Minimal

Going down

This site will disappear off the web radar sometime around the 24th March, as my hosting account runs out. So, the time has come to switch to a PHP/Apache account. Bear with me as I transfer. Last I recall, xcalibre were the hosts with the most (for the fewest pennies). Got any better recommendations?

Me, in print

GoMini magazine, issue 3, page 84, top picture. It’s a very blurry kind of fame, but it’ll do. :)

Sidebar addition

Just a quick note to say I’ve added toothpastefordinner.com to the links at the side. Just as with explodingdog.com, it’s another great site for somewhat random little cartoons. Check it daily — it’s good. Hamsters included.

Anyway, it’s over there somewhere. →

Iceman

It’s been a pleasant 24°C in the office today. Makes a change from the usual 27°C. And yet... I’ve been cold all day. I’m not ill, I don’t sit next to an open window and I’ve got long sleeves on, but still my pinkies are frozen. What kind of a self-refrigerating freak am I?! I even had trouble using a pen earlier. Christ knows how I’ll get on when we move into a building with comfort cooling next week. :(

File under “brilliant ideas”

Orange gives free bike with new plans [Gizmodo]
It’s better than that, though. The bike includes a phone-charging cradle and comes with a hands-free set. One downside: the offer’s only available in the Netherlands.

Beyond the pale

When Israel’s wall becomes glamour [Middle East Online]
I’m no fan of the fashion industry at the best of times, but this is just so, so wrong. One thing that doesn’t surprise me, though: it’s an Israeli fashion house doing the shoot.

The fallacy of fluid layouts and usability

I made the mistake of looking on Jakob Nielsen’s useit.com site the other day. Having avoided it for about a year, I was reeled in by his Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines rant. It didn’t take long for me to find something that wound me up. In fact, it was his second most frequently violated guideline:

Use a liquid layout that lets users adjust the homepage size
<snip>
Fighting frozen layouts seems a lost battle, but it’s worth repeating: different users have different monitor sizes. People with big monitors want to be able to resize their browsers to view multiple windows simultaneously. You can’t assume that everyone’s window width is 800 pixels: it’s too much for some users and too little for others.

So, what’s wrong with his argument? After all, people do have different screen resolutions. And yes, people with big monitors can resize their browsers. Well, conversely, can’t people with small monitors scroll their browsers? Granted, it’s not great usability if you have to scroll horizontally — in fact, it sucks — but it is possible and the vast majority of people won’t need to scroll. There are even measures you can take to minimise the scrolling, such as putting primary content at the left. Overall, it’s a rare occasion when an 800x600 layout badly affects the usability of a site. Nielsen appears reluctant to acknowledge any of this.

More importantly, he also ignores the usability hit you’re taking when you impose a fluid layout on your user. First, instead of being presented with paragraphs whose widths have been optimised for ease of reading, the user has to go to the bother of resizing their window to improve matters. People have got better things to do with their lives than resize browser windows; things like... oooh... reading your site, for instance.

Second, it’s not even as if resizing a window is a simple task. Resizing by the keyboard is so awkward it’s not worth considering. Resizing using the mouse is a pain too, as the resizing widget is pretty small in most GUIs, so you’ve got the much-quoted Fitts’ Law working against you. And remember, users can’t control the mouse very well. All in all, window management such as this is something we should strive to minimise (ho ho!), not impose on the user. If your content can be optimised using a static layout and only a small fraction of your audience will see scrollbars, I say go for it. I know I’d appreciate it.

Right, rant over.

When lots of progress is no progress at all

What is it with people implementing progress bars these days? Everywhere I look, from software installations to IDE build tools, developers are getting lazy. Progress through multiple steps in long operations requires a single progress bar, not multiple bars in succession. Get it right, people! It’s not like you don’t know this. :/

What’s the big deal? As soon as a second progress bar appears, you can no longer predict how long the operation will take to complete. Should you wait a few seconds more, or should you come back tomorrow? You’ve no idea, as you can’t predict how many more progresses you have to sit through. The progress bar has lost its key benefit — predictability. Instead, all it tells the user is that the application hasn’t died. The better way is to assign each operation a fraction of a single progress bar. Just ask Ash, our resident nested progress bar expert at work.

What if your operation is non-deterministic? Well, you shouldn’t be using a progress bar in the first place. Instead, you might want to consider a looped animation of some sort, make it damned clear you’ve no idea how long it’ll take, and offer the option to cancel. You might also want to include a time-out mechanism. Whatever you do, don’t fool the user into thinking they can predict how long they need to wait.

Right, rant over.

White knuckle ride

Following a particularly scary drive down the A1 on Friday night, I’ve decided that the next time I hear the words “Drivers are advised to stay at home unless the journey is absolutely vital,” I’m going to heed the advice. To be fair, the warning was intended for later in the weekend, but it really should have been issued for that very night.

Weaving slowly across a featureless, white expanse of dual-carriageway, your vision was restricted by the glare of your own headlights in the monster snowflakes that were falling. Even a straight bit of tarmac like Dere Street suddenly becomes a nightmare to navigate when the only means of judging your position is the occasional rumble of tyres on cats’ eyes.

Perhaps most worrying, though, was the fact that 40-ton lorries were doing nearly twice my speed (which was 25-30mph), steaming up behind you and expecting to be let past. When you don’t even know which lane you’re in, you’re bloody reluctant to go too far left. In the end, if the lorry didn’t move out to pass, you figured you were in the outside lane and promptly got out of his way before you found yourself flattened under a tanker full of Fosters. If that’s the way I’m to meet my end, the lorry could at least be carrying Caffrey’s. :)

Update: Of course, I’ve not got any photos to prove the conditions were that bad, but Phil has some nice ones of the snow in Gateshead.