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A project to make businesses more aware of their customer experience, and how to fix it. By Mark Hurst. |
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Previous: Laminate flooring package | Main | Next: MS Word Spelling and Grammar checker
November 19, 2005 12:03 AM
Broken: Salon blog rankings page
Sumana Harihareswara comments:
You'd think that to read a blog on the Salon blog rankings page that you would click on the red underlined linked name of the blog. But no! That link takes you to the blog's referrer rankings.
To read the blog itself, you have to click on the globe next to the number of hits.
Even though I've read this page many times, I still find myself clicking the wrong link when I try to get to a blog from the Salon blog rankings page.
I would think it would be the other way around. Click on the text to take you to the blog and click on the thumbnail (for lack of a better word) to take you to the rankings page. People have been acclimated to clicking where it says 'Frank's Blog' to go to Frank's blog, not some small image off to the side.
Bob: It doesn't matter if it's stated how the links work. The behaviour is counter to the almost universal behviour exhibited in the rest of the web. User interfaces should behave in a natural manner with little to no explanantion needed.
Nope, it doesn't state how the links work anywhere that I could see. I guess they just expect you to painstakingly drag your mouse all over the page, clicking on anything that turns your pointer into a hand.
I had a web design instructor who had this thing about linking tiny little graphics like that globe as bullet points for links on a page. She'd have six links in a list, but the text itself wouldn't be linked, only those tiny little graphics NEXT to the links would be linked. (perfect example at http://www.nr.edu/itd110/pages/assigns.htm --isn't it fun trying to click on those damn tiny little dots?)
So basically she forces the user to hit this really really tiny target area amid a stack of other really really tiny target areas, while all that linkable text does nothing.
Most annoying, she taught this as the right way to do things and would count off web page projects if you didn't do it too.
Best part is most project specifications for class assignments included full style sheets, and you would be penalized for not including a style definition for text links EVEN THOUGH YOU DIDN'T HAVE ANY ON THE PAGE because you HAD to link to those annoying really really tiny graphics.
I got lousy grades, but I sure learned how to have a functional web page by looking at her pages as what NOT to do. I'm just a little surprised to see a commercial site doing the same thing. Funny, maybe one of her students actually DID manage to get a job in the industry....
Today's mind-breaking koan: Is it better to click badly, or not to click at all?
I got a huge case of the willies about 35 no-clicks in.
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Previous: Laminate flooring package | Main | Next: MS Word Spelling and Grammar checker
very. broken. i can barely tell thats a globe.
Posted by: gmangw at November 19, 2005 12:19 AM