Archive for the ‘Usability’ Category

Apr 03 2008 at 9:44am

If a cool feature is never used, is it still cool?

At work I take care of a couple of web apps that were developed by the guy who had my job before me. Most were built to address particular needs raised by others in the office. The thing is that they got bit creative with the functionality in some areas. For example, we have this events calendar that includes personal profiles that can pull in events from Facebook and Upcoming.org profiles. It’s a cool feature – users can use this system to consolidate their University and personal events. Seems like a neat idea.

The problem is that nobody uses it. I took a look in the database the other day and there are only about 11 facebook keys and none for upcoming.org (not counting the devs). Granted, the functionality isn’t particularly obvious and is not explained to the user all that well either. There’s also a feature that can send reminders to you by email or sms. That’s only been used about 12 times so far this year.

That brings me to the question raised in the title: If a cool feature is never used, is it still cool?

Posted in Usability | 2 Comments »

Feb 24 2008 at 10:21am

Browser upgrade campaigns, four ways

I’ve come across a couple of interesting browser upgrade campaigns lately. Yes, lots of IE testing! Anyway, it’s kind of interesting to see the way different sites have presented the message.

Purpose of a browser upgrade campaign

The purpose of a browser upgrade campaign is to:

tell people they’re using an outdated browser
explain why this is a problem (optional but effective)
suggest alternatives

Apr 13 2007 at 2:10pm

All Sites Should have Print Stylesheets!

Since I’m in the mood to complian about other sites, let’s talk about print stylesheets! I can’t believe how many sites just don’t have them. It’s not exactly difficult to do. Start a new CSS file, hide a few things, make some small adjustments, hook it up using @media rules and you’re golden. Right? I guess not because an unbelievable number of sites just don’t have them, even sites that should know better.
Read more…

Posted in Design, Usability | No Comments »

Mar 23 2007 at 10:57am

Can we Stop it With the Tiny Text Already?

I was starting to think this trend was over, but then I came across a couple of sites today that have some of the worst cases of tiny text I’ve encountered in quite awhile.

Please, stop making your font sizes so miniscule that nobody can read them properly! I could increase my font size in my browser (zoom in in Opera) but you shouldn’t have to make me do that. It’s annoying and I’m lazy. For many sites I’ve even had to build user stylesheets just so I don’t have to keep increasing the font size every time I visit. My opinion is that font sizes should always be set just a little bit smaller than the browser default size (between 80-90% of normal, depending on the typeface. Both of the examples linked above use Trebuchet, which needs to be bigger). This works well for a normal range of screen resolutions. If people like them larger or smaller they can change their browser preferences.

Even the W3C agrees with me.

So quit it

(Just as I was posting this I came across a post on YouMoz demonstrating that when tested, page views actually increased when the font size was set a little larger. This site was targetting seniors but I think the same could be true for other age groups as well.)

Posted in Accessibility, Usability | 5 Comments »

Mar 01 2007 at 11:39am

All Web Content Should be Dated

This topic came up in no less than three independent conversations yesterday, beginning with GeoffreyF67′s post at SEOmoz proposing that dates be removed from blog posts. As many of the commenters pointed out, there are a lot of problems with this and I think his logic was pretty fuzzy to begin with.

I find it interesting that many of the commenters on that post feel that articles (different from blog posts) should not be dated. This is something I definitely disagree with. How many times have you come across content through a search and wondered when it was posted?

Jan 22 2007 at 11:31am

Hotmail: Most Annoying Registration Interface Ever (or not?)

Awhile back I needed to sign up for a hotmail account. Yes, hotmail. The last time I used that was around 1999. I had to sign up again so I could test some HTML emails. Most of our students use either hotmail or gmail, so the easiest thing to do is just to sign up for accounts and test them that way. Gmail is no problem – I already have an account.

So I went to sign up for a hotmail account, thinking it would be a relatively simple procedure. Was I ever wrong about that!

Posted in Usability, Web Culture | 19 Comments »