Slashdot Mirror
Bad Web Sites Can Cause "Mouse Rage"
alphadogg writes "Badly designed Web sites may have negative effects on a user's immune, cardiovascular, and nervous systems, a study says. The study of 2,500 users was commissioned by Rackspace Managed Hosting and published by the UK's Social Issues Research Centre. It found that five technology flaws in Web sites may have deleterious effects." How long before the first class action suit in the U.S. over bad Web site design?
"Conducted by the Social Issues Research Centre in the United Kingdom, the study identified key factors that can negatively affect cardio functions, as well as the immune and nervous systems."
And they still don't know what causes bad teeth.
I like the Title of this story:
Developers: Bad Web Sites Can Cause "Mouse Rage"
Okay, what causes Developer Rage?
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
How long before the first class action suit in the U.S. over bad Web site design?
My reply: Didn't we already have the blind sue over something similar to this?
click here to view our latest products!
... sorry, our website is under construction. (animated gif of a construction sign here).
*clicks*
How long before the first class action suit in the U.S. over bad Web site design?
Depends on how long it takes my Cease and Desist letter to arrive at CmdrTaco's house. Given the USPS, it might not arrive for weeks!
This slashdot-related signature is a stub. You can help kihjin by expanding it.
"Badly designed Web sites may have negative effects on a user's immune, cardiovascular, and nervous systems, a study says. "
So that's why Taco redesigned Slashdot. I didn't know he cared.
"Sorry boss, but slashdot's ugly IT color scheme weakened my immune system and now I'm sick so I can't come in today"
Monstar L
It's ironic that this article appears on the EETimes, which is so chock-full of advertisements that it's difficult to tell where the article ends. Not to mention the annoying flash popup that activates if you mouse-over the corner of the page.
All psychologists agree that plain text loses next to flashing-anything. So there's a 6x8 block of text, buried in (other stuff) ... and get a load of that FlippyPage!
All still proof that Web 3.0 isn't here yet, in which someone figures out a 5 part payment distribution system so that viewers aren't crushed by ads from companies whose boards are adicted to FivePercentGrowth-or-Bust.
We all boycotted Geocities for this back in the day.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I wonder how hard it would be to design a website that was so awful that it actually caused physical illness...
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Justification of salaries apparently knows no rational bounds.
snarkth
Oh man, nothing gets me madder then websites that are doing very simple things, but don't work! I bet I've caused more damage throwin' my mouse around than any of those stupid Wii users. Gotta find me a nice sturdy wrist starp for my mouse.
How long before the first class action suit in the U.S. over bad Web site design? Never, someone probably patented this particular kind of class action suit already so they wouldn't want to be counter-sued by the patentee.
Or as those of us who aren't pretentious call it: "anger."
My Greatest Heist - Muisc partly inspired by the unbeatable Qwantz
Wouldn't myspace take the cake on this one? Seriously, I'd rather gouge out my own eyes then shift through any of that.
My reply: Didn't we already have the blind sue over something similar to this?
My reply: Do we get to choose which jerks are first up against the wall when the revolution comes? And can we pick web application developers?
'Cause if so, I'm totally in. (Stupid defect tracking system popping up windows left and right...)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Not sure though I believe these guys know. I nearly went insane trying to work out where the Exchange 2003 patches section was yesterday; and when I got there I was told it was only accessible via a password that you get from a phone tech...
I ate your fish.
Other sites regularly cause me to vomit, so it can't be too hard.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
I think some famous dude said "hell hath no fury like someone who just filled out a huge form and the submit times out and wipes it out" Bad design just makes me feel like yay, there's one less person who would get a job over me (future web designer) but nothing makes me or probably anyone else more pissed than composing something huge like a forum post or filling out a big form and then losing all that. In fact, I'd probably get pretty pissed if I pressed submit right now for this and it froze or something. Let's find out...
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Doesn't it seem strange that a company that is dedicated to leasing/selling webservers is saying that every site need to be quick? It is sort of like having oil companies tell us that the world is doing just fine....Oh wait, nevermind.
How long before the first class action suit in the U.S. over bad Web site design?
As soon as those Wii owners return to their computers...
Yes. Target got sued by an organization representing blind people and the judge in the case has ruled that the lawsuit can proceed under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
... the right two words are of course - 'end users'.
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
I'm specifically interested in this so-called "perfect website" that was used as a baseline.
Other factors could contribute also, from the ergonomics and lighting of the testing facility to the colors of the sites presented.
How many of these sites were Flash vs standards-based? What was the average text size? Contrast between text and background? Number of images, and their sizes? How about CSS vs table layouts? How did "Pretty" sites (eg, digg.com) fare against "ugly" sites (eg, cragslist)? Static navigation elements vs complex multi-level fly-out menus? There are a lot of possible factors and criteria that go unmentioned, at least in TFA.
I'm not sure if I completely agree with the implication that hardware infrastructure and network reliability trumps usability. For me, a site that is designed badly or behaves badly on the browser side is a greater offense than a site that loads a little slower than most.
Navigation is but a portion of layout. Other studies have shown that the brain subconsciously identifies all the major areas of a web page (header, navigation, main content, ancillary content) in 1/20 of a second after the page loads, and that the common practice of placing navigation/secondary content a left-hand column causes people to ignore anything in the right-side column (a phenomenon known as "right side blindness"), because people have learned that most of the time, what's in the right-hand column is less related (if it's relevant at all) to their task at hand... typically third party banners or other cruft.
I hope that the conclusion is that modern, CSS driven, user-centric designs are less stress inducing than bloated, image-laden table layouts, but I get the feeling that the reseearchers aren't prepared to commit to saying it.
I'm not blind, you insensitive clod! I'm visionally challenged!
The article mentions google as the prime example of good web design. How long will it take them
to fix that ugly, unresponsive, buggy UI of YouTube? Don't get me wrong, its basic functionality works just fine
but once you start arranging videos in playlists, favorites etc, nothing seems to work in a predictable way.
Your playlist selections appear not to have been saved and then songs appear in it out of the blue in the future.
There is really no synchronization between a user's settings and what eventually makes it in the downloaded page.
Even worse the links to "my favorites" etc disappears from the web page once you view a video. You need to go back to
your account and select options from there.
Needless to say that google video's site is much much better, faster and not buggy at all.
I especially adore their player's random access feature and that it seems to download faster and be less
CPU intensive. I would not mind at all if they just incorporate the youtube user accounts, the uploaded videos
the domain name and add the expensive youtube servers to their grid. Then completely get rid off all
the software developed for YouTube's site and simply take example from some of their nice features such
as comments on videos.
Forget webshites - what makes my blood boil is operating systems. When I'm really working hard on something and get stopped up for a very long time trying to coerce the operating system into doing what I want I can get really frustrated. There is an obvious rise in blood pressure, my muscles tighten up, and if it's really bad I start to get light headed.
This is true across all things - they can make your frustrated. That's part of life. The amount of frustration something gives you is a good measurement of how crappy or good it is.
I'm not saying which operating system causes me so much aggravation on a regular basis - I don't want to be marked down as a troll, you know. But I will say that it rhymes with Bicrosoft Mindoze.
or else!
Whoa. That's some advanced sheot!
It's hard-core science, too. Look at the scientifical results:
The report stated, "Some changes in muscle tension were quite dramatic While this was happening, the participants faces also tensed visibly, with the teeth clenched together and the muscles around the mouth becoming taught. These are physically uncomfortable situations that reduce concentration and increase feelings of anger."
I'm surprised that nobody has ever done anything like this before!
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
What is a company executive doing on this site?
...commissioned by Rackspace Managed Hosting...
... hosted Web sites". "And, of course, the killer cause: site unavailability.", "Unfortunately, many Web sites and their servers cannot deliver this."
And from the article, "What's the root cause of Mouse Rage Syndrome? It's primarily caused by badly
Weirdest thing, a study bought (sorry, "paid for") by a managed hosting company found that poorly hosted sites are a bad thing.
Whatever's next? Will a Microsoft funded study find that Windows has a lower total cost of ownership than Linux? A UK music industry funded study will find that most people support an extension of copyright terms? A Lybian court will find Bulgarian nurses guilty of infecting children with a strain of HIV that's been around since before the nurses entered the country and that it's absolutely nothing to do with pre-existing poor hygene conditions at the Lybian hospital? Those that want funding under the Bush administration will find Climate Change isn't real? Why on earth aren't hundreds of scientists speaking out and decrying such blatantly biased research?
Crazy.
IMHO these people that conducted the study need to spend their time elsewhere. For all those males out there, I take this moment to remind you all that viewing female breasts for 10 minutes a day is proven to relax you. I should know someone sent me the "Powerpoint", and yes I did some personal study :)
It really does work.
MySpace is more of a hosting service itself. The individual pages do not have to suck.
I'm waiting for some one to have an epileptic fit from all the flashing banners on some sites.
Welcome to mouse-rage. Each thing you do or do not do can be a reason for stress. It does not matter where the provocation comes from. Stress comes from your own reaction to the external events as the Gautam the Buddha explained long back. The same set of people getting hyper over bad web-sites will curse while they at the steering wheel.
I'll simply e-mail a link to a poorly designed website to my professors and render them incapable of teaching the next day!
If I surf craigslist for random crap, I'll be tempered in raw shit!
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Or maybe people with poor immune, cardiovascular, and nervous systems happen to frequent sites that implement these offending designs.
You tell the truth. I have considered bagging myself a few IE and Windows devs myself...but the whole killing is a crime thing works against that.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
But I dread the government's intervention even more. Having dealt with smoking, they are already after trans-fats. Web-sites can't be far down the list.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
... mouse designs the bas sites!!
Eclipse PDE and Me
Amazon.com
Decent selection (on certain things) and prices that are worth considering (especially when on sale). But...
1) Why does the search suck? Why can I not easily differentiate between different versions of the same product? The worst is when you do this with books. Sometimes you'll get screens of the seemingly same item, and the differences are slight, such as publication edition, extras included, hardback, or paperback... but NONE OF THAT SHOWS UP. You have to click on each result and dig down HARD to find the difference.
2) Why is it once I enter one of the sections (such as books) by selecting the drop down menu in the search area (books) and entering a query, I can no longer search the music section the same way? Suddenly the search drop down menu changes to book subsections and a generic, whole sitewide 'amazon.com' search. I can either take my chances with the site wide search, or click on the home page button and do the search again with the correct section selected.
2) Why is there SO MUCH CRAP all over the place?
I tend to avoid amazon simply because of interface aggravation, especially when I can help out a local seller. It's a testimony to the crappiness of amazon that the balance of getting in a car/taking public trans and visiting my (albeit awesome) local booksellers beats out rolling out of bed, strugglign to find what I need at their online store, and wrestling with the checkout clicks...
Btw, I do like the minimal amazon search that is available, but it doesn't alleviate any of the above since you still have to hit the site after the results are obtained.
I read the comments in search of "you ain't seen nothing yet" examples, but nadda. Come on, can't we do better (= worse) than the original article? So much for the collective wisdom of /.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
And since we're reading /. from work (I, for one, am.), we sue our employer too. Always add insult to damage!
All rites reversed 2010
"The test results indicate that users want Google-style speed, function, and accuracy from all of the Web sites they visit, and they want it now," according to the SIRC report. "Unfortunately, many Web sites and their servers cannot deliver this."
So...in short, this "Mouse Rage Syndrome" is caused because of lag. The researchers should have gotten about 24 Counter-Strike players to play and then make only ONE user have a three-digit ping. "Rage" would be an understatement when explaining the resulting chaos.
Hmm... The blog is offtopic
OH, you mean that it is full of craps?
[/JOKE]
Syllable 0.62 is here at last!!!
Pinky,are you pondering what I'm pondering?
Then why use two of the ones that do suck as examples?
A smarthat, eh? Don't make me spam your MySpace profile with goatse.
Steal an mp3 = zillions of dollars in damages
Cause health problems for thousands or millions = no damages?
And people tell me that corporations don't have special rights.......
hint: I mean, let's take away the corporations' special rights...
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Why does my blood pressure rise when I go to MySpace? Is it the inane musings of the attention whores, the crappy music, or the terrible, terrible web pages?
Well I guess the bottom line is that if I ever want a primo aneuysm I know where to go.
-R
How long before the first class action suit in the U.S. over bad Web site design?
The next time Forbes.com prints an article that is really compelling and yet is horribly handicapped by forcing the user to learn information by a slideshow interface that just plain sucks.
Even when you can operate the slideshow at your own speed, the slideshow completely refreshes the window you're looking at (I presume it's so that an article with a list can show off much more advertising than if the list were presented normally.) It's irritating on good days, painful on bad when the connection on my end or their end is slow.
The worst offenders are internal corporate sites built on expensive proprietary technology that offers a lot of heavy framework so business analysts can design byzantine workflows. While the client user interface may be theoretically "web-based" it isn't regular old HTML. It has to be client-side java, or at the very least, lots and lots of javascript, so it feels like client-side java. All this is for filling out forms and navigation, mind you, we're not talking fancy graphics or AJAX or anything. Naturally, these sites are IE-only, and very particular about which version of IE at that.
This kind of site couldn't survive for long outside a corporate firewall. Too slow, bloated, difficult to navigate, unsecure, and downright ugly. But when your paycheck depends on using a mandated interface to fill out a trouble ticket, timesheet, or expense report, you just click and bear it.
Oh yeah, in my job I support a site like this. The back end isn't any better.
KTHXBYE
Was talking to one of remote offices in Continental Europe last week, and the boss was complaining his docking station for his laptop didn't work..
turned out his keyboard was broke due to him smashing it on desk. Apparently two of the 3 people in that office are also on their third mouse in a year!
nothing to do with Websites, just M$-Windoze giving hassle - mind you they had problems with their Macs previously as well...
It was the webmaster, in the bedroom, with a Flash based site about home electronics...
...ponders if heavily flashing websites can cause seizures.
>I'm visionally challenged!
You are George Bush and I claim my 5 pounds!
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Some people have no roof over their heads
Some people can't feed their kids
Some people are looking at dead farms in the desert wondering what to do next
Some people have cancer
Some people have reasons to get angry
Looking at a badly designed website isn't one of them. If this makes you angry you really need to ask yourself WTF is wrong with yourself?
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
>...ponders if heavily flashing websites can cause seizures.
Yes they can but epileptics are wise enough to move on if they see anything likely to cause a problem
As the old joke says:
Patient: 'Doctor, it hurts everytime I hit my head on a wall'
Doctor: 'Well stop doing it then.'
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Why should online shopping be any less stressful than real in the shop shopping ?
What's so funny about that? I don't see it.
All this lawsuits nowdays pisses me off, and cause my pulse to speed up and my blood pressure to rise, which is having adverse effect on my health. I guess I shoud sue US for having such stupid sue-everybody practices!
I've been feeling sleepy since I started reading Slashdot...
So say we all
Seriously, those pages really do suck. And your homepage uses frames.
The study was commissioned by a hosting company who I won't bother naming, who will no doubt be all too pleased to explain how their servers can avoid such buzzword enriched ailments.
Maybe the season is affecting our editors skeptical filters.
boakes.org
Wow! Now i know why i feel extremely sick when i access this site... :(
I'd save some headacke medicine if i knew it before
How long before the first class action suit in the U.S. over bad Web site design?
Sad... but, plausible.
I was expecting a slashdvertisement when i saw this article, about a web-hosting service commisioning a study.. It's all good though: The all wise google already has the answer to this article: http://lake.glowie.com/~dmi/slashdot/google_is_wis e.png
----
Pr0n Site Redirection.
I want to see _that_ movie. Where the hell is it?
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
Conducted by the Social Issues Research Centre in the United Kingdom, the study identified key factors that can negatively affect cardio functions, as well as the immune and nervous systems.
I thought everything I previously read said users just clicked away when they get frustrated.
What changed?
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
"Can't come in today either, boss. I'm still blind from Slashdot's "OMG Ponies" color scheme."
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
I am not defending the MS site design but you must mean patches only released to customers experiencing a particular problem. The KB article will usually tell you to contact MS Support for patches not available on their website.
If you are talking about Service Packs, Critical Updates, and those types of things then you can get most of those things by going to windowsupdate.microsoft.com (in IE click on Tools -> Windows Update).
You can also find the Exchange 2K3 downloads in a few clicks.
* www.microsoft.com/exchange
* Click Downloads on the left navigation pane
* Click Exchange 2003 Server downloads on the top right
From there I was able to download SP2 (Using Firefox) in another 2 clicks.
It may not be perfect but the MS site is much better than many other sites. Have you ever tried downloading updates or drivers from IBM? IBM Support can't even tell you how. IBM Support will give you a filename to put in their search form to find the download. It has been this way for 10 years. PATHETIC!
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Yeah funny... The news site where that was posted was rather ugly too. Oh my god, the news media wants to kill me!!!
I vote for the American Express merchant services site. I had to use this everyday to download information. It made my blood pressure go up every time. They implement their buttons with Javascript so that you cannot use tabs to open windows, and make you dig through numerous screens to get at the information you want, and then only give it to you a few items at a time. I particularly remember when then did a code rewrite that didn't make the system more useful. They added a screen that in effect said "you requested XXX, is that what you want?"
American Express - worst site design.
Thanx fer letting me vent.
(BTW- the corporate card site is pretty crappy too. They have a habit of moving the information around so that you have to hunt for it from month to month. My hope is someone from American Express will read this and fire their whole web development team.)
+5 Funny?
Whoever modded the parent funny has never tried to make a modern CSS-driven website that simultaneously worked correctly in IE5.x/win, IE6.x/win, and IE5.x/mac.
I am not kidding when I say that historically about 30% of my time is spent making a nice site layout and navigation tools that work correctly in all versions of Mozilla, Safari, and Opera 7.x+, while the remaining 70% of the development effort is spent trying to hack the code to render correctly in IE.
Lately I've finally given up on compatibility with IE5.x, it's just not worth the effort. Of course, there are still a fair number of users who then write in to complain that the site doesn't work for them.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Actually Auto-Formatting a document in Microsoft Word is the thing that infuriates me the most.
All content herein is here due to the will and desire of the maintainer of this site. The maintainer provides no warranty and accepts no responsibility, expressed or implied, that the links or content will do anything, go anywhere, or be of any interest except to the publisher of this site. Furthermore, this site may contain images which could be considered offensive or objectionable to some viewers, it is the responsibility of the viewer or their parents/guardians to make this determination as the need or desire suits them. The maintainer of this site claims no responsibility whatsoever for content, functionality, fitness, weight loss or gain, inflammation, swelling, fever, dizziness, nausea, myopia, hyperopia, or any ailment, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, or otherwise possible, impossible, probable, or improbable, to affect anyone at all due to the viewing of the material in, on, or referenced by this website, acceptable or otherwise to any and all audiences thereto.
Class-action suit?
The next website I see that tells me that my credit-card number is invalid (because I entered it with hyphens), I'm going to find those developers, skin them alive, then boil them in brine, kill their families and pets, burn down their houses, and salt their land.
University of Cinicinnati, you've been warned.
I look forward to the day people start suing the numerous idiots that use Flash in their index page as the sole menu interface to content on their site.
This is one of the dumbest things I've heard in a long time!
It has NOTHING to do with the websites, the Internet or anything else.
Take a guy who's inept at something, anything. Let's say fishing. He does not know how to attach the hook, that a bait can help or which bait is appropriate at the type of fish. He gets the idea to go fishing to impress his new girlfriend or whatever. He tells her he's going to bring home some nice fish.
Now let him at it for long enough time and after enough frustration you may notice a quickening of the heart, profuse sweating, and furious tossing around and bashing the equipment. In extreme cases, the ailment can be identified by loud screaming.
Does that mean we have a new "fishing syndrome"?
No, all it means is that the guy is overwhelmed, frustrated or whatever. Nothing a good rest, or a walk cannot fix. Maybe some food and a rest is really what he needs. Then someone showing him how to fish.
Maybe you are at work and you told your tough boss that You're The Man for the job, but you find there's something you don't understand and cannot get it right. As the deadline approaches and you're still fighting to get it done you may notice a quickening of the heart, profuse sweating, and furious tossing around and bashing the equipment. In extreme cases, the ailment can be identified by loud screaming.
These "syndromes" are nothing but another attempt to make you think you suffer from a syndrome of sorts, but fortunately it's nothing we can't fix with the right psychotropic drug treatment. Unfortunately a lot of people have bought into that pseudo science. Which mostly lines someones pockets.
Did you know that during the world war in Britain not a single case of insanity was reported? But somehow here we all suffer from something unheard of 50 years ago. And Somehow it can all be treated with some drug!?
Actually the content of handbook used for billing treatments is voted in. They don't scientifically discover some ailment but vote it in by popular vote. Yeah Mouse Rage Syndrome my foot!
Have you ever signed up for a service that required your city and zip code? Ever enter something only to tell you it's invalid? A lot of people make the mistake of assuming everyone lives in a city, when some people don't.
I wonder how hard it would be to design a website that was so awful that it actually caused physical illness...
Just head on over to MySpace and check out any teen girl's page. They seem to have no problem doing that.
I don't know, the pages you listed are not all that good. Granted they are not as bad as SOME, but still... Crappy color combinations and a narrow fixed-width design. I scroll down on one and get this tall narrow column that takes up a very small portion of my browser window.
I went to Home Depot's website 2 days ago and the whole thing was down because and I quote "high volumes because of the holiday season". I don't know whether that's really funny or really sad.
But in a more insidious vein, the #1 website killer to me is registration. I am sick of registration. I am dropping real products because of their website's registration. I am cancelling sales in process because of last second registration requirements. I have stopped magazine and newspaper subscriptions because of registration to their websites. I am not doing registration anymore:
Your website is free, you don't need registration
I am paying my money to you for your product/service, you don't need registration
I already registered the product, you don't need registration
I am paying with a credit card, you don't need registration
and so on. Not gonna do registration anymore.
Not gonna jump through hoops to figure out another password you will accept that will allow me to give you my money. Not gonna worry about you emailing me my forgotten password anymore. You lost that sale, I hope you are thrilled with that.
... there is Evidence That Good Moods Prevent Colds. The obvious conclusion is that bad web sites cause colds! I guess I can stop washing my hands now and work on improving my web surfing habits instead.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
How long before the first class action suit in the U.S. over bad Web site design?
It was filed 10 minutes ago. By the same moron who can't hold on to his Wii controller.
Very interesting results. Really. they found out that bad UI-design causes anger and stress. In addition it should be avoided. Well, I thought this was common knowledge. That's why we try to improve user interfaces. But I must be wrong. At least that explains the concentration on eyecandy instead of functionality in today applications (web or otherwise).
You know what causes me lots of rage? MySpace. I hate that site! Yet, all my friends are on it...
I need new friends. Fuck MySpace!
Student Manager - Take control of your education!
Nothing disturbs me more than seeing gay porn webiste after typing oral sex :s
The nightmares,,,,,,,
I'm told it's tougher than summitting Everest.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
That wasn't about bad design though, that was about not making the site readable by text-to-voice programs.
Allegedly real newspaper headline from 1998:
Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge
The study was commissioned by Rackspace. I doubt they would pay for a study that showed that cheap, slow web hosting made end users relaxed and happy. It's like saying a drug-company sponsored study isn't looking for supporting evidence that their drug works.
Thanks adblock extension to Mozilla Firefox! :)
From the source....
I've never experienced behavior like that in myself due to a web site, but I've found myself flailing at the computer like an offended monkey when Flash starts doing its usual tricks of responding sluggishly to the mouse, starting to ignore keyboard shortcuts at random, and of course crashing and losing data. Sometimes I can just sigh, shrug, and move on, but other times I'm stressed out, under a deadline, and frustrated...
egypt urnash minimal art.
How long before the first class action suit in the U.S. over bad Web site design?
The sooner the better for all of us. It is sad but true that unless it costs a company money, they won't do anything about it. Many engineering mistakes lead to suits which caused changes in practices. It will probably have to be the same in software.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
ban myspace?
Umm... that's kind of the point?
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
How long before the first class action suit against asinine class action suits?
The remedy, of course, is that the victorious lawyers get to defenstrate themselves at a suitable altitude.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Or Novell. Shoot me now, please. Some parts of their site say that Groupwise 7 is compatible with SuSE 9. Others say SuSE 10. End result: it doesn't work right (if you can even get past install) with 10 unless you get a certain specific service pack that isn't mentioned in any obvious literature.
-b.
lets see, there was the Samsung ad in the upper right hand corner. If you happen to mouse over it a lovely "screen peeling" effect happens that causes a large portion of the page to no longer be readable until you mouse all the way off the newly "peeled" section. On top of that both a horizontal and vertical ad that are identical to one another in content. And lets not forget the numberous tables with links in a font small enough that any "vision impaired" individual would need a magnification device (software or hardware) to be able to even decipher what they were.
Maybe it's just me, but making a point to display this sort of information on a website that blatantly is in violation of the whole concept seems to cheapen the data being presented.
We're so screwed.
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex. I could pinch them."
Marvin the Martian
Who was it that said, "The first thing we should do is kill all the lawyers?"
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
Now that's what I call a nicely-done website.
-- Despair is an operating system that ANY human being can run, sort of a psychological JAVA --
Dick The Butcher in Henery IV pt 2
As long as it takes for some ambulance chasing lawyer to RTFA.
Shakespear.
> How long before the first class action suit in the U.S. over bad Web site design?
I don't know, but Slashdot should probably talk to their lawyers, and fast.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I can see the future warnings that pop-up when you visit every web site:
WARNING. This website may contain content that increases stress levels. This stress may cause a number of harmful physiological side-effects including SUDDEN DEATH. By accessing this website, you agree that you understand the risks of stress-inducing websites, and release us from all harm, yadda yadda yadda ...
I went to TFA, and tried using the "Send as Email" link to send the article to my wife (who must have this). Popup comes up, and I need to give email addresses and then there is a captcha - problem is the image that shows letters/numbers I need to type in is a broken link. Ironic, eh?
Quit jabbering on the phone while driving. You are not that important.
That suit was primarily about Accessibility with respect to disabilities. I believe this study concentrated not on the disabled, but more on the average person and the Usability of the site. I understand that there is a lot of cross-over between the two concepts, but they are not the same thing.
From a UI perspective, while you might find a site which doesn't break accepted usability rules, you can't really find a site that's optimal for everyone. Design is audience-dependent. I work for a chip manufacturer with an audience heavily slanted for engineering, and we have to perform our own usability research with engineers because their preferences, statistically speaking, are so very from the generic "web user" considered in most discussions of UI design.
...Websites That Kill!
Yet, despite goatse, I still live. I'm just fine. Nothing wrong here. I feel sdfjkdfas.asd';sd
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
sometimes sites like this just make me sick, gees.
how convienient that we have a story of a study paid for by one of slashdots advertisers on the main page? coincidence? i think not.
Most of the people-who-missed-the-point already are anonymous.
{"The Cheat presents" on a black background appears on the screen, followed by two green, bean-shaped eyes.}
STRONG BAD: Check it out, those are supposed to be my eyes, I think.
{The eyes fade and the letters "SB" appear. "Strong" and "Bad" are inside each letter}
STRONG BAD: That stands for my name.
{The "S" and "B" turn into "The Web" in cursive}
STRONG BAD: "The Web".
{"The Web" turns into "Welcomes 'u' '2'", the letters made of only horizontal and vertical lines. The words "strong bad's cybersite" appear in red below "Welcomes 'u' '2'". A rainbow circle about 3/4 the size of the "2" comes and rolls in, stopping at the quotation mark before the "2"}
STRONG BAD: That little rainbow thing's kinda cool.
{The word "cybersite" turns into rainbow colors. The words exit and a blackhole-like thing appears.}
STRONG BAD: Oh, go through the tunnel, oh look out!
{As he says "Oh, look out!", a hand appears to punch you, and after it does, the word "OUCH!" appears above it. The words "Get on in!" appear in a long button.}
STRONG BAD: Oh, you got punched! Aw, man, right in the face. {typing} Okay, next on the checklist: lots of animated GIFs! {pronounces it /gifs/; stops typing} or... GIFs... {pronounces it /jifs/} or however you say it. I don't know. I heard a couple of nerds arguing about it one time. {clears screen} But you want as many of those as possible.
{An animated GIF appears that cycles between a flame, the word "Fire!" and another flame.}
STRONG BAD: Especially the {Another GIF appears, featuring a mouse that looks side to side before revealing a letter labeled "INTERNET?" in its mouth.} rotate-y kind. {Two rotating GIFs appear, one of a guitar, the other of a diamond that flashes, showing the words "hi rez" which then disappear.} Those are awesome, man. Nobody gets tired of looking at those. {clears screen}
STRONG BAD: {typing} So, then you can pretty much just pick whatever for your subject. It doesn't really matter as long as you got the rest of that stuff on there. {stops typing} I mean, {resumes typing} James, the Internet is a place where absolutely nothing happens. You need to take advantage of that. {stops typing}I mean, you can make a webpage of your cat.
{A picture of a cat lying on a football with red eye thinking "It's 4th and 10. Now WHERE'S MY SUPPER?!?" appears}
STRONG BAD: or your The Cheat.
{A picture of The Cheat sleeping on a couch on his back on a couch thinking "It's 4th and 10. I hate cats."}
STRONG BAD: And, {typing} Who knows? Maybe tomorrow you'll be really big in Pakistan. Or at least, with some guy named Stan. {Stops typing} Anyways, I gotta go work on my webpage.
Transcript from: http://www.hrwiki.org/index.php/website
Video from: http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail51.html
Irony: A web page hosting an article about how bad graphics can contribute to "Web Rage" that has blinking advertisements on it.
I'll give you a very depressing example. Everyone knows about the well-documented IE CSS bugs on Position is everything. A pain they are, but with sufficient hours of slaving away you can hack-around or workaround them, because they are known problems.
... works just fine. I start to think I am losing my mind. I have been at this for five hours. I must have copied a different file than I thought. I try it again, using fresh copy of the file from backup. Menus don't work. I copy it to a different file name. Now the menus work. I really am losing my mind.
But nearly every project, I run into some mysterious *new* IE bug that takes hours to figure out. Here's my favorite example.
Circa 2004, I'm working on the site for Ecliptic Enterprises when I discover that the drop-down navigator menu doesn't work on all the pages. On the staff profile / resume pages, mousing over the menu does not cause it to drop down. It works on all the other pages.
But those menus are defined in an external file that is included on every page. So why would they work on some pages, but not the others? I check several times to make sure that the php code is rendering the menus identically on every page. diff confirms that the HTML, css, and javascript for the menus are 100% identical on all pages. So obviously (I think), some weird interaction with the page's content is breaking the javascript.
I begin systematically removing blocks of HTML trying to find what is breaking the menus on these specific pages. I remove each block, reload to see if the problem is fixed, diff the PHP outputs to check what I've done, replace the block, move on to the next block. I get to the end of the file and nothing has fixed the problem. So I try it over again from the beginning, removing code blocks and NOT replacing them before going on to the next.
After quite some time, I have stripped these pages down to zero content -- just the menus and other nav structure that is common to all pages. Yet the menus still won't function! I strip the remaining common parts of the page until there is nothing but a bare menu in my test file -- it still doesn't work! But the menus work happily on ~50 other pages on the site! About four hours have gone by.
By now I have so many copies of the page (dozens) that I am losing track of what I've tried in what order. profile_test001.php. profile_test002.php profile_whatthehellisgoingonhere.php. Eventually I copy the original page to an entirely different name to start anew. That copy, apparently identical to the original
But no, after testing for an hour, I come to this bizarre, but inescapable conclusion:
if the filename of the webpage contains the string "profile", the drop-menus do not work in IE6. And no, the javascript does not examine the URL or any part of it in any way.
I rename all of the resume pages from "profile_.php" to "bio_.php". Suddenly the drop-menus on those pages work again in IE. My problem is fixed.
That's right, a sensitivity to the filename caused a javascript fault that broke my menus.
You can see it yourself, the files are still around. Boot up IE6, and visit the two following pages. They are bytewise identical, differing only in the filename. You can diff them to check:
http://www.eclipticenterprises.com/bio_ridenoure.p hp (menus work)
http://www.eclipticenterprises.com/profile_ridenou re2.php (menus break)
This bug, which I have never bothered to characterize further, cost me almost an entire workday. And in my experience, that kind of crap is absolutely typical of IE and has plagued me in every web project.
I haven't tested it in IE7. My windo
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
I don't mind having to input it in a specific way, i mind that it says my address is invalid? The post office can find it just fine :)
What I hate the most is the way every site requires a profile, and they all have different, conflicting rules about user names / customer IDs / passwords. Sometimes it's a number, sometimes it's some combination of initials and name, sometimes I can pick but my favorite ID is already taken, sometimes it's an email - but I have switched emails a few times. Sure Firefox can remember some of them for me, but for some sites it doesn't remember them, for whatever reason. (Never prompts me to save this login/password.) And its memory is not very portable - what am I supposed to do, manually sync up the passwords file between all the instances of Firefox that I use on different machines? (I regularly use about 4 PCs at work, 2 of which dual-boot Linux and Windows, plus one at home, plus several more that I don't use too often.) Frequent flyer programs are some of the worst this way. Also Mouser and Digikey (they don't always mail invoices for orders, and Digikey requires you to have a customer number plus an account number rather than a nice friendly user-chosen username.) Then there are all the intranet sites we have at work. All this is enough to make me scream, and I really do sometimes. Some sites, I just have to use the "forgot user name/ forgot password" features every time I access them. With others, even that is too hard (they insist on snail-mailing the password, or making you talk to a person on the phone). My bank web site just replaced the nice simple username/password system they had with one that sometimes lets you enter the password on a separate page, and other times makes you click it out on a virtual keyboard that moves around, to attempt to defeat keyloggers; and sometimes even supplements one of these methods with additional questions like your mother's maiden name, birth town, first car, etc. I'm sick and tired of typing out my billing and mailing addresses on every e-commerce site, too.
It's more clear than ever that we need a universal ID/login system, and it's going to require some hardware; a USB fob, a smart card, a cell phone with NFC, or some such. And people need to apply huge amounts of pressure on every web site that requires a login, to adopt such a system. You plug in your dongle and you are in the site - no extra shit to type, whatsoever! It's plenty adequate security as long as you guard the dongle like you would your keys and wallet.
Visitors to your sites haven't signed any contract to view the ads. If you want adblocking visitors not to visit your site, put a notice up on a splash page. If you want to appeal to people's sense of fairness, solicit donations. Otherwise, you don't have a leg to stand on, legally, morally, or ethically. Not everyone who runs an ad-supported site cares if people block the ads, because for many sites it's just an extra, fairly marginal source of revenue.
If you've chosen to depend on such revenue, that's your choice, and you have to deal with the realities, including the reality of the fact that your content isn't all that valuable, otherwise you could charge people for it directly, via subscription or whatever; and the reality that competition is tough, that there are people out there who might do what you're doing for less, or even for free.
Actually IBM/Lenovo have really improved their update rollout methods.
To find support documentation and downloads, you can go to Lenovo Support & downloads and enter in the model number of the computer in question. Or you may find drivers from the Driver Matrices page. Better yet, you can download the ThinkVantage System Update program which will scan your computer, check for available updates from the Lenovo servers, download, and install them for you.
The links provided are not secrets. They're all available from the "SUPPORT & DOWNLOADS" link off of Lenovo's homepage.
The only time I've gotten "mouse rage" is when I was using a mouse with a ball in it, and you know how they get dirty and wont move at times and then sometimes u cant get all the dirt off the rollers and it snags at times. I ended up smashing that mouse cuz it kept acting figity no matter how much i cleaned it.
See my small cartoon: http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2006/12 /deleterious_sit.html
Bye,
Oliver
The things I find most irritating are sites that employ Javascript to disable right-click and sites that get past my pop-up blockers.
Sent from my iPhone
"How long before the first class action suit in the U.S. over bad Web site design?"
See, I'm conflicted. On the one hand, I hate frivolous lawsuits. But on the other hand, I really do think that, for example, whoever designed the nintendo.com store should be punished.
Speaking of frustrating layouts, I recently accessed BoingBoing on a computer without ad-blocking software and I have to say that that site has really gone to shit. It looks like a bomb went off in there. Be sure to stop by http://xenisucks.com/ if you're in the mood to criticise the web's most popular "blog," since those jackasses don't seem to care what their readers have to say and don't allow comments.
Depends on whether or not the strap broke... :-O
you wouldnt believe the DAMAGE that corporate-initiated PATENT and IP LAWSUITS are doing to innovation in America.
Those are some pretty fucking ugly profiles, actually. The olycat one is scattered & barely legible, and the melikamp profile, while perfectly legible, is tasteless & unrefined. Both are uninspired.
Even if they are better than the numerous, mouse-rage-inducing profiles with 20 embedded youtube videos, etc. etc., I wouldn't exactly use those profiles as examples of decent design.
See, e.g., css Zen Garden, and then tell me the 3 links you gave don't suck.