Discuss: Ruining the User Experience

by Aaron Gustafson

21 Climbing

Jean McGuire:
bq. For example, if you owned an outdoor goods store, wouldn’t it be a cool idea to have the entrance on the second floor, and have a climbing wall in front to get to it?
I just want to say thank you for that delightful analogy :-)

posted at 01:01 pm on March 28, 2007 by Stephen Down

22 Firefox and JSS (and some CSS)

I haven’t made up my mind on the use/don’t use JS argument yet but I am amazed how many sites break with JS turned off. I have been using a FireFox plug-in called NoScript. NoScript disables javascript unless you allow it for a particular site. I can’t tell you how many sites I sat at while the site “Loaded” forever just to remember that I probably need to enable JS for that site. No message, no warning, just eternal loading.

Another point regarding FireFox. There is another plug-in called WebDeveloper that allows you to (among many other things) disable javascript and CSS for a page you are viewing to see how it will render. Very handy.

posted at 03:17 pm on March 28, 2007 by Zachary Kent

23 Use web analytics

Using web analytics should help paint the picture of what changes to make and when. I wholeheartedly agree that you should not force large changes on your visitors and completely agree with designing for as many users as possible.

The truth is that each designer and company will have to determine what and when they are willing to sacrifice usability for added functionality. Its a dance we all do when we build out our sites. (I quit designing for Netscape 4 all together based on the analytics).

And I do not believe that javascript or flash is bad…but in moderation!
http://www.skatterbox.com/2007/03/i-love-jimmy-johns-and-hate-thier.html

posted at 08:55 pm on March 28, 2007 by Luke Newton

24 Untitled

In response:
I’m still not convinced.

However, I did mention that if pda peeps are your audience then maybe you should cater to them with their own version, insuring they can take full advantage of your service.

As Luke Newton pointed out, the best bang for your buck is the largest majority of users based upon your stats. Put it in a bell curve and the few outliers will quickly become unimportant and not worth the extra investment to the typical client.

posted at 10:04 pm on March 28, 2007 by Brandon Richards