Degrading Behavior: Graceful Integration

Posted on February 26, 2010

There has been a lot of talk about graceful degradation. In the end it can become a lot of lip service. Often people talk a good talk, but when the site hits the web, let’s just say it isn’t too pretty.

Engineers and designers work together, or divided as the case may be, to create an experience that users with all of their faculties and a modern browser can enjoy. While this goes down, the rest of the world is left feeling a bit chilly.

What happens is, the design starts with the best of intentions and, then, the interactivity bug takes hold. What comes out is something that is almost usable when slightly degraded, but totally non-functional when degraded to the minimum. Continue reading »

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Website Overhaul 12-Step Program

Posted on February 22, 2010

Suppose you’ve been tasked with overhauling your company website. This has been the source of dread and panic for creative and engineering teams the world over.

Some people, in the panic and shuffle, opt for the fast-and-loose approach. They start throwing anything they can at the site, hoping something will stick. Anything means ANYTHING. All marketing ideas go in the bucket, then the executive mandates, the creative odds and ends, some engineering goodness and all of that. This almost always results in a disaster.

Others look to collect everything that people want and need, do a ton of marketing research and then follow that up with user testing. Though this may lead to a usable site, this method probably won’t generate a site that actually solves user needs. Continue reading »

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Pretend that they’re Users

Posted on February 16, 2010

Working closely with the Creative team, as I do, I have the unique opportunity to consider user experience through the life of the project. More than many engineers, I work directly with the user. Developing wireframes, considering information architecture and user experience development all fall within my purview.

Typical engineers, on the other hand, live in a world separated and buffered from Creative and, subsequently, the user. They work with project managers, engineering supervisors and other layers of businesspeople that speak on behalf of the user, alienating the engineer from the world they affect.

It becomes easy to dissociate and refer to the user as clients and eventually abstract the interaction by focusing on the system and the software client that will interact with the functions being built. People as users become a vague notion that is hardly considered as functional pieces are built and pushed out. Continue reading »

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User Experience Means Everyone

Posted on February 5, 2010

I’ve been working on a project for an internal client, which includes linking out to various medical search utilities. One of the sites we are using as a search provider offers pharmacy searches. The site was built on ASP.Net technology, or so I would assume as all the file extensions are ‘aspx.’ I bring this provider up because I was shocked and appalled by their disregard for the users that would be searching.

This site, which shall remain unnamed, commits one of the greatest usability crimes I’ve seen: they rely only on Javascript to submit their search. In order to give you, dear reader, the scope of the issue, I always test sites like these by disabling Javascript and testing the function again.

The search stopped working. Continue reading »

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Predictive User Self-Selection

Posted on February 4, 2010

Some sites, like this one, have a reasonably focused audience. It can become problematic, however, for corporate sites to sort out their users, and lead them to the path of enlightenment. In the worst situations, it may be a little like throwing stones into the dark, hoping to hit a matchstick. In the best, users will wander in and tell you precisely who they are.

Fortunately, users often leave hints as to who they are without knowing it. They (hopefully) travel through your site, touching certain pages and avoiding others. They also arrive from somewhere.

When trying to select your user and direct them, your initial response may be to directly ask them who they are and what they want. This works well if you are an e-tailer like Amazon, but the rest of us don’t have quite the same luxury. Continue reading »

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Mapping the Course: XML Sitemaps

Posted on February 2, 2010

I just read a short, relatively old blog post by David Naylor regarding why he believes XML sitemaps are bad. People involved with SEO probably know and recognize the name. I know I did. I have to disagree with his premise, but agree with his argument.

I say XML sitemaps are good!

The real issue with XML sitemaps does not lay in the technology but the use. If a site is well designed, well developed and has a strong information architecture, it should spider well and indexing should occur. Moreover, if the HTML/XHTML supporting the information on the site is well formed, the site should get decent rankings. This is where I agree with David. Continue reading »

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The Browser Clipping Point

Posted on February 1, 2010

Today, at the time of this writing, Google posted a blog stating they were dropping support for old browsers. They stated:

The web has evolved in the last ten years, from simple text pages to rich, interactive applications including video and voice. Unfortunately, very old browsers cannot run many of these new features effectively.

I made a case to move in the same direction at my company less than a month ago. I reviewed the visitor statistics and discovered less than 10% of all visitors to our sites use Internet Explorer. Months ago, Digg posted a blog asking whether they should block Internet Explorer 6 from viewing the site. Their statistics represented similar numbers to our own. Continue reading »

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