Articles Tagged with “Usability”
07/01/2008: New BBC Home Page
So the BBC has redesigned its home page. OK, so normally I’m against the “let’s be a portal” philosophy, but for the Beeb, I think it works. They produce such a colossal volume of content — and in areas that make sense for a portal site (news, weather, sports, listings info) — that they can get away with it. It sports togglable, movable widgets a la iGoogle, thus allowing the user to customise their “BBC experience” to their own tastes.
Overall, I’d say it’s an improvement. There’s still work to be done, but it’s only in beta, so that is to be expected.
But why the animated clock in the upper right-hand corner? (No, unlike most of the content on the page, it can’t be removed.) Virtually every operating system includes a clock somewhere on the screen by default — which the user can generally customise to their heart’s content — not only in terms of fonts and colours, but also more important stuff like whether to use 24-hour or…
02/08/2007: Command Line Interfaces, Again
I posted a couple of years ago that the command line is the interface of the future. Today I stumbled on a couple of articles that seem to agree with me:
Quicksilver blows away both Apple’s Dock and Microsoft Windows’ Taskbar in terms of speed and usability. And what is it? A command-line interface with a bit of eye-candy.
Command-line really is the way to go.
21/02/2007: Re: target new window = good or bad?
idiotprogrammer wrote:
I find this to be bothersome and contrary to current web trends. But I can find no articles or recommendations to back me up here.
25/03/2006: Sample PHP Source for Non-Interrupting Logins
Noozer wrote:
User opens a page. A session starts and they are asked to log in. They spend 30 minutes reading the page, then clicks a link. Since they were on the page for 20+ minutes their session ended. At that point they are asked to log in, and then taken to their chosen page as if never interrupted.
Reasonably easy, yes. This example is in PHP, but the same idea should work for other languages…
19/10/2003: On Web Design
local wrote:
Now I wonder how important cross-browser coding actually is. How many browsers do I have to test, which versions?
I have two philosophies on this question.
The first is the philosophy I apply when making my own website — I stick to the standards and let any browser that can’t handle it be damned. If 99% of browsers don’t work on it, that’s fine by me. (OK, so I have added a few little workarounds for IE6, but nothing major)
The second philosophy is similar and is what I use for other people’s websites. Again, write to standards, but make sure it works more or less perfectly in:
- IE 5+ (Windows)
- Netscape 6+
- Opera 7+
- Konqueror
and make sure the content is readable and the site is navigatable in:
- Netscape 4.x
- IE 4 (Win)
- IE 5 (Mac)
- Opera 5+
- Lynx
Now, the best way to do this, is to follow my smiple (sic) 7 point design
procedure:
1. Content
Start with the content. It may be cliche to say so nowadays, but content really is king.
2. Markup
Mark up the content…