I disagree. I've yet to find one person who raves about how "stylish" and "good-looking" a web site is an then points to a website that isn't a pain in the ass to use.
Let's take a look at your mezzoblue.com example:
* Uses inconsistent highlighting -- background rollovers (ugh) on part of the text like the "also available" websites, underline rollovers on other parts like the "Designing with Web Standards" link.
* It uses images for text in its heading. At the moment, I am sitting back fram my computer and leaning on a recliner. My face is about 1.5 to 2 times my normal viewing distance, and I use 1152x864 on a 17" monitor, which is already a high resolution. Normally, I just bump up the text size and have no problem reading a website (as do disabled people). This website's topic entries are unreadable to me, and I had to lean forward plop my face right next to the screen to read the "also available" heading. Heck, that's damned small text even for a lot of glasses-wearing older folks that I know of, with no way to work around it.
* The site uses rollover menus. I don't think I know *anyone* that likes using rollover menus -- I *really* hate it. It doesn't even use your typical old annoying rollover menu -- this has an image background or something. It took ten seconds or so for the image to load, so I had floating white text on a light blue background for a bit. It was pretty unusable.
* Widget functionality is unclear to a viewer. Once again, the analysis I've heard of rollovers holds true -- they're used by designers that have such an unintuitive design that they require the user to wave the mouse around over the interface to figure out how it works. There are rollover menus in the upper top corner. There's no visual indication that these little dinky images are, in fact, rollover menus. It wasn't until I started scanning the page with my mouse cursor that I figured it out.
* Confusingly chosen and similar visual indicators. The mezzoblue.com site uses a diagonally-upward-aiming triangle to indicate a menu (*most* of the time). For starters, this indicator is inconsistent with the common desktop use of a downward-aiming triangle to indicate a popup menu. It is also almost identical to the diagonally-downward-aiming triangle that is used to indicate a section header *on the same site*. Not only that, diagonal triangles most common use in current HCI is for a half-open expandable section of data, a convention from Mac OS. The sections look like they *might* roll up when clicked, but do not in fact do so.
* Dissimilar widgets are visually identical. If this designer *had* to make rollover menus and grokked HCI (a dubious pair of bedfellows to begin with), he'd know that one does not make widgets that operate differently but appear identical to the user. Up at the top, we have three blocks of text that appear the same (upward-diagonal triangle, text). The first two ("about", "weblog") are rollover menus. The third, "contact", is a link. When I started rolling my cursor over them, I sat and waited on this link, assuming that my browser was just slow to pop up the associated menu.
* Text colors poorly chosen for readability. Much of the text/background combinations involve two very similar shades of blue. Most of this is readable to me at my current viewing distance if I increase the size, but I know many people that would *not* be able to comfortably read such text.
Honestly, mezzoblue.com seems an excellent example of why sites should *not* be "stylish" -- when designers use "stylish" as an excuse, they're frequently making websites that are simply poorly built from an interface point of view.
Finally, as I've argued before, a lot of people making "stylish" websites with "extra zazz" are people that are familiar with the conventional way products are sold. Most products need to appear flashy, interesting, and novel just long enough for a person to impulsively choose to buy them. For conventional products, "flash" h
If I'm working on a number of projects on different desktops, there's no reason to close all my windows and then reload all of them each day.
Plus, (Mozilla, at least) doesn't have the ability to store all the URLs and window positions that I'm at as Opera does, so it would be a significant inconvenience.
Pine is not perfect either. I think that all of the major email clients I can think of have had a buffer overflow at *some* point in their history. There was a nasty one where some reference or commonly-used library had a problem with MIME, for instance.
As far as I can tell, groupware (well, specifically meeting scheduling) is a waste of time. It just lets people drag more people into more meetings. ("Hey, John Smith doesn't have any meetings scheduled for today!" [right, John Smith is actually doing work today] "Let's add him to our meeting!")
Even if you don't switch to a client that's more secure, switching to one that's *less used* will work equally well. How many viruses are going to target, say, Pegasus Mail, even if it's riddled with overflows? Not a hell of a lot. I can understand interoperability issues with Word, Excel, etc, but this is *email*. All the clients out there work fine together, and it's not as if it takes long to learn an email client. The main concern in such a switch would be moving old stored email, and I would guess that any major Windows-based email client would provide Outlook import.
Email is also a good candidate for a piece of software to be written in eiffel or ocaml or some other safe language (Java might use too much memory, but there are safe languages that aren't as RAM-intensive). An email client does very little that's computationally expensive.
The problem is that then you get web designers sitting down and thinking "Should I really worry about catering to these bastards using Firefox? They avoid looking at my pop-up ads, most of them block my banners after the first time through, and I can't even get referrer data from them. I'll focus on IE users -- they're easier to deal with."
It's ten years since I first started working in commercial web development. I'm opposed to arguments from authority (so feel free to disregard this next comment) but in all that time it's become pretty clear to me that content providers desperately desire better information about their users (why else all those "free registration required" sites?). Persuading users (clients) to send less of it is just unbelievably counter-productive.
Ah, but see, it's a public good problem. As long as only one or two people block based on host-referrer, people will continue to use host-referrer, and those folks will get the (percieved) benefit of preventing other folks from visiting their site.
Also, a few sites *require* http-referrer to be from the same site.
It's annoying enough that I maintain a script that wraps wget for dumping websites. It runs recursively, no-parent, and forges a host-referrer of the same page as the starting address I pass in. I've yet to see a website that's dynamically generated from a database and checks that referrer results are from the correct exact page -- normally they just check the domain of the referrer.
a) You got the Diebold guy's side of the story. It's not as if vendors won't blame each other (and the one with access to the customer gets the upper hand in such an explanation).
b) Given the size of Diebold, there are probably awful people and good people. That being said, it *does* seem like their software in the two instances that it's been brought up on Slashdot, e-voting and ATM use, is flaky for something that isn't all that complicated.
But, hey, they leave these things out, and presumably all of them run XP, so you can just find the closest Diebold ATM, wait for it to crash, and have silky smooth emulation.
In the US, it seems popular for newer ATMs to have touch screens.
Why, I have no idea. The screen is less durable, people smudge the screen, the interface is less accurate...there's really little point in a touch screen except for the "gee whiz" factor.
Actually, I'm reasonably convinced that touch screens (in ATMs or not) are almost never justified -- that a touchpad would almost always serve users better.
ATMs not connected to the Internet and without keyboard are pretty much unhackable unless you can pry open the case and attach a keyboard and/or wireless connection.
There was an experiment being conducted on the feasibility of public Internet kiosks in poor villages in India, and how people would react (I believe it might have made Slashdot). Somehow, despite the fact that the computers lacked keyboards, some Indian kid had figured out how to use the charmap in Windows to create, name, and save a text file containing a brief chunk of text.
If a poor kid in an Indian village with a public kiosk can manage to muck about with the system, I *guarantee* that a horde of CMU students will make very short work of said system.
If it replaces the old Baker Hall National City ATM, it's right in the middle of the hallway, and not right next to any classrooms. The closest offices are, I believe, philosophy.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. I've yet to find one person who raves about how "stylish" and "good-looking" a web site is an then points to a website that isn't a pain in the ass to use.
Let's take a look at your mezzoblue.com example:
* Uses inconsistent highlighting -- background rollovers (ugh) on part of the text like the "also available" websites, underline rollovers on other parts like the "Designing with Web Standards" link.
* It uses images for text in its heading. At the moment, I am sitting back fram my computer and leaning on a recliner. My face is about 1.5 to 2 times my normal viewing distance, and I use 1152x864 on a 17" monitor, which is already a high resolution. Normally, I just bump up the text size and have no problem reading a website (as do disabled people). This website's topic entries are unreadable to me, and I had to lean forward plop my face right next to the screen to read the "also available" heading. Heck, that's damned small text even for a lot of glasses-wearing older folks that I know of, with no way to work around it.
* The site uses rollover menus. I don't think I know *anyone* that likes using rollover menus -- I *really* hate it. It doesn't even use your typical old annoying rollover menu -- this has an image background or something. It took ten seconds or so for the image to load, so I had floating white text on a light blue background for a bit. It was pretty unusable.
* Widget functionality is unclear to a viewer. Once again, the analysis I've heard of rollovers holds true -- they're used by designers that have such an unintuitive design that they require the user to wave the mouse around over the interface to figure out how it works. There are rollover menus in the upper top corner. There's no visual indication that these little dinky images are, in fact, rollover menus. It wasn't until I started scanning the page with my mouse cursor that I figured it out.
* Confusingly chosen and similar visual indicators. The mezzoblue.com site uses a diagonally-upward-aiming triangle to indicate a menu (*most* of the time). For starters, this indicator is inconsistent with the common desktop use of a downward-aiming triangle to indicate a popup menu. It is also almost identical to the diagonally-downward-aiming triangle that is used to indicate a section header *on the same site*. Not only that, diagonal triangles most common use in current HCI is for a half-open expandable section of data, a convention from Mac OS. The sections look like they *might* roll up when clicked, but do not in fact do so.
* Dissimilar widgets are visually identical. If this designer *had* to make rollover menus and grokked HCI (a dubious pair of bedfellows to begin with), he'd know that one does not make widgets that operate differently but appear identical to the user. Up at the top, we have three blocks of text that appear the same (upward-diagonal triangle, text). The first two ("about", "weblog") are rollover menus. The third, "contact", is a link. When I started rolling my cursor over them, I sat and waited on this link, assuming that my browser was just slow to pop up the associated menu.
* Text colors poorly chosen for readability. Much of the text/background combinations involve two very similar shades of blue. Most of this is readable to me at my current viewing distance if I increase the size, but I know many people that would *not* be able to comfortably read such text.
Honestly, mezzoblue.com seems an excellent example of why sites should *not* be "stylish" -- when designers use "stylish" as an excuse, they're frequently making websites that are simply poorly built from an interface point of view.
Finally, as I've argued before, a lot of people making "stylish" websites with "extra zazz" are people that are familiar with the conventional way products are sold. Most products need to appear flashy, interesting, and novel just long enough for a person to impulsively choose to buy them. For conventional products, "flash" h
I remember some guy that was trying to argue that implementing the "change scrollbar color" extension in KHTML was a good idea.
Every time I've run into a web page designer that tried to make his page "feature rich", I've been disappointed with the actual usability of the page.
I don't *want* rollover menus, thank you very much.
What bank do you use that Mozilla doesn't work with?
Seriously, that's *awful*.
I keep my web browser up for *weeks* sometimes.
If I'm working on a number of projects on different desktops, there's no reason to close all my windows and then reload all of them each day.
Plus, (Mozilla, at least) doesn't have the ability to store all the URLs and window positions that I'm at as Opera does, so it would be a significant inconvenience.
May I suggest netcomics and a dedicated image browser like gqview?
Pine is not perfect either. I think that all of the major email clients I can think of have had a buffer overflow at *some* point in their history. There was a nasty one where some reference or commonly-used library had a problem with MIME, for instance.
As far as I can tell, groupware (well, specifically meeting scheduling) is a waste of time. It just lets people drag more people into more meetings. ("Hey, John Smith doesn't have any meetings scheduled for today!" [right, John Smith is actually doing work today] "Let's add him to our meeting!")
Even if you don't switch to a client that's more secure, switching to one that's *less used* will work equally well. How many viruses are going to target, say, Pegasus Mail, even if it's riddled with overflows? Not a hell of a lot. I can understand interoperability issues with Word, Excel, etc, but this is *email*. All the clients out there work fine together, and it's not as if it takes long to learn an email client. The main concern in such a switch would be moving old stored email, and I would guess that any major Windows-based email client would provide Outlook import.
Email is also a good candidate for a piece of software to be written in eiffel or ocaml or some other safe language (Java might use too much memory, but there are safe languages that aren't as RAM-intensive). An email client does very little that's computationally expensive.
The problem is that then you get web designers sitting down and thinking "Should I really worry about catering to these bastards using Firefox? They avoid looking at my pop-up ads, most of them block my banners after the first time through, and I can't even get referrer data from them. I'll focus on IE users -- they're easier to deal with."
It's ten years since I first started working in commercial web development. I'm opposed to arguments from authority (so feel free to disregard this next comment) but in all that time it's become pretty clear to me that content providers desperately desire better information about their users (why else all those "free registration required" sites?). Persuading users (clients) to send less of it is just unbelievably counter-productive.
Ah, but see, it's a public good problem. As long as only one or two people block based on host-referrer, people will continue to use host-referrer, and those folks will get the (percieved) benefit of preventing other folks from visiting their site.
Also, a few sites *require* http-referrer to be from the same site.
It's annoying enough that I maintain a script that wraps wget for dumping websites. It runs recursively, no-parent, and forges a host-referrer of the same page as the starting address I pass in. I've yet to see a website that's dynamically generated from a database and checks that referrer results are from the correct exact page -- normally they just check the domain of the referrer.
Customers don't give a shit about color interfaces ("Ooh, *this* bank has an ATM with *blue* *and* green text! I'm going to go with this bank!").
ATM vendors might *claim* that bank customers do so that they can sell banks more replacement machines, though.
a) You got the Diebold guy's side of the story. It's not as if vendors won't blame each other (and the one with access to the customer gets the upper hand in such an explanation).
b) Given the size of Diebold, there are probably awful people and good people. That being said, it *does* seem like their software in the two instances that it's been brought up on Slashdot, e-voting and ATM use, is flaky for something that isn't all that complicated.
It's a P4.
But, hey, they leave these things out, and presumably all of them run XP, so you can just find the closest Diebold ATM, wait for it to crash, and have silky smooth emulation.
In the US, it seems popular for newer ATMs to have touch screens.
Why, I have no idea. The screen is less durable, people smudge the screen, the interface is less accurate...there's really little point in a touch screen except for the "gee whiz" factor.
Actually, I'm reasonably convinced that touch screens (in ATMs or not) are almost never justified -- that a touchpad would almost always serve users better.
ATMs not connected to the Internet and without keyboard are pretty much unhackable unless you can pry open the case and attach a keyboard and/or wireless connection.
There was an experiment being conducted on the feasibility of public Internet kiosks in poor villages in India, and how people would react (I believe it might have made Slashdot). Somehow, despite the fact that the computers lacked keyboards, some Indian kid had figured out how to use the charmap in Windows to create, name, and save a text file containing a brief chunk of text.
If a poor kid in an Indian village with a public kiosk can manage to muck about with the system, I *guarantee* that a horde of CMU students will make very short work of said system.
If it replaces the old Baker Hall National City ATM, it's right in the middle of the hallway, and not right next to any classrooms. The closest offices are, I believe, philosophy.
In a well-designed ATM, there should not be any message boxes that users shouldn't see.
A well-designed ATM shouldn't be running Windows anyway.
Seriously, that machine promises to be open to all kinds of jokes now that people know it's running Windows. I sure as hell wouldn't use it.
The entertainment systems on aircraft are isolated from the flight control systems (for reasons exactly like this one).
National City has really lousy hours. If you work 9-5, it's a pain in the ass to get to them.
Canada doesn't have to fight any wars, because they don't go out and actively piss people off.
NASA does have to launch spacecraft.
Like a horde of MacGuyvers, those Ruskies.
If all programmers had slower computers, software would run faster.
The previous government was stuffed with ex-bankers who, from all arithmetics, only knew how to add and multiply :-)
<wistful>I wish Our Glorious Leader in the US could at least manage the same...</wistful>
Guaranteed that this is either a repost or a copy-and-paste -- I remember reading it as well.