Slashdot Mirror
Homepage Usability
You might want to read Homepage Usability just for the entertainment of watching web usability guru Jakob Nielsen deconstruct the homepages of fifty major sites. Or you could read it for some invaluable advice on web design -- I learned a lot from it, as I think even seasoned web designers will.
Homepage Usability begins with 113 tips on homepage design, some of them obvious and some not so obvious, and most of them applicable more broadly than homepages. Here are two of the shorter ones:
Use graphics to show real content, not just to decorate your homepage. For example, use photos of identifiable people who have a connection to the content as opposed to models or generic stock photos. People are naturally drawn to photos, so gratuitous graphics can distract users from critical content.Nielsen and Tahir then look at some statistics on the fifty sites considered. These statistics are used to make recommendations, following Jakob's Law of the Internet User Experience, that "most users spend more of their time on other sites." Here's a sample:Don't use clever phrases and marketing lingo that make people work too hard to figure out what you're saying. For example, the "Dream, Plan, & Go" category on Travelcity might sound catchy to a marketing person, but it's not as straightforward as "Vacation Planning." Every time you make users ponder the meaning behind vague and cutesy phrases, your risk alienating or losing them altogether. Users quickly lose patience when they must click on a link just to figure out what it means. That isn't to say that homepage text should be bland, but it must be informative and should be unambiguous.
Link FormattingAll this packs a remarkable amount of useful information into the first 50 pages, but the vast bulk of Homepage Usability, some 250 pages more, consists of analyses of the fifty chosen homepages. These follow a standard format. A full-page screen-shot faces a brief commentary, discussion of the page TITLE and tagline (if any), and a pictorial (overlay plus pie chart) breakdown of screen "real estate" into operating system and browser controls, welcome and site identity, navigation, content of interest, advertising and sponsorship, self promotion, and unused/filler. Then follow either two or four pages with detailed commentary: the screen-shots are repeated on the left-hand pages with elements numbered, and the right-hand pages have comments on them. Many of these are trivial and site-specificNext to the use of colored text, the underline is the second-most important cue to users that text is clickable, and 80% of the homepages underlined the links. We continue to recommend that links be underlined, except possibly in navigation bars that use a design that makes it more than commonly obvious where users can click.
Of the homepages in our sample, 60% used the traditional standard for link colors: blue. This is a fairly small majority, but still large enough that we continue to recommend blue as the color for unvisited links. If links are blue, users know what to do. End of story.
"This Go button's color isn't noticeable enough - there should be much more contrast with the background color."some of them amusingly so
"In general, oil companies would best avoid photos that show large dark shadows in the water next to their rigs."Others are more general
"Don't have a special Shop link when there is a product section. The natural thing for users is to find the product first and then decide to buy it."The sites covered are mostly those of corporates or media organisations - Ebay, ExxonMobil, ESPN, IBM, Victoria's Secret, and CNNfn, to name a few -- but some government departments are included and there's a good sprinkling of English-language sites outside the United States, such as those of the BBC and Australian supermarket chain Coles. The vast bulk of the analysis is, however, just as relevant for other kinds of organisations -- certainly for the university at which I work and the charity for which I do volunteer work, but also for my personal sites.
Finally, a comment on the physical book. A large square volume, 25cm a side, with colour everywhere, Homepage Usability is really nicely laid out. I'm not generally a fan of books with a lot of graphics and screen-shots, but here they are used to good effect, demonstrating how some things can still be done much more effectively in print than online.
You can order this book from Fatbrain. Check out Danny's other Internet and publishing reviews. Want to see your review in this space? Check out our book review guidelines first :)
nothing about pop-ups?
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
hehe... Yes, this is a blatant ad, but I used to work for them, and I still feel a little company loyalty.
For a good service that provides what isn't, strictly speaking, usability data, try http://www.webcriteria.com. They do computerized testing of your web site that checks for "clutter" and fluff. It tells you how long an average user takes to read your page, how long it takes an average user to surf through your site to find a specific piece of information, or for commerce sites, it will even tell you how hard it is to place an order.
Yes, it's a blatant ad, and I don't even work there anymore, I just think it's a great service. (Plus, they have the coolest programmers on the planet, programming AI that does everything.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Worst offender I've seen recently is Hercules/Guillemot. Give it a try with Mozilla, Konqueror, Lynx or w3m and cringe! Even Netscape 4.77 can't seem to grok its menu structure.
Someone write that webmaster a nasty. :P
This not meant to be flamebait, but this site is over 4 years old, and the interface and usability has not gotten any better (it wasn't that good to begin with).
He notoriously overcompensates on a strictness in useability which typically mandates sucking all of the fun out of your web pages. Jakob seems to be stuck on information delivery in its distilled form, which simply isn't paying the bills for many sites out there.
The points made in this book (as read in the review) make good sense... but are nother spectacular in my view. Use underlined words for links, use graphics wisely...
There are many websites owners who should definately give this book a try I'd say. But than again, it they don't have the good common sense to use the nice default 'a href' tags but instead try to make thing look fancy with abusing stylesheets and Flash (!), you might think that this is exactly something they don't have...
seriously, the tips listed above, if they are any indication of what else the book "teaches" us, do not speak well for the book's usefulness except as a beginner's or For Dummies guide.
is there anyone among us here who does not follow these hints because of ignorance? i'd wager not; i think the only people who don't know this stuff are the ones too lazy/careless to absorb it from a book either.
most of the time people who determine what is and what is not good for web design dont have a clue, or are obsessed with old standards and old browsers. (ie you shouldnt use frames)
I will say the suggestions mentioned here however are not bad.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Is it just me, or does the majority of the comments made by the author point out rudimentary common sense ideas?
Okay, maybe we need to sometimes be reminded about these, but I think that (and granted, I haven't read this yet so I can't be TOO judgemental) this book isn't for anyone other than relative web-design newbies.
So, what does he say about those homepages that are is just Flash?
Personally (specially if there is no link to a non-Flash version of the site), I go elsewhere for the information that I was looking for.
Kent
Especially the sections regarding Americans with Disabilities act compliance... Something lacking in most current websites.
Has anybody used the word "homepage" in the past few years? Is this guy behind the times, or is it me? When I hear "homepage", I think of an "About Mee" page on Geocities.
Working html is much more usable
with the w3
also, bobby seems a bit bothered
there's more than one way to do me.
As for the author's credits, Nielsen is widely acknowledged to be a guru in the field. Check out his website, UseIt, for lots of more usability-related stuff.
is not the cheapest place you can buy this book. Check out AddAll for a price comparison.
I think this book, or something similar, should be standard issue when you reg a domain name. Whether or not you follow the advice given, it is good for ppl to know when they are straying off the path of what an average webuser (note: not a slashdotter) would grasp. They may still choose to do this, but at least they will then know that they could be alienating general users.
One example is that Slashdot does not follow much of these guidelines. Thats okay, cause they know their target audience is tech, but most sites aren't.
I really think a lot of sites put too much time into making something neat, and not enough into making it easy to use. This book could really help. I plan on buying it.
http://monkeyserver.com --- weeeeee
this stuff seems to be all tautologies or very basic ideas.
Like: make the buttons visible, make links visible, don't confuse users.
You don't need a book to figure this out. A working brain should be sufficient.
However, I admit that many pages seem to be designed by people without a brain.
On the other this might just the after effects of the dot-com hype with low level qualified people doing thing for which you need high level people
(lvl 15++).
I think the positive side effect of the dotcom crash is that now proffesionals will take over the internet, who don't need "smart" books like this.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Is it just me, or does Jakob Nielson say less and less with the same amount of words as time goes on? We've heard his trip before, over and over. Do we really another book from him telling us not build sites using any post-1996 technology?
Over the years, I've slowly developed an active dislike for the man. Should we really keep from using current technology in order to be backwards compatible with the 2.3% of all users who are incapable of upgrading their browser? How can innovation occur if we confine ourselves to Nielson's 256 color, 1995 view of the web? Can you really trust someone who includes the string "discount usability engineering" in the meta keywords on his site to give you good advice on web design?
Certainly there are applications for which the most minimal distillation of information is preferable (yes, I use lynx from time to time as well - put your flame thrower down), but come on - let's move forward.
I write trance music.
But it is for some marketing folks.
Where I work we had, for over a year, a web site that belonged on WebPagesThatSuck. It required javascript be enabled just to tell the viewer he needed the Flash plugin to get past the front page. No alternative. Why? A marketing VP thought it looked professional (I guess in marketing professional is a synomyn for "k3wl").
The folks who had to use it (support in the field) hated it. The people on the phones told to say how great it was hated it. Without javascript it came up as a blank page. Nothing else. Nada. Nil. Zip. With javascript, you had to go get a plug in. We were saying "Our site is too cool for you. Go elsewhere." But "elsewhere" wasn't an option for some, and for others it was where didn't want folsk to go: our competitors.
A while ago someone quietly re-made the whole site and the VP "had it thrust upon him." While he did get to do some minor tweaks (like get javascript menus back - but js isn't required - and a #&$% marquee line) it is now useable. Not ideal. It still sucks a bit, but at least now it sucks in a useable manner.
That VP is who this book is for. I will grant the second point - I doubt the book would have helped him. It wasn't until the site was changed and various reasons why pointed out that he grudgingly came around. One reason: Search engine spiders don't run javascript of Flash...
People are naturally drawn to photos, so gratuitous graphics can distract users from critical content.
Phsaw. Like most homepages have "critical content."
were any of the 50 reviewed sites of the porn variety? I'd be particuarly interested in hearing Mr Nielsons analysis of a porn site...
"titties. 80% of users wanted to click on titties but found they could not - the same proportion of users complained that the mouse cursor did not change to a hand when hovering over the titties (althouth this could simply be because they are not clickable)"
I sit in front of a computer all day at work, and often several hours at night, and if there's one thing I can't stand it's white backgrounds. This isn't just a Web page issue, of course, but is a general UI design issue.
White backgrounds may seem "obvious" to people, perhaps by comparison to a sheet of paper: black ink on white paper = black text on white background. The problem with this analogy is simply that paper doesn't glow, but a computer monitor does. If you turn the background white (or any bright color) then you are making every pixel on the screen light up and your user will find herself or himself staring into a light bulb.
Have you ever stared into a light bulb? It hurts your eyes doesn't it? Every night when I go home from work, my eyes are burning, even though I do as much as I can to minimize the effects: black desktop background image, change the colors in NTEmacs, etc. Unfortunately it isn't possible to do enough since most programs and web sites assume you have a light colored, if not actually white background. Change the background color and you may find yourself looking at black text on black background.
Which brings up another point: if you specify any one color on a web page, then you need to specify *all* of them, otherwise the user may see the black on black phenomenon and decide that your page is too difficult to bother with.
Whew!
Rant mode off.
Yes, most ideas good interface ideas could be considered common sense. . . But common sense is rarely either. Some people are gifted and intuitive when it comes to the web. But the average person designs a website that is somewhere between awful and horrific. The unwashed masses definitely need Nielsen's distilled results of thousands of experiments, focus groups, and observations. And even some of the pros could benefit from things like user needs analysis, user testing, and periodic reviews.
but i dont like vague links either. that's why i like to make them visible AND redundant
sig
"Discount usability" is a term Jakob uses for a specific method of usability testing.
I'm not a big fan, but I wouldn't discount his whole approach just because he puts that term in his site keywords.
If you have a large list of links on one page, PLEASE use different colors for visited and unvisited links. This is helpful for forgetful people like me who accidentally click on the same link twice.
Also, make it so you, the user can resize the font. NOt sure how it works, but I've seen my share of pages where moving the font size up and down doesn't work at all. People with poor eyesight will be thankful.
Also, do not have links open up in a new browser window unless absolutely necessary. If I want to click on a link to open in a new window, I'll do shift-click. You don't have to do it for me. I guess people assume they want their website to be on everyone's browser at all times, so links away from the website open up yet ANOTHER window(or in any case of a site on cjb.net, you'll get about 20 pop up windows in addition).
And don't try to jam links to everything on the index.html page. Spread it out a bit, in a logical manner. Every gaming site(which all look the same) love to do this.
Don't have excessive amounts of porn banners just to make a few bucks you won't see in referrals. You'll lose out on the audience of people who surf at work.
Not that I'm surprised or anything, but 75% of the serious posts so far dismiss the ideas in the book as common sense.
Have any of you actually read the book?
Come one, people.
Jakob Nielsen also has a new report out:
The 10 Best Intranet Designs of 2001
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20011125.html
25 cm on a side? Jakob, you fuckstick, that's non-standard and irritating when you have to sort this book with dozens of others. It makes your book stick out like a sore thumb, and somehow implies that the content is more important than that of any other book.
Idiot. It's people like Jakob that make librarians and booksellers hate their jobs.
As for this book...it's pretty, but it's not aimed for developers and professionals. It is, as many have pointed out, very common-sense. This however makes it perfect for Marketing people who make a big deal out of lots of pretty pictures and gratuitous animation. Internet common sense is often lacking in those who grew up designing for paper and print. For better guides for techies, try Neilen's other books: Designing Web Usability and Usability Engineering (a very technical guide to designing interfaces). Both of those show that while he's an extremist, he knows what he's talking about. Additonally, the book Don't Make Me Think! is an excellent reference for designing usable web sites and applications (and it's a damn amusing read).
On the other end of the spectrum is the book Fresh Styles for Web Designers which is basically some guy collecting a bunch of pretty websites and telling you that they're cool and don't sacrifice usability (he's lying - 90% of them are almost totally unnavigable). Pretty pictures, though.
Reality is somewhere in the middle.
It's a tough field right now. On one hand you've got Joe Corporate-User who believes that if he's got MS Word's "Save as HTML" feature, he's as good a web developer as you are. You've got software engineers who would, given the chance, make every web interface beveled and battleship grey. You've got web designers who are still stuck in the 1996 mode of "if the website looks cool that will be enough to bring in users." The real challenge in web development is juggling these people and producing something that satisfies users and manages not to be mind-bogglingly dull.
----
"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
Now go look at this example. Notice the link in the upper left hand corner of the page? WHERE IS THE BLUE TEXT, JAKOB?!?! Help! I'm such an idiot that I can't find my way back to your homepage! I don't know what to do!
Feh.
Why don't you crawl back into your cave with your Lynx browser and your Athena widget set. We'll stick with substance AND style, thank you very much.
This space for rent
If they can figure out the site then its ok... of those people, only one has a web site.
the most common sense thing to do is run it by people who will give constructive critisism
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Jakob Nielsen has always perplexed me. I remember reading Flash: 99% Bad and being totally confused. If Flash is so "bad", why does everyone use it? Slashdot just linked to the flash-enabled iSee project by Applied Autonomy today, and no one complained.
One of Nielsen's famous complaints is that every web site should be compatible with the "Back" button - this is absurd, not even Slashdot is compatible with the Back button. Try posting a comment, hitting Preview, and then hitting back - Slashdot erases the contents of your comment window.
Admittedly, some of his ideas are very good. We DO need a way to deliver rich web content to dialup users, and right now a 100K web page is the wrong way to do that. Some of his other ideas - banning Flash for example - make less sense.
And why the obsession with this "any browser" business. Let's face the facts: some versions of Netscape 4 don't render Style Sheets at ALL. Their miserable failure of an attempt to implement CSS was noble but it just didn't work out. If I publish a browser with the ability to read nothing but the letter "Q", do you need to rewrite slashdot to be compatible with me? Of course, this is an absurd argument, but it cuts directly to the point: it's OK for web sites to prefer browsers that are more standards compliant. Slashdot, for instance, gets over 85% of its' hits from Internet Explorer - for good reason.
Anyway, Nielsen is certainly a vast improvement over "HTML for Dummies" and let's hope he gets past his own reactionism and continues to provide a valuable resource to the Web Design community.
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
I'm genuinely curious what you might recommend changing on Slashdot? Except for the white backgrounds (see my post below) I've always considered Slashdot to be a model of good design. Apart, that is, from the hodge-podge of site links on the upper left (faq, code, awards, privacy, etc).
Don't make me think by steve krugg
1. this is a $45 book ,and amazon has 21 souls looking to unload theirs at $15... sounds like a one time read at best.
2. make it an ebook - what is it with all these people - negroponte leading the charge - extolling electronic/cyber/wired life and grinding trees to pass out their gospels? dymitri or no dymitri, people pay for ebooks.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
While its good to see Jakob Nielsen not just recommending Mosaic-era web pages this doesn't really seem different from anything he's written about online or published in the last few years. As an information architect I've read a lot of Nielsen and just see him as way to strict. Not all web pages have the sole purpose of efficiently distributing content. For a lot websites (like www.pepsi.com) reinforcing the companies brand is the primary goal and just about every website has it as a strong second or third.
Usability experts and designers like Donald Norman, Alan Cooper, and Bruce Tognazzini seem to me to be a lot more realistic in their mixing of user goals and business goals. If the business goals don't get met there is no company to meet the users goals. I wish Jakob would stop issuing these outdated proclamations ("If links are blue, users know what to do. End of story.") and start taking a more realistic view of what it takes to get a site to achieve both the users and the businesses goals.
There have been plenty of comments so far that essentially say "This is all common sense, it's a 'For Dummies' book" etc etc. I've been doing web development in a variety of companies for 6 years, and it's amazing how little "professional" web developers and designers understand about useability. People who have disabilities are limited not because they are "too dumb to know how to upgrade their browser" but because they have physical limitations that will not be cured by using the spiffiest new web browser. The reason Nielson points these things out is because they still need to be pointed out. Don't shoot the messenger.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
I have to wonder how much time they spent looking :)
at the Victoria's Secret site compared to the other
sites mentioned.
I don't like websites with a navbar button called "Solutions", particularly when there's not also one called "Products". How presumptuous for a company to offer solutions when they don't know what my problems are! Let me see your products and what they do, and I'll decide if they solve anything!
There is a time and a place for many of the things that "useability experts" like Nielson judge to be horrendous mistakes. It's all about context and the particular audience you're trying to reach. For example, he says you shouldn't have a separate SHOP button if you have product categories because users tend to search for the product first, then decide to buy it. What unmitigated crap. There's a lot to be said for giving site visitors several ways to get to the same information, so long as you don't confuse them in the process. In truth there are very few "rules" that apply in all cases to all websites. Not putting black links on a black background. Not using Front Page to build it. Etc, etc...
Fried ice cream is a reality. - George Clinton
Actually, one of the reasons slashdot is so popular is that it is so usable. I know Jakob made that point in his last book _Designing_Usability_ that the most popular websites are often the most usable.
Okay...lets try to use some of Jacob's principles on Slashdot. Look at the homepage. First of all, you got the Slashdot logo and text in the upperleft-hand corner. Its obvious where you are. This is a news site so the news should be the most obvious part of the page. It is. In fact the news takes what looks like 75% of the width of the page, probably more.
Next, Slashdot makes great use of what Jakob calls scanning. Jakob has noted that visitors don't often read all the text on the page but that they rather they scan for the information they want. So the important information should be underlined, italicized, bolded, or put in a different color. This happens on the Slashdot homepage. The headings are the most obvious in that they are white with a green background which contrasts with the text which is black on white. Then at the bottom of the news entries you have "Read More" (which is an active verb, BTW). And its highlighted.
Another principle that Jakob explains is that visiters like to have an idea of where they are going before they get there. At this, Slashdot seems to excel at. For instance, before the main body of the homepage loads, you already get an idea of what topics today's news covers by the icons in the upper right hand corner. Today I get an icon for The Internet, Linux, Microsoft, News, and Privacy. While it would be a little better for these icons to have titles the tooltips serve well for if you don't know what the icon is for. Also, these icons correspond directly to the icons next to the news items. In addition, each link in the news stories have relevant text underlined so you have an idea on where that link will take you.
Slashdot is also fast and for me takes under a second to load. It has little use of graphics and these graphics are cached to improve load time for other visits.
People who feel comfortable coming to this website have good reason, from Jakob's principles. To an online friend of mine I showed a post I made. Next thing I know, he replied to it. He told me he never used this website before.
So if there's a usability problem with this website, I would be interested in knowing what it is. Because I'm not finding anything.
(before posting this I notice a bold heading below the comment window that says "Important Stuff:" that says what comments should be like. These kinds of things make slashdot such a usable site)
Since half of the Internet at any one time are newbies - who probably don't know HOW to change the traditional link colour - does this mean that only 10% of homepages still use blue? ;)
I'm proud to say that I'm one of that sixty (or was it ten?) percent... check out my homepage, http://www.jonnydigital.com to see why I stick to good old blue unvisited links. (Site also here if the first page won't work.)
Of course, my visited links aren't purple... they're blue, too - but a darker blue. Purple wouldn't fit into my colour scheme...
It's just like I always say - "If links are blue, users know what to do!" ;)
I've read some of Jakob's stuff and if any of you have worked with Usability folk before I'm sure you've had similar experiences with them. I expect this book will be more of the same. He is interesting however and developers and graphics people alike should read at least one of his diatribes to gain the usability perspective. My on bigotted oppinions about the who usability camp follow...
They tend to get caught up in small details like "here is what a link should look like" and go way overboard on tiny stuff that doesn't give the user credit for being able to even get to the site in the first place. They are however invaluable at navigation analysis and making sure that the site is easy to use and that it is easy to get to any to anywhere on your site from anywhere on you site.
And who can really hate them when I did learn the phrase "Flashturbation" from a usability guy when he was explaining to one of my graphics guys why flash in general was bad. =)
BTW, for reference I am a developer mostly using M$ DNA/.NET technologies and JAVA/J2EE, though not for any love of either but just because it's easiest to make the most money with them. I have been developing professionally for about 6 years or so and have worked for both startups and Fortune 500 companies. I am by no means graphics person and would probably hate the Usability Demons with all my heart if I were. Just a caveat.
Personally, I've found most homepages/portals simply don't feature google enough. Yahoo, no. Excite, no. MSN, no. That's why I like www.google.com. Because it features google and loads quickly
;-)
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Timothy, if it's "your own home page", it probably doesn't have to be usable to anybody except you, so all the usability standards in the world don't mean jack squat.
"Your company's home page" might make sense as a target for this, but 99% of the people reading this (including me, I admit) don't have anything to say on their OWN home page that's that crucial.
I really don't know what you're talking about. Could you give an example?
How do you improve homepage usability, if your homepage is useless? (like mine)
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
yes we all know it is silly to make your site one big flash animation, but this guy is just as bad in the other direction.
blinking text really bothers me for some reason. So does MIDI files. They are basically just annoying.
I mainly only see webpages with these "features" on servers w/ free homepages so I don't run into this kind of stuff very often. When I see this on company webpages I usually find someone else that sells the same or similar product.
-Jeff
- "Sections" and "Topics" are confusing. I have yet to find a good reason why both subgroupings need to exist. Also, the fact that some Sections and Topics have different page colors than the homepage while others don't is annoying and confusing. Color should be used consistently the same or consistently different.
And let you think I have nothing positive to say:Whether the book is right for you or not, it does sound like a neat and permanent record of the early web for future generations. You know, even if Google (and the "agencies") manage to store a few gadzillion homepages in a safe place, there might not be suitable retro-technology for displaying them (as god/authors intended), not to mention that the media of the future might be so different that merely seeing the pages (and perhaps hearing the odd "boink-boink" advertising sounds) may not convey the mindset of this era.
At least a book like this, from the sounds of it, might give the future anthopologists some insight on what we were getting at.
Get a copy and surprise your grandchildren? Some of my earliest inspirational moments came at my grandparents' attic.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
I've always been a fan of usability. I kept a copy of Psychology of Everyday Things on my bedside table. However, I've noticed some unpleasant patterns over the past couple of decades:
Alas, all the evidence is that, even if usability is on the list of criteria for purchasing (which it seldom is at all), it is way low on the list. It may even be a de facto negative.
Vincent Flanders asserts that web pages are different: that if people don't like it, they're gone. Well, maybe, but is there any evidence that usable commercial web pages sell better than less usable ones? Has anyone done a study? I thought the value of usability in commercial products was self-evident, too, until the evidence built up that I was flat-out wrong.
Sorry, I just couldn't resist.
(/me imagines John Ashcroft pronouncing <blink> to be a terrorist act)
- undoware.ca
Slashdot is not the pinnacle of anything, especially not commercial site design. Arguing that "/. isn't 'back-button-compatible'" means nothing.
324006
I can see Neilson advoating using punchcards instead of crts/keyboards in the 60's.
THe new fangled CRTS are hard to read,
only a select few have them,
typing is an art that only secretaries have mastered,
when your poor at typing you are distracted between the screen and the keyboard
The CRTS have only one colour, so you can't colour code like you can with printed material.
The resolution of a crt will take eons to match that of printers, so type will be indistinct at smaller type sizes.
etc
etc
Imagine if everyone had followed his advice?
With the web, you can see the active delvelopment of tomorrow's user interfaces through the expiraments and failures. However, because there are failures in adapting new technology, that does not mean people should stop trying!
The most efficient Jakobian interface to information over the internet is GOPHER!
On your concern of page fonts being small, have you ever used the Opera web browser?
There's a little pull-down menu in the toolbar that lets you resize pages. It's similar to the zoom pull-down that you'll find in Word or any modern word processor. It's really convenient. Opera also carries many other little features that can make reading poorly-designed pages more pleasant, like buttons to toggle images or page formatting on/off.
Granted, this doesn't fix the problem of dumb webmasters, but it does help in reading poor pages.
I like when I can plug my favorite underused web browser.
-Grant/JimTheta
My stupid web site
It'd sure be nice to see a summary of the list of flaws from the beginning of the book? I wanted to see if my pet peeves were in there:
Load Time
I hope Nielsen made prominent comments about load time. If I were the guy approving the design of the company's external web site, I'd do the final review offsite where one would have to use a dial-up connection to view the site. That would go a lo-o-o-ng way to reduce the amount of gratuitous graphics that most corporate web sites shove onto their homepages.
Not Testing with Popular Browsers
Not testing with all the popular browsers should be a misdemeanor, at least. (IE dominance aside, would it kill 'em to at least try out the top three or four?) True story: Compaq's home page used to have a link to text-only version of the same page. Unfortunately, all the links on the ``text-only'' page pointed to pages that were lousy with graphics and tons of Java/Javascript that crashed the browser that they shipped with their UNIX workstations. So much for text-only. The day after I called their office to point out that I was unable to view their web site using the software they shipped with their OS, the text-only link disappeared from their home page. I can only imagine the conversation between the manager and web page maintainer:
Boss: ``Hey! People that follow the text-only link from the home page have their browsers crash. Fix it.''
Maintainer: ``Sure, boss. Just take a few seconds.... Done!''
And Compaq people who I have to deal with wonder why I laugh when they suggest ``you know, this information is available on the web site''. The thing that pissed me off the most about this incident was that the pages wouldn't load using a browser that they were shipping on the OS CDs. Web pages on the CDs had links to pages on the corporate site that would crash your browser. Pathetic.
Teeny, Tiny Fonts
Then there are the web sites whose designers have 20/5 vision (or better) and force you to view the site with the smallest possible font that your browser is capable of displaying. Guess visitors will actually be able decide for themselves what font size is best for the viewer sometime before the heat death of the universe. If we want the ability to choose in our lifetimes, though, I'm betting that it'll only happen after someone shoots all these arrogant designers (``Listen! I'm an artiste! What school of design did you attend?'') and pry their pet style sheets from their cold, dead fingers. (BTW, the line forms behind me.)
Why do I mention these? Because it appears that 99% of the companies with these broken web pages couldn't care less whether users have an easy time accessing their sites. If they actually gave a damn, they'd stop creating web sites that didn't appear to purposely antagonize their visitors.
Gotta wonder: Who was it that posted the web page ``Why Web Sucks''? Hopefully it's still around. IMHO, it's still relevant.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
What browser are you using? I just ask because I'm stuck with Netscape 4.7 on my Sun at work, and it loads lots of pages very slowly because its HTML rendering engine is super slow (and sucks especially with tables). But I know that if I move to a Windows machine elsewhere in our T1-connected lab, it won't have a problem at all.
-Grant/JimTheta
My stupid web site
And TV commercials interrupt the flow of my favorite shows.
Life can be hard sometimes.
Basically it points to a page, which is just a redirector page. Now this sort of traps the user because if you hit back once, it just ends up sending the visitor back to the page. I find this annoying, but to the average surfer, I suppose it could get frustrating. I think this is really sleazy...
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
The dot.coms are gone, but they left us one legacy. That's the idea that those who write websites are developers. If that's true, then they should start treating their websites as software engineering projects.
Software engineering in a nutshell:
1) Analysis. What are your project requirements? Who is your market? What are their needs? If it's not addressed here it shouldn't be in the final website. If your site is going to adhere to web standards, req them here. If it's going to support specific browsers instead, req it here and say why.
2) Design. Before you write one byte of HTML or PHP you need to get the design down on paper. Document all pages, modules, classes, databases, interfaces, etc., before you move on to the next step.
3) Coding. This is more than just knowing your language. Code review. Unit testing. Etc.
4) Verification and Validation. No go an test your website. Does it meet all requirements? Does it work for the Konqueror, Mozilla and Opera? Does it work on a monochrome monitor, or for Lynx? If not you had better have that in the requirements. Without looking at any of the design or code, a tester should be able to formally validate the website.
5) Maintenance. You may actually get bug reports! Fix them when you do and don't just tell the reporter to get a bigger monitor, switch to a different OS, or to use a different browser.
6) Repeat. Websites are dynamic beasties. Much more so than applications. Go all the way back to step one.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Convert your Update CD to a full Install CD
In the meantime, we found a work-around that may be even better than the one we were looking for. Instead of finding a file on the hard drive that we could modify to fool the Installer, we found a file on the Installer that we could delete and thereby bypass the checking process altogether!
We found the file by comparing a Mac OS X 10.1 "full" Install CD with an Update CD. Both CDs had the aforementioned VolumeCheck file. However, only the Update CD had the CheckforOSX file. Could this be the only critical difference between the two CDs? What if we made a bootable copy of the OS X Update CD, but with the CheckforOSX file missing? Would it act as a full install CD? We tried it. It worked! In brief, here is what
to do:
1. Using instructions posted on this page, create a disk image of the Update CD.
2.Delete the CheckforOSX file from the Essentials.pkg file in System/Installation/Packages folder of the image file. [You need to use the Open Package Contents contextual menu item to access this file.]
3.Burn the image to a CD using Disk Copy.
You can now boot from this CD. When you do, it will list any volume - even one that has no version of Mac OS X at all - as eligible for an install of Mac OS X 10.1. We did not test to see if this actually correctly installed the OS, but we have no reason to believe it would not. This method thus apparently converts an Update CD into a full install CD! A neat trick (although we suspect Apple may not find this so wonderful).
A review of a book that you can't purchase on ThinkGeek? The nerve...
Especially when they are on top of an all-flash page. What the hell are they thinking? Besides making users wait all day for the animation to load, do they really like having to pay all the bandwidth? Have a look at this one (White Trash softcore site): http://www.katies-world.com and bring along a barf bag.
You mean an actual *book* with pages and all?
How retro...
How oxymoronic...
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
This discussion wouldn't be complete without a link to the online Yale Style Manual. For anyone interested in web design principles, I highly recommend it.
For those of you who have never heard of it, the Yale Style Manual basically came out of the Yale medical school as they started studying what to do with their own website. Some of their stuff is out-dated (they still recommend 640x480), but most of the book is quite informative.
Why aren't we told when editors moderate our posts?
The Homepage Usability book has many guidelines that would make the web a much better place. About half of them are "Don't" guidelines, like:
A portion of the book is about what they call the site's "Tag Line". They claim that all homepages should have the company/organization name or logo near the top of the page, with a breif description of exactly the company/site actually does. They say that people who've never been to the site need to be able to quickly look at the top and see what company/organization this is, and what they can expect to get from the site. I hadn't really thought about this much, but it seems to make a lot of sense, particularly for a smaller site like mine where nobody would be familiar with the name. Robin and I talked about it for about an hour over Thansgiving and we came up with "PJRC: Electronic Projects, Resources and Open-Source Code, With Components Available For Worldwide Delivery". I've shown the site to some people over the years, and usually they initially ask some questions about what it is. I showed it to someone just the other day, and this tag line at the top made the site's purpose immediately obvious.
Another really insightful part of the book is about what to put into the title. They say you must begin with the most important word, and never something like "Welcome" or "The".
They claim that all sites should have search on the homepage, and they give some suggestions about how to make it appear. They don't go into detail much about the search, probably because Neilson's company sells a report about search usability.
They have some other really insightful suggestions... here is a short list of some:
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I count seven distinct fields on the top of the /. homepage and several more as you scroll down. I have been using /. for several years and have never used any of sidebars except "Freshmeat."
Actually, your beef with the right side of the is not that there are so many Slashboxes but that there's no way close by to turn them on or off. You have to go into your preferences to do that. In fact, you can even disable Slashboxes entirely.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I just ask because I'm stuck with Netscape 4.7 on my Sun at work, and it loads lots of pages very slowly because its HTML rendering engine is super slow (and sucks especially with tables).
Have you tried Mozilla 0.9.6? Or is your filesystem quota set by a non-you, non-flexible administrator too small? Unlike Netscape 4.x and IE, Mozilla's Gecko engine renders pages incrementally; you can force Mozilla to render the part of a page that it has downloaded so far by right-clicking anywhere on the page.
This assumes you haven't tried IE for Solaris.
If Mozilla is ported to GameCube, we'll see Gecko running on Gekko. Better call Geico.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The "Reply" is a button ... Need to get rid of that button so that I'll have the usual options of opening my reply in another tab/window, etc.
This problem can be fixed at the HTML level (change it to a link) or at the client level (make context menus work as well for forms as for links). Kuro5hin and other Scoop sites follow the former approach; it took me a while to find the Reply button after months of Slashdot participation. Bug 17754 in Bugzilla covers the other approach, opening form submissions in a new window. IE, on the other hand, does not have a public bug tracker; if it did, I'd be all over it.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Sections" and "Topics" are confusing. I have yet to find a good reason why both subgroupings need to exist. Also, the fact that some Sections and Topics have different page colors than the homepage while others don't is annoying and confusing.
Newspapers also have sections: news, business, sports, and lifestyle. Each Slashdot section has its own color scheme. Sections and topics are many-to-many; a story with topic 'GNOME' could be put under 'developers' for a release or 'your rights online' if somebody with lots of dollars is suing a developer.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It may seem like common sense, but good page design is hard to implement. In our classes, we make sure that we always have representatives from at least two firms registered for any class. The students then do a usability analysis on pages that they did not create.
When the first student makes "dumb mistakes" on a page, the designer is sure that it's a fluke. When the third person makes the same "mistakes", it's funny to see the designer's jaw drop. Usability is not about being pretty, nor is it about what is expected.
Good usability incorporates page purpose, site purpose, and user expectations to make it easier to accomplish the purpose for the user. If I can't get to my desired item easily, return to it, and help other people find it, the site is not usable for me. End of story.
That thing about oil rigs and shadows in the water? It may seem trivial, but if a major purpose of the website is improved public relations with a potentially hostile audience, little things take on bigger meaning....
In any case you couldn't have a useful shopping or gaming site without [colors, graphics, etc].
Do you claim that useless Flash intro pages, Flash sites with flyspeck text that don't have a useful HTML alternative, and big flashing X10 popups make a site useful?
Part of the purpose of a site is to also convey the brand or meaning, and frankly you are very hobbled in doing this using Jokob's rules.
What does branding require other than a PNG or JPEG logo at the origin of a page and gratuitous mentions of a company's product and brand names in the body text?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Reminds me of Web Pages That Suck: THE BOOK. Website at http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/navigation/
This is also a great book on web usability and navigation. I actually like it a bit more than Nielsen's books because it's, well, written O'Reilly style. Very concise and concrete whereas Nielsen will break down into pretty abstract theoretical stuff and talk about his days at Sun. Nielsen is pretty good, but I end usually end up a little peeved at how much of a throwback the guy is at times.
http://www.useit.com/
Case and point. Sometimes he breaks his own rules on his own front page, so I take his word with a grain of salt. He also seems to abhor graphics. I wish I could find the article, but there was a time when he came out and said that you should never use graphics as navigational elements. Rather, you should use "native" widgets like form buttons if you wanted to make a graphical link. Come on! Talk about code bloat. It takes significantly more code to generate a simple form than it does to link from a graphic. Code bloat affects the user experience and therefore usability.
Personally, I think studying information design á la Edward Tufte is a better approach than studying Nielsen.
Pooty tweet
I'm not equating "innovation" with "masturbatory graphic design" - I'm saying that there is room for rich web interfaces using images, flash, CSS, DHTML, or whatever.
Macromedia Flash technology currently provides little or no support for assistive technologies designed to help those with disabilities. Images without a textual alt ernative also give little help to visually impaired users who "see" the Web through the synthesized voice of Cats. On the other hand, well-written CSS will gracefully degrade (except on nutscrape-4.x).
Will I retire or break 10K?
I like Jakob and generally think he's right on the money, but this specific recommendation makes me wonder if he'd sniffed too much toner the day he wrote that recommendation.
"Light decoration" I can agree with, but no decorative graphics? Does Jakob really expect that the masses will be happy without a few logos, borders, dingbats and other assorted eye candy? Jakob focuses a lot on the idea that content is king, and I couldn't agree more, but the reality of marketing on the web is that, in general, if your site doesn't look slick then people will think it's not quality.
A little eye candy, for all that the term is depracative, is an ok good thing. People simply want their content packaged up pretty.
I think a lot of people really neglect the usefulness of their home page, in that they can make it into a really quality Start Page for themselves, in addition to the typical home page information for others.
Here is a temporary link to my home page. Some of the functions aren't working. My ISP got hosed.
The top section has the stuff that I want others to see and use. Nothing too special. The box on the right is filler material (that displays a funny movie when working correctly). The left hand side is all the different links I usually go to in an average week.
That's right. Instead of using bookmarks, this comes up as my home page, and I can easily select my favorite destinations that I use on a regular basis. (And, at the same time, endorse them for others to use.)
Bottom left is some articles I wrote (mostly on Segfault, which is currently down).
I think the idea though is that people should customize a page that they use, if not just for themselves, which contains all the links they commonly use. It really makes surfing through your favorites easier. (And marking something as a "real" favorite versus a bookmark, which could be anything.)
That may very well be, but one should be ranting againts pointless animations and stupid timewasting intros, not about Flash an sich.
Many jurisdictions require businesses to accommodate those with disabilities. If a site uses Macromedia Flash technology for its main presentation, how will people with visual disabilities read it?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Please flush the bugger. We don't need to see that AC's crap, we can get plenty from his website. Where is it you ask? Gee it was right here a minute ago, wait I seem to have lost it in the myriad of popup and glitz sites I've bookmarked for endless jawdropping yawning pleasure.
Use the right tool for the right job. I wore a tux to my wedding, but I wear my stained sweatshirt and ripped jeans when it's time to get the job done. Your dog-and-pony-show will fail to impress most backers if you don't use glitz, because they expect glitz and consider you unprepared without it. A fast, informative site that doesn't impose a kooky interface on users gets lots of use, but won't generate many compliments because the (excellent) design is essentially transparent.
"CSS affects style, not structure or usability."
Uh oh. You haven't been reading the CSS2 spec, have you?
The new CSS specs allow you to do positioning with tags and such. No more need to use tables for layout, which is good as tables weren't designed for layout.
Check out zeldman.com or alistapart.com there are some links to articles describing how to use CSS for layout.
It's actually quite cool. Now my HTML primarily only contains content, and certain tags that describe what type of content it is. All of the style is controlled by CSS. So I can completely redesign the look of the website by modifying one file instead of 4,000.
The problem is, since Netscape doesn't support CSS, while the tags and content do appear on the page... they are not at all pretty or useable.
Make the title (that which appears in the title bar of your browser window) describe what the page is. At least on my browser, when you bookmark a page, this title is what appears in the bookmarks list. In this context, "Welcome", "Home", "Buy Online" etc. are very unhelpful, but "Acme Products Mail Order" lets me find your site again.
Others have commented on font - I'll just point to an example of how not to do it. Here is a story from Aviation Week. Notice how, having used a minscule font, they then add to the effect by using mid-grey for the text on a white background.
Checkout also the interface hall of shame, although this is aimed more at applications than web pages.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
If this book is anything like his web site, I will never read it. I have studied human computer interaction (HCI) and usability at university, and have very little respect for Nielson.
While I admit there are problems with some web pages, and some of his 10 heuristics are good (aka common sense... thus should not be mentioned), some of his suggestions are ludicrous.
I have been developing web pages commercially for 4 years, and have to say that frames can be used correctly, and images on web pages are ok. People are not using 9.6 kbps modems anymore.
Take a look at the source code of http://www.useit.com/. Uppercase HTML tags, unquoted attributes within tags, single HTML tags such as img, br and hr without closing forward slashes at the end. He doesn't know what he is talking about. And worst of all, he uses Verdana, an ugly, unreadable font that is not as suitable as Arial, Helvetica and sans-serif for viewing text on computer screens.
One reason new technologies are created is to enhance the education and entertainment that can be provided by online content systems. If content provided is dry and boring (eg: www.useit.com), viewers are going to learn less and be less satisfied with their experience.
Nielson should take a reality check and leave the publication of usability books and papers to people who are experts, not just claim to be.
If I go to a website that tries to override my browser's colors, I leave. Fuck them and whatever product they were trying to sell me.
Why? Because people who have any variation of color blindness will set their browser to use colors which they, the users, can distinguish. Most web sites never even consider this fact, and suddenly the users are faced with links, text, images, etc, which all look the same. (Consider a user with red-green color blindness going to a website that tries to "get in the Christmas spirit" by making the links red and green.)
Those websites need to die. I will not support them, visit them, nor refer them to others. I encourage everyone reading to do the same. The inconsiderate I-will-decide-what-you-display designers of those websites also need to die. I will torture them on sight with big flashing migraine-inducing strobe lights, and I encourage everyone reading to do the same.
The whole freaking point of HTML was to allow the end user to specify layout and appearance. The website designer specifies content, nothing else.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Was sagst du?
I'm a Lithuanian posting from Antartica.
It's very quiet here.
Here's how it works ... a web designer who thinks everyone who will visit their site is as artsy and as ably bodied as themselves suddenly gets into his trendy head that a teeny tiny font will be good so he can fit more whizz-bang widgets on a page.
Not being familiar with the use of "font-size: xx-small;" and similiar CSS attributes, they instead specify an absolute font size (eg, 6pt).
Then a visitor comes along whose browser doesn't allow font resizing. Internet Explorer foolishly will not scale absolute font sizes and will only scale relative font sizes. This shortcoming is what you are noticing. On the other hand Opera's zoom and Mozilla's font size increase (Ctrl + +) ride roughshod over what the designer wanted and display what the user wants.
That's the way the web works: The user sees what he wants to see, and how he wants to see it ... which is why absolute font sizes are a sign of a small-minded designer (and a broken user agent that can't scale them).
Now regarding his target demographic ... it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and he (and a few of his friends) end up being the only people visiting the site.
This is something I see mentioned a lot more the longer I'm online. It's very hard for those who are colour blind online.
Does anyone know any resources that cover this subject?
I'd like to make my site friendly to colour blind users, and I think I have, but really, I have no idea because I can't see the way they do.
I was just looking around for some snowboard info today, and came across this site.
Salomon Snowboards. Click on it if you want, so that they realize what the slashdot effect is like on a bulky flash app.
The entire site is in Flash. There's no way to copy and paste info from it. No way to bookmark an existing page. Navigation to a specific section takes seconds longer than a regular site (and I'm not talking about waiting for the info to download--i'm just waiting for the graphics to animate!). If people wanted to see reactive animation, they'd play video games. I used to be able to say that you need nothing faster than a cheap pentium system to surf the web. You can no longer say it with these website monstrosities.
If you are a designer you might prefer something like Repeatweb. Page level and session level analysis, virtual focus group management, etc. Worth it just to justify the fee to clients.
"not my problem" is not good enough
"not my problem" will give you "not getting my business"
See irony
or Misspelling
But you're right. It wouldn't be the same without 'em.
Maximum Stories:
The default is 30. The main column displays 1/3rd of these at minimum, and all of today's stories at maximum.
Try making yours lower and see if it improves.
Not using Nested will speed you up as well.
I also submitted a review of this book to Slashdot a week or two ago, but mine got knocked back. My review was substantially more in-depth, but far less complimentary.
Anyway, you can read my review of Homepage Usability here.
Charles Miller
The more I learn about the Internet, the more amazed I am that it works at all.
What would Jakob Neilsen say about my favorite homepage of all time? Its funny 'cuz its bad.
Doors with horizontal handles should be pushed, while doors with vertical handles should be pulled.
In many cases, doors that should be pushed shouldn't even have handles. Just one of those long metalic release bars or a simple metallic plate is enough to tell the person "you can't pull this."
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
are really the only things that I think could be improved, and that's really because regular and new readers of slashdot need different things.
I think a link above Topic and Section on the story submission page would make it more understandable for first time submitters.
Sections (from what I understand, correct me if I'm wrong) is more about which Editor will look at your submission, as they have different sections as their responsibility, just like a newspaper. (as for those colours, I have no freakin idea, except that I do think Ask Slashdot should look a little different, as it's questions, not direct information)
Topics are really related to the subject matter, which I think can be a little intimidating for first time submitters, as there are a lot of variables on some submissions.
I recently submitted a story that was accepted, that would have fit under a couple of Topic headings.
It was News, but a lot of stuff is News. It was more important to people following Linux news, so that's what I submitted it under. But is also could have gone under Science or Technology.
I think it would be useful to have a little blurb to help submitters choose the most accurate Topic for Slashdot purposes.
With the navigation links, I'd like to see those become customised. For a new user, most of those links are useful. But for regulars, some of it is not so useful.
If I could tick boxes on what I want, I'd retain:
preferences
submit story
And below that I'd dump the section box altogether.
And I'd like a search box up high, above all links on the left, or just under them (I'd only have two if I could choose).
But for a new person, visiting the site for the first time (especially if they have never heard of it), different stuff is needed.
As for all the delightful goodness in Slashdot, I think most people have mentioned it all, aside from what I really love, which is news I can't always get ahold of easily and quickly. Slashdot gave me really great (fast, accurate, important) information on the American Attacks, I never had any trouble loading it during that time, when I was almost unable to use a lot of overseas sites like CNN (I know they said it didn't go down, but when it times out because it's so slow, it's the same thing to the viewer).
I got the 'thanks for your resume, loser' email back from the company a few minutes later, so I replied explaining that their website didn't work for all configurations. They were nice enough to reply to me, saying that this was not a website problem, but a "computer compatability problem!"
Tonight, I'm looking at the IBM free tutorial (35 MB download) on DB2, also using large fonts. They have the same problem. The tutorial is HTML, with non-scrollable windows, about 10% of the text lost because it doesn't fit into the table regions they have defined, and the button to check your answers on all of the review questions is nowhere to be seen, so I can't see any of the answers to the review questions unless I reboot with small fonts.
And if you spell like that, I'd say your brand comes across as illiterate and unobservant. It's Jakob, not Jokob, as any previous post could tell you. Your grammar could also do with some polishing.
Branding isn't usually information, except to marketroids.
A useful shopping or gaming site would:
Something which branding doesn't cover, if you just don't have what it takes.
Most sites don't have what's mentioned above.
Work on that and then start your branding.
I recently saw a job posting from a law enforcement agency wanting to hire a webmaster for a website for battered women. They got funding from somewhere for this, to reach out and help those needing help. A great cause. But the help-wanted ad asked for people skilled with every worthless website glitzification-enhancing and functionality-obstructing technology that the prevaricating unemployed dotcom bozo could cram onto a resume. I get visions of women getting beat to death while waiting for pages to load or
or rebooting after Netscape crashes, or, if they are lucky and the webmaster is exceptionally thorough, looking at error messages about how they must turn on this or turn off that before they can access the page.
Do you see people raving about their site? I never have. In fact I've been there a few times, looking for reports on their human rights abuses, but they're not on there.
I would guess a lot of hits Nike gets are from being in the news for their slave labour practices.
A hit count won't tell you whether your site is good or bad, only how many people have visited it.
If lots of people go to a filthy public toilet that could give you any disease of your choice, it doesn't mean it's a great public toilet, it just means they needed to go.
Your site can have graphics, but if it's heavy, people will leave before they fall asleep, waiting for it to load.
I can't really think of any time to use this design. If I have to wait around for a site to load, I'm off doing something else, and I won't be back.
A very polemic opinion.
E.g. what has the HTML-code of his own website to do with his opinions on web-usability? Do you have to be an engineer to drive a car?
And why should he NOT use Verdana and Georgia on his website? Other than Arial these are fonts designed for screen-reading (BTW by Microsoft).
-- Watch me working: www.magerquark.de
Not necessarily. Both services have different objectives.
Bobby [http://www.cast.org/bobby/] is a web-based tool that analyzes web pages for their accessibility to people with disabilities. From their test homepage [http://bobby.cast.org/], a Bobby-approved website must:
* provide text equivalents for all non-text elements (i.e., images, animations, audio, video)
* provide summaries of graphs and charts
* ensure that all information conveyed with color is also available without color
* clearly identify changes in the natural language of a document's text and any text equivalents (e.g., captions) of non-text content
* organize content logically and clearly
* provide alternative content for features (e.g., applets or plug-ins) that may not be supported
The W3C validator [http://validator.w3.org/], on the other hand, ensures your webpages are syntactically correct and conform to their prescribed standards, such as XHTML 1.0 Strict. It does not place so much emphasis on accessibility, though it isn't ignored.
I would advise you to develop your webpages with the disadvantaged in mind. Make the web a better place for them and they will be grateful.
Cheers
CD
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Many of the Web designers with >5yrs experience whom you'll meet generally:
know HTML and CSS
consider Jakob Nielsen to be a complete blowhard
The first is true because these folks have been around long enough to realize that Dreamweaver et. al. place too many limitations and create too many problems to be viable, in a design environment.
The second is true not because Nielsen gives bad advice, but because his conclusions are too broad and too strongly worded.
As for comping with Photoshop: I've been comping with Photoshop for four years. So do lots of other designers; the comping tools of choice are generally considered to be {raster gfx package | vector gfx package | pencil/paper } with many using two or even all three, since they do their own illustrations and drop the illustrations directly into the comp. The difference between the professional designer and the Junior VP is that the former is far more likely to know what's easy to markup, and what's not. This is generally reflected in the way people proceed through the site development process...
...When in doubt, think for yourself.
Jahn's article above is quite interesting to read again because the names have changed, time has passed, but most of the issues are still the same.
Yet another book by New Riders. Makers of some of the worst tech books out there.
...because Jakob's Law of the Internet User Experience doesn't apply to Slashdot. After all, most /. users spend 98% of their time on this site...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I noticed that when the changes first went up. Don't you think that's kind of ironic, when you think about the software development ideas many /. readers support and believe in, and the fact that one of their biggest benefits is rapid evolution of the product?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
even if you don't think it exists.
when a story is on slashdot, there's a lot of links to the items being discussed.
that's a lot of opportunities for someone to visit Nike when they are in the news so much.
you said:
Do you really think that they would get as many visitors to there site if it wasn't a flashy site? No way. and that's just not accurate
a lot of hits are first time visitors, they've never seen it before, so they don't know it's flashy.
branding is why Nike gets hits, it has nothing to do with their site.
but it could be aided by their frequent news items
- Sites that used multiple font faces and sizes for one single page's body text
- Sites with splash pages composed entirely of a 640x480 animated GIF (the spinning-globe motif was popular in the mid- to late- 90s)
- Sites with nice images, but *no* content
- One site was designed with an elaborate beverage vending machine for navigation -- the machine's buttons each had clever, inscrutable titles that, when clicked, would lead the user to a particular section of the site (done in Flash, no less)
- one user insisted on having a 'talking head' narrate each of his intranet site's pages, because he had seen that stupid Microsoft Text-Readin' Genie somewhere -- the inteanet site, I might add, was intended for use by people in the field, dialing up with a laptop at god-knows-what-kind-of-horrible-speed
- elaborate images, sliced up into navigation bars that swoop across the top of the page, then down to the left (pity thepoor bastard who has to add a button to the left-side navigation bar on those puppies in a year or two)
- sites with no links to a site owner or administrator, and no other indication of who might own the site
- sites with no link to the main intranet 'home page'
- newly-developed sites, being submitted for approval, full of broken links, or anchor-type links done *incorrectly*
- framed sites that targeted links to the wrong frame (i.e. you click a link in your left-navigation area, and the left-navigation area itself disappears, and a word document takes its place)
- a lot of direct links to Word and Excel documents, and even Microsoft Project files
- sites that required 1024x768 resolution to avoid left-right scrolling -- this, 3 to 5 years ago!
All of these sites were put together by alleged web designers or web developers. Damn FrontPage. THIS is why we need these silly, obvious, common-sense tomes.