Monday, October 23rd, 2006
Ruining The User Experience
Category: Presentation
, The Ajax Experience
Being a semi-professional experience ruiner myself, I was attracted to this session with Aaron Gustafson - Easy Designs, LLC at The Ajax Experience).
Much of the content was fairly basic “must know” stuff. A little review never hurts though; Besides — if you don’t know this stuff: you really _need_ to know before you get much further down the road.
These are things like:
- Terrible error messages (”Error: Can’t display error message”)
- Non-scalable font sizes
- Distracting layouts
- Not knowing your audience - Are they ready for the coolest new JavaScript trick?
- Relying on JavaScript without a fallback.
The second half of the presentation revolved around that final bullet. Some tips, tricks, and approaches to “Hijax” (covered here previously).
- Expanding/displaying hidden content on a javascript action, but falling back to a simple anchor href
- Making up for an absence of js with css, using :target (and again providing a fallback, of course)
- Proving the “submit” for the form if xhr can’t be used
As a frequent reader of ajaxian - these are things you aren’t considering earth shattering - but you DO use them everyday - and you know (probably first hand) that they can hurt your site.
[...] Ajaxian » Ruining The User Experience [...]
Non-scalable font sizes
Isn’t that a fault of the browser (i.e. IE6-), not a fault of the developer?
I think he’s getting at providing something like this… although, failure to do this certainly isn’t going to “ruin” you on it’s own.
[...] http://ajaxian.com/archives/ruining-the-user-experience [...]
It’s normal to have JavaScript activated - if it’s switched off, users should get an error message: “Activate JavaScript and press F5!”
Why should I build pages with JavaScript and provide rich functionality and then have to create a fallback solution? This makes no sense. It’s more important to put an eye to browser compatibility (a blink to some prototype functions and scriptaculous (doesn’t work in opera)). If you have created a full compatible site that uses JS, it should require JS, cause JS rocks.
Everything a question of philosophy ,)