Sep
30
2008
at 10:57am
This morning the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) launched a “do not call” service. Within hours the website was not available. The explaination:
“A spokesperson for the CRTC said the site ‘worked fine’ when it launched at midnight, and said she didn’t know what had caused it to freeze up.
She speculated that the number of people trying to access the site may have blocked access to some users
‘Try it later and cross your fingers,’ she said.”
They don’t know what happened???? “Cross your fingers”?? Did they not realize that when they announced this they’d be getting a flood of traffic? Had their web developers never heard of the Digg effect? Similar problem when you’re announcing a very attractive service in media outlets across the country.
What do do when things go wrong
- Find out what actually happened.
- Fess up. Admit that your systems weren’t able to handle the traffic (or whatever the problem was). Do not blame the users.
- Promise to get the site working ASAP.
- Do get the site working ASAP.
- In the future, make sure your servers can handle the traffic, or plan other ways to avoid the problem.
Posted in Usability
Sep
12
2008
at 1:56pm
The “chunky footer” is becoming a big trend in web design. This is a footer that is much bigger than what was traditionally used, often containing several sets of links and other information. Take a look at this flikr set for some examples.
Do you find these to be effective? I think from a design perspective they solve a lot of problems. Get a lot of links on the home page without cluttering the main interface.
The problem I find is that as a user I often miss them entirely. On Jason Santa Maria’s site it took me several visits before I even noticed it was there. Why? Because I didn’t scroll that far (on the actual articles there are often many comments, making the pages quite long. Most users wouldn’t read all those comments.)
What about my home page? Will people notice the Recent Posts block at the bottom? Will they think to scroll past the white? Granted, I was intentional in what I put there vs. what I put on the sidebar. It’s not exactly essential stuff.
Usability experts have found that users have learned to scroll (early usability research found that users wouldn’t scroll past the fold). But, do they scroll the whole page? Prioritizing Web Usability, Jacob Nielsen points out that users often won’t scroll further if they get the visual impression that there is no more content on the page. If users assume that the navigation ends with the top or left navigation bar, will they try looking further down for more links?
What do you think?
Posted in Design, Usability
Aug
29
2008
at 1:08pm
When I started my new job in October the computer that I had to use was a Power Mac G5. This wasn’t my choosing – the guy before me really liked macs and had the whole office switch over several years ago. I was allowed to get a new laptop as well, and chose a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 and installed Ubuntu.
Until now the Mac has been my primary machine – home of email, web browsing, scheduling, and my main design activities. Why? Because that’s the way I set it up at first, before my laptop arrived. I used the laptop mainly for harder development activities, and file transfers (more on that later).
This week I finally decided to move to the Ubuntu machine for my primary activities. Why? Because I just don’t like OSX that much. It hinders my activities in some pretty significant ways.
Why I’m leaving Mac
Crap file management.The Finder doesn’t work for me. No location bar and no tree strucure side panel makes it difficult to navigate folders and move files around the way I want to.- Insufficient panels & customization. In Ubuntu I can have as many panels I want, can put all kinds of stuff on them, and can arrange them however I want. In OSX You just have the dock, and you can really only put applications or files on them, and you can’t even put in a separator to keep them organized.
- Various other annoyances. Such as:
- program menus are glued to the top of the screen on one monitor only, which detaches them from the window. This is especailly annoying when the program you’re using is on the second monitor.
- the date/time doesn’t open to a navigable calendar. I often use this to check dates in the past or future.
- you can’t see hidden files unless you run a command from the terminal to turn them on. Thus, hidden files are either always on or always off.
Why I’m keeping Mac
I’ll keep the Mac around for some tasks (I have a KVM switch set up so I can easily toggle between the two), including:
Those pesky .docx files. Correction: Open Office is now able to open .docx format. This must be new because when I tried last week it didn’t work.- Dreamweaver – until we get a CMS in place I still need to manage sites built with DW templates.
- Photoshop – because sometimes the Gimp isn’t enough.
Update 02/09: My apologies for the tone of this post. I didn’t mean for it to be inflamatory in any way. I actually had made some edits that were accidentally lost (how, I don’t know!). Sorry about that!
Update 03/09: Comments on this post are now moderated.
Posted in Open Source
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