Tuesday, August 12, 2008
User Interface Fail
Someone recently asked me to take a look at a post on this website. I will not comment on the site content, but the major innovation here seems to be that you read posts from left to right (like a book! it's so natural!).
Except for the fact that since I switched from Gopher to the WWW in 1992, my internet perusal muscle memory has been conditioned to down-arrow/Pg-Dn when I wish to obtain additional content from a website.
Not that I'm a Luddite or locked into a particular navigational methodology. A few years ago I added the mouse scroll wheel to my repertoire. Which is useless on this website. It's pretty rad when your website design cripples standard input device hardware.
But lest anyone say my criticism is not constructive, I have a recommendation (other than the obvious, rm -f /). Trap the keypress event for spacebar and automatically scroll right to the next post.
Someone recently asked me to take a look at a post on this website. I will not comment on the site content, but the major innovation here seems to be that you read posts from left to right (like a book! it's so natural!).
Except for the fact that since I switched from Gopher to the WWW in 1992, my internet perusal muscle memory has been conditioned to down-arrow/Pg-Dn when I wish to obtain additional content from a website.
Not that I'm a Luddite or locked into a particular navigational methodology. A few years ago I added the mouse scroll wheel to my repertoire. Which is useless on this website. It's pretty rad when your website design cripples standard input device hardware.
But lest anyone say my criticism is not constructive, I have a recommendation (other than the obvious, rm -f /). Trap the keypress event for spacebar and automatically scroll right to the next post.
