>. What is needed are many, many, focus group sessions to create an OSS interface guidlines document that everyone can refer to (or not) when they build thier applications. Arent Gnome doing something approaching this?
Focus groups themselves don't necessarily give you clear vision. First you have to agree on what problems you're looking to solve then go from there.
Regarding design-by-dictatorship vs. design-by-committee, look at the Phoenix project and Chimera which were started as a reaction to the designed-by-committee state of Mozilla's UI.
The Mach-O version of Mozilla (which uses the Unix backend and Carbon frontend) flies on my Powerbook G4/400. With ATSUI text rendering it looks great. When the developers turn their attention to the Mach-O build and whip it into shape it'll be my browser of choice. Check out an experimental Mach-O build here: http://homepage.mac.com/stevekstevek/
and here's a screenshot of the Mach-O build running the Pinstripe theme.
When I read the short article a week or so ago, I remember wishing it contained more information. He has a bit about his criteria for the list, but I would have liked to see at least a short blurb about why each lab deserved their ranking. I know the Alertbox posts are not meant to be long involved discussions, but Nielsen's columns usually contain more analysis than this one.
No, not all the text on the Olympics home page is clickable. If you want a specific instance of a slightly inconsistent link treatment, look at the orange headline. That's a link of course and most users would expect that. This may lead the user to believe that clicking on the orange heading in the "highlights" section is a link - in fact it is not clickable.
Also the blurb underneath the main story image is not clickable and the small blurbs under the "highlights" images are clickable even though they are treated almost exactly like the blurb in the main story.
I'm not advocating a devotion to strict rules (ie. only underlined bright blue links) but guidelines (contrast, consistency) to increase the likelyhood that links will be followed rather than ignored.
Users don't read on the web, they scan. If there isn't any differentiation other than size or font weight between text and a hyperlink, you stand to lose clicks. Links are the most important thing because the home page is for the most part an entrance to content deeper in the site.
You could have the cleanest code and the most clever and imaginative design and still be a failure if you don't connect with your audience's expectations and the way they interact with a web page.
This ain't a print medium. If you want users to click on links, you must differentiate them from text in a meaninful way, such as coloring them differently, underlining them, or both. Besides trying to make links stand out, consistency of link treatment is also key. On the Olympic home page I counted six different link treatments. Yes users can move their mouse to each element and discover what is clickable in a relatively short amount of time, but a lot of users will not bother. Its not the users' job to uncover the important stuff, its YOUR job as a designer to show it to them.
Re:Usability of slashdot..
on
Homepage Usability
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· Score: 2, Informative
Jakob Nielsen was interviewed by Slashdot over a year ago. On the subject of/.'s usability, he said:
Obviously, Slashdot has great usability for its targeted user base of nerds. The proof is in the pudding, in that they use it so much and keep coming back. There is nothing here but pure user interface: nothing you buy or get, so if people use it, it must be because it is good. This said, many elements of the interface would present too much complexity for more average users. For example, the many different ways of viewing and sorting threaded discussions is quite difficult to understand. How do you really know what you will see if you click on one of the links from the home page?
There are three elements of Slashdot that I particularly like:
* Simplicity in the layout itself: focus on content rather than flash.
* The liberal use of linking - in fact, the site lives off the ability to link to the rest of the Web. Too many other sites forget that hypertext is the foundation of the Web and provide nothing but a closed world.
* The reputation manager effect coming from the moderation system.
Every time someone mentions XPod as a solution I think "huh?". Perhaps someone can enlighten me.
When you copy song to the Music folder on the iPod manually through the terminal or other hack programs, the copied file does not automatically add itself to the iPod's database. On the other hand when you add a song to the iPod through iTunes (through manual or automatic synching), the file is coped to the iPod and an entry is made in the iPod's database (located at/Volumes/[iPod]/iPod_Control/iTunesDB). This is the database which the iPod uses for the front end when you it as a standalone music player. It seems that XPod will *not* do this and thus will not enable Windows users to use iPod how it was designed - as a standalone portable music player. The files will be there, but the database on the iPod won't know about them.
I checked the XPod faq and it looks like XPod will simply allow you to use the iPod as a firewire disk with the added feature of catalogging the songs on your iPod and moving files back and forth. Is this good enough?
Re:mozilla for OS X
on
Mozilla 0.9.5
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· Score: 2, Informative
Speaking of OmniWeb, I think a major thing going for it is that it renders its text with Quartz and looks wonderful. Recently there has been an effort to get Quartz to draw fonts in Mozilla. Check this screen shot of Quartz working in Mozilla. Cool stuff. It's only a prototype and from the bug report looks like it has a ways to go before it lands.
Slashdot Mirror
>. What is needed are many, many, focus group sessions to create an OSS interface guidlines document that everyone can refer to (or not) when they build thier applications. Arent Gnome doing something approaching this?
Focus groups themselves don't necessarily give you clear vision. First you have to agree on what problems you're looking to solve then go from there.
Regarding design-by-dictatorship vs. design-by-committee, look at the Phoenix project and Chimera which were started as a reaction to the designed-by-committee state of Mozilla's UI.
Yes you can.
i lt o", true);
Put the following line in prefs.js, which is in your Mozilla profile directory.
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.external.ma
The Mach-O version of Mozilla (which uses the Unix backend and Carbon frontend) flies on my Powerbook G4/400. With ATSUI text rendering it looks great. When the developers turn their attention to the Mach-O build and whip it into shape it'll be my browser of choice. Check out an experimental Mach-O build here: http://homepage.mac.com/stevekstevek/
and here's a screenshot of the Mach-O build running the Pinstripe theme.
When I read the short article a week or so ago, I remember wishing it contained more information. He has a bit about his criteria for the list, but I would have liked to see at least a short blurb about why each lab deserved their ranking. I know the Alertbox posts are not meant to be long involved discussions, but Nielsen's columns usually contain more analysis than this one.
..and the new Corporate name? SunBM?
No, not all the text on the Olympics home page is clickable. If you want a specific instance of a slightly inconsistent link treatment, look at the orange headline. That's a link of course and most users would expect that. This may lead the user to believe that clicking on the orange heading in the "highlights" section is a link - in fact it is not clickable.
Also the blurb underneath the main story image is not clickable and the small blurbs under the "highlights" images are clickable even though they are treated almost exactly like the blurb in the main story.
I'm not advocating a devotion to strict rules (ie. only underlined bright blue links) but guidelines (contrast, consistency) to increase the likelyhood that links will be followed rather than ignored.
Users don't read on the web, they scan. If there isn't any differentiation other than size or font weight between text and a hyperlink, you stand to lose clicks. Links are the most important thing because the home page is for the most part an entrance to content deeper in the site.
You could have the cleanest code and the most clever and imaginative design and still be a failure if you don't connect with your audience's expectations and the way they interact with a web page.
This ain't a print medium. If you want users to click on links, you must differentiate them from text in a meaninful way, such as coloring them differently, underlining them, or both. Besides trying to make links stand out, consistency of link treatment is also key. On the Olympic home page I counted six different link treatments. Yes users can move their mouse to each element and discover what is clickable in a relatively short amount of time, but a lot of users will not bother. Its not the users' job to uncover the important stuff, its YOUR job as a designer to show it to them.
Jakob Nielsen was interviewed by Slashdot over a year ago. On the subject of /.'s usability, he said:
Obviously, Slashdot has great usability for its targeted user base of nerds. The proof is in the pudding, in that they use it so much and keep coming back. There is nothing here but pure user interface: nothing you buy or get, so if people use it, it must be because it is good. This said, many elements of the interface would present too much complexity for more average users. For example, the many different ways of viewing and sorting threaded discussions is quite difficult to understand. How do you really know what you will see if you click on one of the links from the home page? There are three elements of Slashdot that I particularly like:
* Simplicity in the layout itself: focus on content rather than flash.
* The liberal use of linking - in fact, the site lives off the ability to link to the rest of the Web. Too many other sites forget that hypertext is the foundation of the Web and provide nothing but a closed world.
* The reputation manager effect coming from the moderation system.
Every time someone mentions XPod as a solution I think "huh?". Perhaps someone can enlighten me.
/Volumes/[iPod]/iPod_Control/iTunesDB). This is the database which the iPod uses for the front end when you it as a standalone music player. It seems that XPod will *not* do this and thus will not enable Windows users to use iPod how it was designed - as a standalone portable music player. The files will be there, but the database on the iPod won't know about them.
When you copy song to the Music folder on the iPod manually through the terminal or other hack programs, the copied file does not automatically add itself to the iPod's database. On the other hand when you add a song to the iPod through iTunes (through manual or automatic synching), the file is coped to the iPod and an entry is made in the iPod's database (located at
I checked the XPod faq and it looks like XPod will simply allow you to use the iPod as a firewire disk with the added feature of catalogging the songs on your iPod and moving files back and forth. Is this good enough?
Speaking of OmniWeb, I think a major thing going for it is that it renders its text with Quartz and looks wonderful. Recently there has been an effort to get Quartz to draw fonts in Mozilla. Check this screen shot of Quartz working in Mozilla. Cool stuff. It's only a prototype and from the bug report looks like it has a ways to go before it lands.
There is no Java plugin for Moz/Netscape 6 yet. There has been some movement on this lately. Check out http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88870. The bug is targetted at the .96 release.