Entries Tagged 'Web Design' ↓

When recently performing a system-wide clean-out, I removed a long-expired Macromedia Flash 8 Studio trial. Unknown to me at the time, it had taken it upon itself to remove the flash player as-well; because, of course, now that I don’t want to develop flash, I’ll never need it again!Anyway, a week or so later I discovered that I needed to re-install the player, so off I went to Adobe’s Website. When I arrived, I was presented with a fairly reasonable page - in terms of design - but there was something on there that epitomises the lack of thought that goes into usability on the web. People, you have to remember it isn’t just about how you create your links (bad “click here”, no play-time for you!), it’s also about how your content is worded.What you can see in the screenshot is what you’re shown if you don’t have the flash player installed (or JavaScript enabled, I’m guessing).

What’s wrong with this picture?

It’s very misleading, that’s what.

The heading is asking me “Can’t see this content?”, but I can, can’t I? I’m reading it! Oh, the word “this” isn’t associated to what I’m reading (as it should be), but rather what I’m not reading. Interesting.

Misleading text has also found its way into the body content, once again, I am reading the content aren’t I? Another thing is that the content also implies that I have JavaScript disabled when I actually don’t. I believe you’re statistically more likely to have a user without flash installed, than without JavaScript enabled. So with that in mind, it would have been a better idea to ask if they have flash first then ask about JavaScript. Even better would be to do a check to see if JavaScript is enabled, if it is you don’t need to display that part of the message at all!

One last thing, those controls at the bottom; what are they doing there? I know (now) that they’re there because the content that’s supposed to be showing is a movie, but prior to having that knowledge surely they just reinforce the feeling that I am seeing what I’m supposed to. I have content, I have play controls, hey why aren’t they working? They serve no purpose apart from to confuse the user.

A slightly better picture

I’ve modified the content to be - in my eyes - a bit more respectable. It still isn’t perfect, like I said above, some JavaScript detection would be nice. Here it is non-the-less though:

“Reading this?”

I most certainly am.

“If you are reading this message, then you are unable to view our active content.”

Oh dear, so that’s what this is all about. How do I fix it?

“Please either download the latest version of the Macromedia Flash Player or enable JavaScript in your browser.”

Will do, thanks for the help Mr. Usable Information Box.

Note: I have no particular dislike of the website in question, in fact I read it on a regular basis, but what I’m about to talk about is a travesty. Although it does tie in rather nicely with a previous post of mine: Bloated Forms.

I was browsing one of my regular watering holes (water of knowledge, of course!) - The Server Side.Net - and I felt the overwhelming urge to make a reply in the forum. Registration was required, of course, so off to register I went. What followed was purely horrible on so many levels.

Step One

I was first presented with the rather humble request of entering my e-mail address, nothing un-expected here and to be honest, quite refreshing in its simplicity. I thought I may just receive an e-mail with a pre-generated password and that’d be it… but it wasn’t to be.

Step Two

Next was a list of ten check boxes for various newsletters I could subscribe to. I don’t know how many people actually use these “features” of registration forms, but I just wanted to register. If I wanted to receive newsletters I would opt-in from within my account once registered. In their defense, the checkboxes did at least default to false!

On a side note, how is it not understood that you should give the user as little to deal with as possible? Especially when you’re trying to get them to sign-up to your services, you should get them in as quickly as possible, no fuss, no mess and people won’t lose interest.

Step Three

This one is a whopper, scarily so. Baring in mind that all I want to do is make one post on their forum, this seems a tad excessive.

Firstly they want my first and last name, fair enough but I’d say even just my name, singular, would suffice. Next are my Company Name and my Title at said company, followed by my full address, postal code, telephone number and fax number. These are a bit odd, especially considering I might be unemployed and/or unwilling to disclose such information.

Based on what the next sections were, The Server Side are seriously interested in my company. They’re asking such in-depth questions as what my IT budget is, how many employees are at the company, how many of those are developers, the purchasing scope and the industry of my organisation. Woah. Who even knows that stuff? Never mind wants to disclose it.

Finally I get to choose which technologies are relevant to me, via another big list of checkboxes.

As if that huge list wasn’t bad enough, to put the proverbial icing on the cake, 90% of the fields are mandatory! Yes, even the IT Budget and Purchasing Scope. Absolute madness!

Step Four

Yes, there’s more. This is merely a finalisation of my e-mail and a password. Nothing fancy.

The End

When I encountered step three, all I thought of was targeted advertising; something I definitely do not want to be a part of. I’m shocked to be honest, it’s a sad state of affairs when so much information needs to be gathered just to allow simple forum/comment posting.

I didn’t make it past the form - The Server Side has lost my gems of wisdom.

I don’t know what it is, but there seems to be an inherent urge of web developers (or designers, managers or whomever) to create forms that are hugely bloated and pointless, even for simple things such as sending a contact e-mail.

This fascination with bloated forms is incomprehensible to me, I just can’t understand why anybody would want to know the gender or official title of somebody who’s simply trying to say “Hello”; it’s irrelevant, all I personally care about is what they’ve got to say. Is it supposed to portray the company in an intelligent, professional manner? (These people want my title, they obviously mean business!) I don’t know, but it needs to stop.

I personally am a lot less inclined to fill out a form if it feels like an interrogation. Contact forms should consist of me entering my name, some form of contact information and my brain-dump - nothing else!

Fairly standard form

Suggested form

I know which one I’d prefer.

As reported by BBC News, a new set of accessibility guidelines have been developed for UK websites.

Although this certainly isn’t anything new — being as a law was passed in 1999 for compliance — and it isn’t even legally binding, it may be used in court if a case arises. This is just one more little pebble added to the mounting landslide that will occur when a disabled user finally does the american thing and sues a company for not providing sufficient means to access their website.

The web has come a long way in the past few years, but it is still hindered greatly by the methodology of the “previous generation” of web-designers. People are still designing with the mentality of serving everyone with a page that is specifically tailored to suit their particular browser and operating system. While this did get the job done originally, it was most certainly a lot more work than it needed to be. That’s why I find the idea of generating one (and only one) document to serve all users very interesting. Most browsers are conforming to standards in some way shape or form, the majority support CSS2 and XHTML 1.1 and the ones that don’t (mostly) degrade gracefully. It’s no longer about serving a page that is pixel perfect on every system; it’s about making sure all users get a good experience from your site.

Another branch of this takes the form of Accessibility. Accessibility has recently been highlighted by governments as a priority for websites; the US and UK both have their own take on the situation with relating laws and amendments. It basically boils down to any website that is providing a service should have a bare minimum of accessibility; otherwise they are discriminating against their less able customers. This means businesses are required, by law, to provide for all their customers (whether or not they have disabilities). Just as you would expect a shop to provide wheelchair ramps for disabled shoppers, you should expect pages to be designed to aid disabled web-users.

Recently I equipped my self with a screen-reader (JAWS) and was appalled — but not particularly shocked — at the amount of sites that are simply unusable with anything other than a standard browser. Most pages are so full of invalid markup that the screen-readers simply mumble on continuously and any actual content is undecipherable. If websites complied to the standards then their experience would be tolerable at the very least. Unfortunately the majority of website designers simply do not know (or often care) about creating accessible pages.

Note: Screen-readers, for those that don’t know, take a web page and read it out using a synthesised voice. A perfectly accessible site would read the same as a printed document.

One of the largest problems with the way pages have been designed in the past has been using the supplied tags for their appearance rather than their actual purpose. The <b> tags have been used to create bold headings, the <font> tags used to change styles of fonts and worst of all the <table> tags for layout. This means when a screen reader parses these pages it emphasises the wrong words and spouts nonsense when encountering these convoluted tags. What a properly designed page would have is a distinct separation of content and layout, of HTML and CSS. The HTML document should use be structured like a standard plain text print document; with appropriate headings, sub-headings, lists and paragraphs. These tags can then be styled using CSS to any manner to which they like. So when a screen reader encounters this page it reads the unstyled version; a perfectly formed document.

That’s the end of my little rant, maybe together we learned something.