The Questions

While many of the question were totally normal and I don’t remember what they were a few took me totally by surprise. They asked me how my day was going. I know they didn’t really care but it made me smile and want to continue working on the form to see what other jokes they had in store for me.

Basecamp - How's your day?

Later they ask me if I’d date Basecamp if I was single and Basecamp was interested. Of course this is even funnier so I continue working on the form.

Would you date Basecamp?

Then we get to the end of the survey and we have three totally irrelevant but interesting questions.

3 more funny questions

Sure I know that those were silly but they brightened up my day. I wonder if they found conversions increased with funny questions like that? I’m willing to bet that they did.

The Conclusion

So why do so many sites/surveys/forms have to be so bland and boring? Something a bit out of the ordinary makes you memorable. Sure there are probably some haters out there but does the humour act as a good filter for people who are just going to be difficult anyway? I think it does.

So here I sit with a wonderful copy of CS4 running on my machine. I would love to scan something into my lovely version of Photoshop but unfortunately I can’t. Why is it, you ask, that I can’t scan something directly into Photoshop CS4? Well it seems that there is no official TWAIN support for 64bit in Windows so Adobe didn’t include it. I’ve never had trouble with TWAIN on my Mac so why should I install the plugin manually?

The Rant

Here’s the thing, I don’t care if there is no official support. I just spent hundreds (thousands if you bought a full CS4 package) on a piece of software and it doesn’t work. I don’t care about the reason I just want to be able to scan things directly into Photoshop. It worked in CS3 it should work now too. If there is no official support then write unofficial support for it. For the Mac have an extra check box that includes it by choice. Don’t make us dig through a disc image and manually install it.

This also made me think of Linux and Ubuntu and how I don’t care about their partially ‘holier than thou’ attitude towards flash and non-open technologies. Until Ubuntu just works with the web out of the box no one but nerds (I use it. I am a nerd) is going to use it.

My wife doesn’t care about some philosophical argument on how things should be open. She wants to get a new computer go to YouTube and watch a flash video. Sure she may have to update a plugin, but enable ‘restricted extras’, nope she might as well just toss the machine out.

Again we can relate this to the favourite philosophical argument of the web designer, dealing with IE 6. As I wrote a few weeks back, clients don’t care about the philosophical arguments. They want their site to work for their clients. So lets cut the crap and if the user base justifies it, support IE 6.

The Appeal

So here is my appeal to software companies, and web designers. I don’t want to hear the whiny crap about why things don’t work. I just want it to work. It’s not a big request to scan things into Photoshop. It’s not an out of touch request to want to watch flash videos without extra work. We’re not crazy for wanting to support the browsers our clients use. So do what’s right for your users and leave the crap for some other bad company.

The Resolution

This also means that as a web designer I need to cut the crap. Interfaces should make sense. You should look at it and it should work. We shouldn’t build craptacular philosophical arguments to justify bad interfaces. Things should be designed to make sense so just do it. The competition is only a click away.

Horrid CAPTCHA example

Hidden under the guise of making your life less troublesome by limiting spam on your site lurks a hurdle. It’s a hurdle that brings no end of frustration to users. A stabbing pain in the eye of users and what does it gain us but a few precious seconds of our days.

The Issue

We’ve all dealt with CAPTCHA’s. You know that squiggly piece of crap that is supposed to test if you are human. Google even recommends using CAPTCHA to help control the spam you get for registrations or comments.

While I understand the need to control the spam bots lurking out in the ether this problem is not the problem of your website users, so why are we forcing it on them to solve? Really some CAPTCHA’s are so twisted that future generations will enshrine them in museums as the torture implements of this net enabled generation.

Really to get people interacting with you online you need to break down barriers and make the hurdles as small as possible. Google’s webmaster central recommends that we build sites for users then recommends you use CAPTCHA’s. Does one hand know what the other is doing?

Captcha’s aren’t built for users they’re built for website owners. They take the problem of spam control and make it the problem of our website visitor. Would you go to a brick and mortar store that had a test to make sure you had cash to buy right now? I mean that’s a challenge and response to make sure you fit their profile right?

The Better Way

So we’ve established that CAPTCHA’s not only suck but they take a problem on our end and make it a user’s problem. “There has to be a better way” we all scream.

There is at least one system I know of that doesn’t push my spam control issue onto my users. It’s used just below for comments and comes bundled with any WordPress installation, Akismet.

Akismet uses some fancy algorithm to figure out what is spam and what isn’t. I don’t have to manage it I just check once a week quickly to see if there are any false positives which has never happened on the blogs I manage regularly.

Another option is a honey pot form element. Push it way off the side of the site. If it’s filled in you have a spammer so you throw out the submission.

Simple logic puzzles are another way to try to drop the bar lower but still get a challenge response from users. You’ll see this on some of my forms that ask “What colour is snow?” Still this is a hurdle and in my mind less desirable than no extra steps from the user. In fact I’m actively looking for a different form plugin for WordPress because of this.

The End

So let’s band together and try to make sure we don’t push pain on our website users. Rather then wasting time trying to kill IE6 let’s throw our effort behind killing the CAPTCHA.

And now for some fun. Let’s stop and look in absolute disbelief at the horrid CAPTCHA’s shown below.

More terrible CAPTCHA examples

die ie6 from .net magazine

The proposed demise of IE 6 rings with the shouts of joy from web developers the world over, but is it truly on the horizon? While sites trying to kill IE 6 extoll all the valid reasons web designers and developers have to want the death; clients sit and look at philosophical arguments and compare them to the real world dollars of IE 6 users.

The Reality

The truth is that for many sites IE 6 users bring in money. I currently work with an e-commerce site where IE 6 users bring in 12% of the annual income. So that means in the last 30 days IE 6 users brought about $12,000 into the pockets of the owners. Don’t know about you but I would notice that money missing from my pockets.

On top of that there is a marked difference if we don’t provide full support for IE 6. Not having transparency on the images drops IE 6 conversion rates by 50%. Um I’d notice that hole in my pocket.

One company I sub-contract for only supports the latest editions of each browser. I totally love that I don’t have to hack around with IE 6 till it’s perfect. Sure I still check and put in a few minutes on it to fix major items but that’s about it. I do wonder though if the clients realize the real world dollars they could be throwing away by not supporting IE 6?

The Cost

I mean how long does it take really to get IE 6 supported fully? Let’s say it takes a whole work week, 40 hours. If we figure that you bill on the high end of the scale or are an agency with lots of overhead let’s say it costs $150/hour. So in 40 hours we just spent and extra $6000. Yeah we’d make it back in two weeks.

The cost is inconsequential really.

The Right Approach

The right approach when looking at browser support is to evaluate the clients statistics and support their clients. If they balk at the $6000 price of supporting IE 6 show them how much the users bring into the site and how quickly they recover the cost.

Sure I’d rather be building cool sites that just run the latest technologies. I’d rather be using HTML 5 and CSS 3 but more than that I like having food and a roof. I don’t love time debugging IE but I like affording a coffee.

So I’ll keep supporting IE 6 as long as it pays for my clients to do so. Really when I’m hired, I’m hired to give the best advice and solutions for a client situation not the best advice that isn’t a pain for me. Let’s just provide our clients with the right solution and get off our high horses.

demo e-commerce site

I’ve been designing lots of e-commerce projects lately and a theme I’ve been finding in the designs is the buttons. Specifically the implication of buttons.

We’ve all seen buttons on store that say “Add to Cart” or “Purchase” or whatever but does the simple word convey enough meaning?

The Thoughts

I am more and more of the mind that buttons with text on them don’t convey quite enough. Language doesn’t transcend cultures really. Sure lots of the world that is online would read English but why put that barrier in front of potential customers? I look at other UI elements from web browsers and applications and they provide more information than simple text.

Look at the back button on your web browser. No text is really needed to know that pressing the button will move you back in your browsing history. Same goes for the stop button and the home button. They stand alone without the text. Whey then do so many websites require descriptive text on the GUI elements?

The Simple Solution

Lately with my buttons on sites I’ve been working really hard to have a single symbol along with the button text to convey what is happening when a person clicks on a button. Submit buttons have typically been getting ‘>’ on them as well. I feel submit implies a forward type of motion though ‘+’ would also create the feeling of addition.

Buttons for purchasing products have been getting the + symbol along with the “Purchase” text. When you click it you are adding something. Similarly the “Remove” buttons have been getting the – symbol along with the text.

I’m simply trying to convey more from a usability standpoint. I want to make it easy on users with reading difficulties, or that don’t have a native language of English, by having a stand alone symbol to represent the action.

Am I alone here? What else can we do visually to make site more accessible across language barriers? How do you address these issues?

The Issue

Working in the web industry means there is lots of news to follow. Tons of new developments all over that you are expected to keep track of. If you don’t keep track of the latest developments you can quite quickly find yourself using outdated techniques.

I use Google Reader to organize all my feeds. It’s great for moving through lots of feeds quickly to get the good stuff. Follow a few friends and they can share items you missed. Google Reader is accessible from any internet connection on any machine. Jump on the Google Gears bandwagon and offline reading is only a sync away. But Google Reader sucks…

Google Reader sucks for one thing though…reading. Yeah that’s right Google Reader sucks if you actually want to read the articles in your feed.

Google Reader is just not pretty. Sure the blue links with purple for visited links is accessible but boy the experience of reading is sadly lacking. Sure you can install HelvetaReader and get some nice typography and drastically improved looks for links but it’s still has a long way to go. It most certainly doesn’t make reading an enjoyable experience, reading in Google Reader is a utilitarian experience.

The Experience

I personally miss reading as an experience. I miss sitting and enjoying a good book. Yeah I know that much of those times are gone but the web could learn something.

Most sites are full of flashing little banners for adds (I know people need to get paid). Though they say ‘content is king’ it’s really only lip service it seems.

A book is just words on paper. You’re not getting distracted by that cool flash add. You sit and experience the story, experience the content.

I want blogs to start taking some of this experience into their design and layout. Drop the flashing adds. Tone down content all over your sidebars. Provide the user with some beautiful typographic layout in the body copy and let the other things fade to the background.

Yes I do realize my site doesn’t totally mesh with this idea, but a redesign is in the works.

The Reality

So despite all the charming things I said above the reality is that putting time into a blog is a lot of work. At some point there has to be a payoff and for many people it is financial. Financial comes in a few forms. It can be the adds. It can be the referrals for clients.

Most of those payoff’s require some form of advertising and some way to pull the focus off the text and onto your services or your adds and contact forms. But let’s see if we can leave off a bit and let the reader focus on what they came to see, the content.

stack of dell mini 10V netbooks

Even for myself the only thing I really need my desktop for is to work in some of the Creative Suite Apps (really only Ps, Ai, and Id). Most of my coding can be done just fine on a low powered laptop. Then throw in the portability and people are sold.

This brings up and interesting question for designers though. At one point the standard for screen resolution was 800px x 600px. Then more recently it has moved to 1024 x 768, this in fact is what I have been designing to for the last year or two. With the rise in smaller screen sizes (iPhones, iPod’s, smartphones and netbooks) should we be looking at the way we design our sites again?

The Example

I love the application Evernote. I use it almost daily. I most often use the desktop clients but when I’m on my Linux machine I’m stuck with the web inteface and then I have a problem. While all of the toolbars and items at the top of the screen are needed by the time I was actually editing a note I could see about ¼ inch of the editing window.

shot of the small edit window on my netbook

Being a fairly advanced computer user I just went in and reduce both my default system font size and then in Firefox my default browser font size and took the text labels off of the buttons. Then I flipped Ubuntu over to the Netbook desktop version and lost the bottom toolbar on the system. While all of these changes made editing a note online okay it still isn’t a great experience.

My point is this, most users just wouldn’t take the time. They just would have left the site if it wasn’t usable. Really Evernote is a decently designed site but it doesn’t take small screen size into account.

The Solution?

My first recomended solution for Evernote would be to let users toggle some of the bars at the top of the site. Add a bit of javascript in, make is persistent for a user. Problem solved. I sign in with my netbook some of the top bars are folded shut and I have a ever usable web application.

A second option would be to perform some browser sniffing (controversial I know) and present a slightly altered layout to those on smaller screens. Again we get a web app that is very usable on smaller screens without affecting the bigger screens many people have.

My Resolution

I suppose this all comes down to evaluating your user base and providing good experience for as many as possible. At the very least make sure that when you design you at least put some thought into what people will see on a screen without a lot of vertical pixels. Resize your browser to 600px high and see how usable the application or site is. If it’s not good give a bit of thought on how the UI can be improved for small screened devices.

Are web apps enough?

So looking at this promised land I decided to move my blog writing from Open Office with storage in Dropbox to Google Docs with offline enabled. I have now been writing exclusively in Google Docs for about a month and here is my experience.

The Good

I love the organization of Google Docs. There is just something about the simplicity of the interface that appeals to me. Drag and drop folder sorting is beautiful. Auto saving is great. Being able to check the content of a folder with by winding and unwinding the arrow for a folder is great. It just seems easier than drilling down a file structure and backing out of folders. I love that I am not really flipping back and forth between a file browser and an application for writing. I love that I just have Firefox open and can browse for links and write out of the same interface without having multiple applications running. Since I do much of my writing on a netbook having a single application open instead of a few is a great feature.

I find that the spell check works well and the standard keyboard shortcuts for boldand italic text work great. I really do not notice that I am in a web interface instead of a desktop application.

The Bad

While Google docs seems to promise document syncing and offline editing my experience leaves me wanting much more from Google docs. I typically operate over two main machines, a Vista desktop and an Ubuntu netbook. I take the netbook with me lots of places that do not have WIFI of any sort so I need to be able to edit my documents while offline.

The first fail came for Google docs when I was trying to start a new article over lunch one day. Low and behold the new document button is ‘ghosted’ out. So I scratched my head fired up Open Office and jotted down the notes I had in my head for an article. After a bit of research I found out that you can not create a document while in offline mode. You can ‘hack’ around this by creating a number of new documents while online and then editing them at a later point when you have a new document to write. Not a perfect solution but not too bad either so I could live with that.

The second fail or series of fails dealt with syncing my documents when transferring offline and online. For some reason a month after editing I still have documents that are marked at ‘edited offline.’ Despite the fact that I am currently giving Google Docs every opportunity to sync these items while I sit here online finishing this article in Google docs. Since it appears that the documents are just marked as ‘edited offline’ while still having the content syncedSo while this is annoying again I can live with that.

The final fail item was just today. I had planned to work on a document and finish it off for a blog post. Unfortunately for some reason Google docs decided not to sync that particular document today. So there I am ready to write an article and I get totally stumped. I suppose the great thing about that is I got to finish off this post about the ways in which Google docs has failed me. Maybe it has something to do with the Linux implementation of Firefox but to be honest I really do not care. I just want my apps to work.

The Conclusion

I love the thought of web apps and offline access but at this point I do not think that Google docs is there. Sure if you always have a WIFI connection Google Docs is a great resource but if you are editing offline and online you are out of luck (at least in my experience). I actually love writing in Google Docs but the syncing problems just kill the option for me. I really do not want to switch back to Open Office and Dropbox but I feel I have no choice. So I think I’ll be going back to using Open Office and storing documents in my Dropbox for syncing. The only downside to that is the poor functionality of Open Office for Mac. Fortunately my main machines are Linux and Windows with Mac as an occasional platform (at least for writing).

My next attempt at online document writing will be with Microsoft’s Office Live. Hopefully that is not a bucket of fail. Added after I scheduled the post Unfortunately it seems that Office Live is also a buckect of fail. While many browsers across many platforms are supported there is no Linux support in the Office Live site so my primary writing machine won’t work. I guess that means I’m stuck with Open Office and Dropbox for syncing.

So I have been doing what any designer does. I bought a copy of Snagit, which I will review later, and started capturing contact forms and form fields that I liked. I also tried to interact with the forms to see how they worked overall.

The Finding

Do you know what I found??? Lots of very beautiful contact forms that really were not very nice from a usability perspective. Sure the forms fit well with the site. Yeah they are gorgeous but they provide little to no visual feedback regarding which form field you are in. They provide no tooltips (a note for myself as well). All you have is, in some cases, a very tiny blinking cursor to tell you where you are on the form.

The Need

As designers it is our job to ‘make things pretty’ as much as we hate hearing that. But more than that we need to make things easily usable. You don’t have to be a usability expert to do this. Rollovers are a very common thing to include in a site design. Any good design puts them in their navigation. We put them on links. Why no love for contact forms and form fields in general.

The Resolution

Here is my resolution. I am going to ‘pretty up’ my forms and form fields but not at the expense of usability. The next versions will offer tips for content entry. They will have rollover and active states. I will not be lazy.

Now I said it so hold me to it.

yahoo homepage

1. Is This What People Really Want?

I’ve recently read Getting Real and while I do not agree with all of the book it presents a very good point to this issue. Yahoo’s homepage is now a cacophony of options. Compare that with Google and see that at google.com you only have one option. It’s simple you search. At yahoo.com you have millions of things to do all distracting from the search function, which I feel is of primary importance.

2. US only? (to start)

So this new amazing service is only available to US people to start. Really? With such an interconnected world we have you are only offering the new features to US accounts. It’s not like we are talking about phone numbers (Google Voice) that might really mean restricted access imposed by government organizations. We are talking about an intentional choice to limit the access to the ‘preferred’ customers.

While they don’t say it by only offering this service to US people they are setting them up as special thus alienating the rest of the world for the time being. I realize that they are doing a staged roll out of the service but I say offer it to the beta testers around the world then let it go for all users not a select few in a particular geographical region.

The Proposed Plan

I say don’t add more features to yahoo.com, take some out. Have a separate page to aggregate your ‘lifestream’ fine but do not make me see all the options when I simply want to search something. Being better than the competition is not doing it bigger and better it’s just doing it better. Kill the cruft.

Second do not setup a preferred client based on purely arbitrary reasons like a border. We are not talking about services regulated by governments (for most of the world) so just open it up to everyone. Alienating potential clients just is not good business.