Category / Usability

by Aaron

Need to criticize …? Think first.

Even with avatars and accounts, and …, many web-visitors feel empowered to be critical. Is it the lack of face to face?  The need to feel like a contributor, even if it’s negative?

Why is there a completely irrational need to analyze someone else’s web page innards, rather than the outside? I know, we’re often taught to look for inner beauty in other people – but in the case of web sites, the opposite is true. Seriously – does the fact that a new web site uses a table layout somehow truly impact the usefulness of the web site (even a table layout can be made accessible).

Read “Hey, lose the pedantic negativity.” from Vitamin.

by Aaron

Search Engine Optimization Dirty Tricks….

Dear web site owner,

My distrust of your web site and product increases ten-fold when you add dozens or hundreds of search words or phrases to your web pages in order to potentially lure unsuspecting Internet searchers.

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In the example above, Word reports that there are

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487 extra words on your page (none of which are standard copyright text) and 3,472 characters total.

If you have a good web site or product, they will come. I promise. Get rid of the slimy techniques to draw traffic. You may have drawn me there, but I almost always move on as soon as I see that type of nonsense. You must have something to hide, or your product is inferior. You’ve just lost a repeat visitor and/or customer.

Signed,

Concerned about your giant footer.

by Aaron

Why write your own rendering engine anymore?

I just installed and ran the latest version of Lavasoft’s Ad-aware Free (Anniversary Edition) and was disappointed by the general fuzziness of the text.

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So, I grabbed one of my favorite tools, Spy++ to do a little bit of technology spelunking. The interesting thing was that there was only a single window in use:

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The fuzziness of the text initially made me think GDIPlus, but a quick scan using Depends seemed to indicate that wasn’t the case:image

The text rendering just isn’t right:

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For example, check out the kerning of the “e” and the “m” above.  I tried the same text in Photoshop (wondering if it was a bitmap from a common image generation tool):

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But, it looks fine in every aliasing option.

It wasn’t GDI, or GDI+:

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And not WPF:

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There are probably a handful of toolkits that it could be, but I don’t have the patience to try a match anymore.

I’m just not sure why they’d take the time to not use a standard Windows provided text / graphics engine? I’m not opposed to an architecture that minimizes HWND usage to increase efficiency or allow for some unique user experiences (like skinning), but why go this far? What’s the gain? When the quality of text isn’t near perfect, why wouldn’t you abandon the technique? Anyone know?

by Aaron

Usability Mistakes in Web Design

From Smashing Magazine: 9 Common Usability Mistakes in Web Design.

Some great tips.

For #1, I definitely appreciate web sites that use actual decent clickable areas for page navigation. These aren’t too bad for example (from MSDN):

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But there’s still too many web sites like this:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 … 31 32

The clickable area for each page is no wider than the width of the character! Don’t forget that not everyone has the mouse dexterity of a 14 year-old avid game player! :)