navigation etc.

So, I think his comments are worthy of more than just a passing thought.

Here's a link you might follow to get you onto the right foot. It seems to me that all of your 'needs' only *need* some research. Jakob Nielsen's usibility guidlines are a good headstart. My own suggestion would be KISS.

Bloated, inappropriate, proprietary methodologies are evil.

PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption

But in many ways, RSS is like the old "push" hype of the late mid-90s, and push died.

Push tried to make the web work like television and suffered from similar problems we see when people put video edited for TV on the web. In short, people on the web are far more active than people watching TV. Different states of mind.

The way I remember PointCast (or maybe it was some other app) was that it would take over the whole screen, or at the very least, I would have to sit their watching it. I just uninstalled it after five minutes because I don't sit down at my computer to just sit and watch something unless it's a DVD. (In which case I'm using it like a television, so...)

I don't have a problem with RSS. It makes my Firefox toolbar useful because I can flip through all the menus and see which sites have got new stuff if I'm bored. Some sites don't work too well, so I just have regular links to their homepages.

As a site designer, I'm going to build an RSS feed into my code simply because it's not a big deal for me to do so.

I'd take anything that Jakob Nielsen says with a grain of salt. His usability guidelines are nearly impossible to implement without looking like his site. Which, while readable with lynx, well, I mean, look at it. Bleah.

Cuz his site's RIVETING http://www.useit.com/ Including "Permanent Content" that only goes back to November 7...

I stopped reading after this:

Why This Site Has Almost No Graphics
Download times rule the Web, and since most users have access speeds on the order of 28.8 kbps, Web pages can be no more than 3 KB if they are to download in one second which is the required response time for hypertext navigation. Users do not keep their attention on the page if downloading exceeds 10 seconds, corresponding to 30 KB at modem speed. Keeping below these size limits rules out most graphics...

How on earth can Microsoft's 2nd greatest surprise of the year be addition of RSS support in IE? Blogmonsters living in their blogospherecaves don't seem to have any clue about the real popularity of RSS. Hint: it's close to zero in any scale.

Why didn't the writer tell us about the results of MS Research http://research.microsoft.com/? Or the growth of Raymond Chen's fan club http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/? Or that the notorious nitpick Jacob Nielsen gave a bit of positive feedback to Microsoft and the upcoming Office http://www.useit.com/alertbox/wysiwyg.html?

When sites are designed using a fixed width such as 800x600, the layout aften depends on assuming a small font size so that elements align properly. My banking site is one such web site. When the font size is increased, elements can overlap to shift to the next line, losing some of the contextual imformation of their placement. At worst the elements may be overlapped by other elements thereby obscuring whatever it is that you needed to see. I see this happen often with navigation items.

My recommendation is that while you are designing your site, use the keyboard shortcuts for font increase and decrease in Firefox to test and make sure that the page looks as expected. Another option would be to create another Firefox profile with the font set to 20 points and the minimum font size set to 14. This is what I use in my Firefox settings. I have a small laptop screen with a resolution of 1400x1050 which, when combined with my poor eyesight, has made a font size like this required for easy reading.

I also want to stress that if the layout of the page breaks a bit, that is fine. Most users that browse with a large minimum font size are used to seeing the page mess up a bit. There are sites such as Slashdot and Wikipedia that continue to look fine at any font size. Others might be using absolute positioning for DIVs and may have navigational and other elements obscured when the font is large. The important thing is to make sure that the elements on your page that make it functional still work. If something isn't aligned correctly but it's not a big deal, don't worry about it. If the navigation is only partially visible because of the larger font size, then you should fix that. For example, last.fm has some display problems when a larger font size is used, but nothing that impeeds navigation or general usability.

Finally, let me stress that you should avoid specifying your font sizes using a fixed method such as pixels or points. Instead, please use a relative font size such as "x-small", ems, or a percentage. There are still many users that use IE. IE will not resize fonts that use a fixed specification such as pixels and points, even when the font size option in the browser is changed from the default.

1) Coming here to ask your question is a bad idea. Not necessarily because of the quality of most answers, but rather because /. readers represent such a miniscule portion of the real population.

2) Which brings me to my next point. Hire HCI experts, or take some classes on HCI. Testing OSS interfaces isn't any different than testing those of commercial software. You can do either user evaluations or predictive evaluations (w/o users). In fact, doing the latter first AND then the former is [usually] the best option. A cognitive walkthrough or heuristic evaluation can eliminate ~75% of the problems if done by around 4-6 evaluators. Then design an evaluation plan to be executed w/ users. Decide on benchmark tasks. Since you're comparing KDE with Gnome, and I bet those with Windows and/or Mac, you'll want benchmark numbers for all. Look for # of errors, time to completion, etc. These are easily quantifiable and thus comparable metrics.

Just off the top of my head, make sure to study these basic principles (not exhaustive): Learnability, Retainability, Predictability, Familiarity, Consistency, Dialog Initiative, Customizability, Generalizability, Observability, Responsiveness, Efficiency, Error Prevention, Error Recovery, Feedback.

Jakob Nielson and Don Norman are 2 of the most popular experts on HCI. Read Norman's "Design of Everyday Things" and Nielson's Usability Engineering.

The article linked to in the top level post is a cleverly crafted imitation of Jakob Nielson's original frames discussion. It is made to look like Jacob Nielson's work, which it isn't.

On his home page, Jakob Nielson specifically states that.

Even the sites that reported about the Nielson 'Alertbox about AJAX' have now realized they were hoodwinked.

It must very much suck for Nielson to have other people imitate him, to the point where it is difficult to distinguish his viewpoint from the imitations. Chris McEvoy, the author of the spoof, goes on to both apologize and gloat over the success of his prank.

Also, notice if you click the link for "The Original" it was written December 1996...

I mean -- look at these 'statistics' :

The November 1996 browser statistics from Interse show the following distribution of browser usage:
Netscape 2: 13% of users
Netscape 3: 47% of users
Internet Explorer 3: 28% of users
Other browsers or earlier versions: 13% of users
Percentages sum to 101% due to rounding. Thus, 13% of users would not even be able to see a site with frames.

[Frames Suck Most of the Time (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox December 1996): Link: 9612.html , Dec07th, 2005]

I think the major point of the article is that AJAX is currently being used (like a lot of upstart web technologies) in many places were it just confuses things more than needed. Give it time, and people will stop using it just for the sake of jumping on the new craze bandwagon and we'll find out where it shines and where it should never go.

True indeed. In fact, if you look at the author's Original Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design, number 2 is "Gratuitous Use of Bleeding-Edge Technology".

My first clue that something was wrong with this was in the article summary... since when is AJAX considered a "Microsoft technology" ? If there's a defining AJAX app, isn't it Google Maps ? Is there some Microsoft AJAX app or developer kit I should be aware of ?

I'm going to have to disagree with something you've said, though :

we all need to evolve past the "You are looking at a flat page" ideology.

Why ? Flat pages are very useful for documents. Hyperlinks are great for linking documents. "Plain old web pages" remain, IMHO, the most useful aspect of this thing we now call "the web"... cool apps like Google Maps are cool and all, but they'd be just as cool ( probably cooler ) outside of a browser. Requiring a high-speed connection and robust ( or even particular ) Javascript implementation on the client side just to view your web page is what doesn't make sense, at least to me.

Then again, maybe I'm just getting old, but back in the day, we just had static web pages and forms, and we liked it!

This article is a spoof of a previous article about frames. If only someone would read the whole article before posting.... http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9612.html

Hear hear... have you seen his website... designed by blind donkey. http://www.useit.com/http://www.useit.com Hardly a good model for usable, effective web design.. But a shining example of the "usability" of the internet circa 1996

Unfortunately I can't find it right now, but I was recently reading something on Jacob Nielsen's use it about how yellow was a good attention-getting color. (it was something to do with in-page popups, and that yellow was the best background color).

Anyway, I'm guessing that is what the FF people were thinking when they first implemented it- basically that yellow is pretty well standardized as "look at me!" colors. However, after having a rational discussion with anybody in their right might, you should be able to see that IE7 has the right of it.

    Stop lights? Green, Yellow, Red.

    Stop sign? Red.

    Checkmark / OK? Green.

    Banking, shopping, money? Green.

IE / MS is opening up the game a bit more, rather than secure / insecure, they're talking about secure, phishing, and dunno-yet. And by doing that, it makes sense (FOR EVERYBODY, ESPECIALLY!) to follow those same standards if they're going to be playing the same game. Even if it means slight confusion in the short term it's worth it for the long-term benefits of standardization.

--Robert

This is one of the first things that Microsoft has done to innovate the UI since the original wysiwyg style interface. This type of interface is known as a wygiwys (What you get is what you see) the reverse of what you see is what you get. Basically the stuff you write gets morphed into the options you choose giving you a better feel for the end result check this link out http://www.useit.com/alertbox/wysiwyg.html Sounds good.

This is one of the first things that Microsoft has done to innovate the UI since the original wysiwyg style interface. This type of interface is known as a wygiwys (What you get is what you see) the reverse of what you see is what you get. Basically the stuff you write gets morphed into the options you choose giving you a better feel for the end result check this link out http://www.useit.com/alertbox/wysiwyg.html Sounds good.

It's useful for printing only. For displaying it's useless. It breaks almost all known user interface standards. It won't all display on one screen. Scrolling is a chore. It breaks the readers flow. This article goes into detail about why PDF is a very bad choice for information that would otherwise be on the web.