Monthly Archives: April 2005

UX is a quality, not discipline, thoughts spurred by Peter Merholz

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I thought this post from Peter Merholz was a nice philosophical step-back for usability.

User Experience is a Quality, Not A Discipline

One of the things that has been hard for the “usability community” to accept is that usability is not really interesting in and of itself. And that usability isn’t really a goal, and it’s definitely not the end-all be-all. Usability is simply a quality. It’s an important quality, but just one of many. And it definitely doesn’t warrant being a “discipline.” [More]

Kind of goes with Tufte’s observation that a superbly usable site does not equal a superbly designed site. Extend that thought with this post and you get the idea that a high level of usability is a quality of a superbly designed site (or, a site that provides great user experiences).

Useit.com: Usable, sure. Pretty, nope. My experience at useit.com is never that great because I don’t feel good about the visual design. I always find what I came for, but I am never inspired to do greater work or humbled at the work of a master.

Features of robust dynamic menus

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There are many fine examples of dynamic menus, menus that display sub menus when you hover your mouse pointer or bring focus to them in other ways, such as tabbing through links with your keyboard. I was reading a recent article on AlistApart.com regarding hybrid CSS menus, and the discussion that followed the article showed a real demand for a robust, cross-platform, accessible, dynamic menu.

Here are some features the menu should have:

  • Be written with web standards: valid xhtml, ECMAScript, and css. (There are some nice flash implementations out there, but they have accessiblity issues.)
  • The menu should degrade gracefully, allowing site visitors to navigate even when scripting is turned off in their browsers.
  • The menu should work well for people using a mouse as well as people using a keyboard.
    • When a user tabs to a main link, the sub menu should appear as though the user hovered over it with a mouse.
    • And users should be able to tab through the sub links as well.
  • The menus should work well in all mainstream, current browsers (i.e., it doesn’t need to work with Netscape 4.x or it’s peers).
  • It should allow for text-zooming, and it should remain useable when the font size triples.
  • The menus should be built with usability in mind. They should be as easy to use as possible, from a purely interface perspective. For example, the links should be easy to click on, and it should be easy to navigate a sub menu without accidentally closing it. (Review Fitt’s Law for some principles.)

I’ve seen menus that support these features, but none that support them all. In fact, Adam Richardson (business partner) wrote a very nice menu system that worked well with keyboard tabbing as well as mouse events.

Related resources:

There are many solutions implemented out there, some better than others and very few that I’ve seen have been flawless. When I get some spare time (ummm), I’d love to take a crack at this. Anyone else have a menus system that matches up to the features list above?

Eva’s mystique with the iBook

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The girls have this uncanny ability to undermine Chey’s iBook.

A few months ago, Lila was “working” on Chey’s computer while I was reading a book. When she was done working, she had managed to move the Library directory from /Users/cheygranroth/ to /Users/cheygranroth/Documents. The tricky part was neither Chey nor I realized what had happened until later on, when Mail wouldn’t give her her messages and was acting like it was freshly installed. That, and her settings for the desktop seemed completely wrong.

Anyway, I’m typing this on her laptop in monochrome. Yes, that’s right. Eva managed to take all the color out of the display, with some arcane keyboard command combination. It’s like ^+option+command+* or something, but I haven’t been able to get the “toggle monochrome” to actually toggle.

That said, it’s kind of cool to work like this. Very retro, with a modern edge. OS X’s GUI doesn’t look all that bad in black and white. I tried to take a screen snap shot, we’ll see if it is really in monocrhome or if somehow the snapshot managed to hold color. I’ll post it at some point (Chey’s computer doesn’t have any decent image editing program that I can use to switch it out of PDF format).