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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?
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.
Or as those of us who aren't pretentious call it: "anger."
My Greatest Heist - Muisc partly inspired by the unbeatable Qwantz
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.
...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.
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.
And people tell me that corporations don't have special rights.......
Those rights arise from the "corporate person" employing a fleet of lobbyists and lawyers who know how to grease palms, exploit loopholes and drag out legal liabilities for eons. That's one ridiculously powerful person.
Special rights indeed... let's suppose I'm a physical person with the resources that a corporate person has, and I just find it too much of an effort and hassle to seek out a trash can every time I finish off a can of soda. Well, I'm going to lobby, influence and bribe the proper authorities (congressmen and courts especially) to make littering legal. Sound ridiculous? That's exactly how the corporate climate functions.
The slippery slope began the moment a judge (in the 1860's or 70's, I believe) ruled on the side of the corporation being a "person", an exploit that arose from the misuse of a piece of legislation designed (horribly, it seems) to protect the rights of the black man in the United States after slavery had been abolished. Again, fleets of lawyers exploiting loopholes.
Imagine giving special rights to caucasians to litter in the street all they want, but if an african, asian, hispanic or middle-eastern person gets caught trying to pull it off, they get penalized. If a corporation is a "person", we are living the equivalent of special rights for a minority, and we (physical persons) are all being discriminated against.
To make matters worse, I'm under the impression that only certain corporations get the special treatment, as many mom-and-pop businesses are structured as corporations - remember that corporate status prevents personal assets from being seized in case of business woes such as bankrupcy. A few transnational rotten apples have spoiled the basket for the vast majority of well-intentioned endeavours. However, the abuses of the transnationals are such that we seem to be past the critical point in several crucial aspects for the economy, society and even the species as a whole. Many informed and concerned individuals are fed up and itching for change, even if just to err on the side of caution.
Intriguingly, there were elections last May in Northern California, and the people of Humboldt County voted by a margin of about 60%-40% to abolish the status of "person" to corporations. Maybe little will come of this, but maybe other counties around the nation will put up similar propositions to its' voters, there will be a confrontation, and a decision makes it all the way to the Supreme Court. Maybe it's happened before, but this is not the sort of shit that makes the nightly news, even though it may be one of the crucial issues of our times. Also, I wouldn't hold my breath with the current Supreme Court under Baby Bush. Nor under a democrat president either, to be honest.
Does anybody knows if the Humboldt County experiment has been attempted before? And secondly, even though it can be considered a landslide election, how come 40% of the population, even in liberal Humboldt, would vote to keep the legal status of corporations as "people"? To stay one step ahead of the implicit joke here: what were they smoking?
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
+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.