Thursday, October 23, 2003
New usability rule: You cannot use pop-ups as part of your web application. Yesterday I was sending out resumes via monster, when I inadvertently sent one out without a cover letter. There was a set of radio buttons for choosing either to omit a cover letter, to use a saved one, or to create a new one. I wanted to create a new cover letter, I selected that option and clicked the submit button. At this point I expected to be taken to a page allowing me type in the new letter. Instead it led to a confirmation screen alerting me to the fact my resume was sent. What happened here?
Well monster’s newest interface does something odd. Upon selecting a radio button a pop-up window appears allowing you to perform the action associated with your selection. On my computer pop-ups don’t work unless I hold down the shift key. I use a program called pop-up stopper. But wait you say, Matt, you are a computer geek, most people aren’t using pop-up stopping software. Wrong! AOL and NetZero both advertise pop-up stopping software bundled with their service. Safari and Netscape both include pop-up blocking as a feature. All this adds up to an increasing proportion of users who won’t see the information you want them to.
I have long believed that monster was the worst of the major job boards on the web. But using pop-ups as part of their UI is not their biggest sin here. The problem here is not that their system failed, but that it didn’t fail gracefully. I expressed my desire to add a cover letter to my submission, yet it allowed me to send my resume without one. It could have displayed an alert box with a warning. It didn’t, and that is bad mistake.
Sunday, October 12, 2003
About three years ago I was taking design classes at SVA when I was given an assignment to pick an object and reproduce its image using four different techniques. These could be photography, painting, it didn’t matter as long as at least one was three-dimensional. For my object I choose a particularly delicious looking red apple. With such a standard subject my thought was to show off my creativity through choice of medium. Not a fan of clay, I racked my brain to come up with a good way to create a 3D version of my apple. When finally it hit me, I could create a stereographic image, no one else would think of that. It was totally original.
Stereographic images are those fuzzy things you need to stare and squint at before they finally appear. Typically they are found at a booth in a mall or on posters hanging on dorm room walls. Personally, I can never make them out, but still it seemed original, so that what the hell. I found a program that helps create the tacky mall-art, and I was off. Unfortunately I couldn’t quite figure out how to work this piece of shareware. An image was created but my depth map was drawn incorrectly. (I blame this on the lack of examples included with the software.) There was no apple, no matter how hard you squinted, nothing would appear. My result was a blank.
This being night school, I moved on, displaying my blank along with the three other treatments. My intention wasn’t to fool my classmates, I wanted to explain that I failed, but I never had to. That night in class we hung our assignments up for critique. As usual people started looking at each other’s work. When the first of my peers squinted at the image, they immediately said they saw the non-existent apple. One after another students told me how cool that was, most of them reporting that they saw it right away.
Given that the picture was displayed next to three other images of an apple, and that everybody knew what they should be seeing, it is no surprise that many thought they did in fact see it. No one wants to be the person who can’t see through those things, so there is an element of social pressure as well. I am looking for a good morale of this story, a one-sentence summary that captures its essence. But I probably don’t need to include what you already remember reading.
Tuesday, October 07, 2003
Been quite the Flash monkey lately. Making a cartoon for a friend’s band and working on some fancy rollovers for my site redesign. Last week I downloaded the newest version Flash MX 2004. It is an interesting upgrade in that there are almost no new features of interest to me. The same goes for the new Photoshop CS.
In Flash most of the new features are aimed at making it the new front end for web apps. I actually think this is a good idea. More responsive interfaces for web apps are necessary given increased reliance on them. However, very few people are using flash for this purpose today. Thus this new release is an effort to expand their business and does little for existing users, animators like myself. What’s worse is that some of the new features that would have been useful to me, like expanded components, have been poorly implemented and hardly documented. Most components now require XML, which is nice if you plan on remoting and a pain in the ass if you are prototyping. I will write more about this later…
