racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

Here’s one UI peeve of mine. It’s when a web application—or any software for that matter—asks you for something, and gives you no option otherwise.

Take for instance tagged.com. After signing in with your desired username, password and other details, it will then ask you for your web mail credentials (in my case Gmail) so it can send invites to everyone on your list (read: spam everyone!).

One correction. Initially, one would think that the point of submitting your webmail credetnials is for Tagged to check if any of your contacts is already on their database. It’s in the wording, after all:

Enter your password and we’ll search your address book for friends on Tagged.

However, it appears that my first hunch is correct. The point of this is for you to allow Tagged to spam EVERYONE on your contact list. See here.

What bugs me is that they don’t give users the option to NOT harvest your mail contacts. First thing that popped in my mind was this could be a phishing site. Had I not known better, I would have just keyed in my Gmail password. I wonder how many users had been fooled into doing just that.

Tagged should have given me the option of skipping this step, much like other social networks. I would rather just invite friends after I’ve tested the waters and determined whether the service is worth sending email invites/solicitations to people.

It’s up to you if you want to go in the buff in person that day. But I’m talking about the annual CSS Naked day which will come this April 5th.

In 2006, Dustin Diaz declared April 5 to be the annual CSS Naked Day, a chance for the web world to be reminded of the benefits of CSS web page design. By removing the stylesheet for the day, the world would see naked web pages. They would also have a little more appreciation for the skills of web page designers.

CSS, after all, was meant to separate content from the aesthetics. And being naked will help you know if your site or blog’s markup is usable and accessible (and yes, even compliant). Remember the tables and frames of olden days? I hope you ditched them a long time ago.

The fact of the matter is, if you’re writing good solid markup to begin with, it shouldn’t be all that bad anyway. It will be a test case to see how usable your website is to others without a design. So in the meantime, don’t hesitate to prepare your site for the big day.

So I’ll see you (your site, at least) naked on April 5th. If you’re running WordPress, here’s a plugin that automatically disables your style sheet every April 5th.

I’m a fan of usable sites. In fact, I’m part of a local group of usability advocates—Usability PH. If you’re wondering what the heck usability is, I can cite the Wikipedia definition here.

Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal. Usability can also refer to the methods of measuring usability and the study of the principles behind an object’s perceived efficiency or elegance.

Usability usually pertains to how efficiently a product (or software, or just about anything) can be used, how easily one can learn to use it, and how satisfying it is. So you can imagine your favorite gadget to be usable if it satisfies these three criteria—that is, if you were easily able to learn how to work it, and if you’re satisfied overall.

Simplicity: a concept in itself, and not a lack of something else

Many people equate usability to simplicity, and I cannot help but agree. Something usable should be simple enough to use that you shouldn’t have to RTFM. However, this does not mean something should be dumbed down and feature-less. To better illustrate, let me cite what Joel Spolsky writes on his blog.

Devotees of simplicity will bring up 37signals and the Apple iPod as anecdotal proof that Simple Sells. I would argue that in both these cases, success is a result of a combination of things: building an audience, evangelism, clean and spare design, emotional appeal, aesthetics, fast response time, direct and instant user feedback, program models which correspond to the user model resulting in high usability, and putting the user in control, all of which are features of one sort, in the sense that they are benefits that customers like and pay for, but none of which can really be described as “simplicity.” For example, the iPod has the feature of being beautiful, which the Creative Zen Ultra Nomad Jukebox doesn’t have, so I’ll take an iPod, please. In the case of the iPod, the way beauty is provided happens to be through a clean and simple design, but it doesn’t have to be. The Hummer is aesthetically appealing precisely because it’s ugly and complicated.

So Joel says that aesthetics is a matter of taste. The iPod’s elegance lies in its simplicity. However, other objects may be beautiful because of how complicated they are. Just like mechanical watches, with all the gears, cogs, tourbillons, and whatnot. However, Joel goes on to say that the concept of simplicity does not mean you have to take out features to make something usable.

I think it is a misattribution to say, for example, that the iPod is successful because it lacks features. If you start to believe that, you’ll believe, among other things, that you should take out features to increase your product’s success. With six years of experience running my own software company I can tell you that nothing we have ever done at Fog Creek has increased our revenue more than releasing a new version with more features. Nothing.

Strike a balance

However, I would like to disagree to some extent. Too many features might just confuse users. And actually Joel wrote about that just recently, when he posted about Windows Vista’s having too many shutdown options. So I guess it has to be a balance in design. Something should have enough features, but useful features. And the product’s design should be simple enough not to give the common end-user headaches having to wade through tons of features, but also intelligent enough to be able to give the more advanced ones access to the extended feature set.

It’s just like OS X having a straightforward UI for everybody, but access to the terminal for advanced users who want to tweak just about everything.

It’s a complicated concept to think about, I know, but being an end user I appreciate elegance in design. That’s why I work better on my old PowerBook than my newer, supposedly faster Compaq Presario. That’s why I went for the iPod Video when there are other, cheaper MP3 players that can do much more. It’s about efficiency, elegance and satisfaction.

It’s that simple.

Christian Montoya posts on the top ten ways to “uglify” your blog. It’s basically a collection of the top things not to do if you want your blog not only to be aesthetically-pleasing, but also accessible and usable. I think the keyword here is usability. I believe in designing blogs and websites with usability in mind.

While I do agree with fellow problogger Dave that not everything in the list is helpful, let me highlight some points I find worth following—actually design points worth avoiding, that is.

• Long blogrolls. I used to have a moderately long blogroll at the old J Spot (jangelo.i.ph), which kept on growing as I got to know more people in the blogosphere and got to read more interesting sites. Actually, my blogroll is automatically generated from my bloglines subscriptions, so this means each and every blog I publicly bookmark keeps getting added to the point that the blogroll got too long that it ate up a space longer than the front page of blog posts. I eventually relegated my blogroll to a static page, so it’s unobtrusive, while still serving the purpose of telling readers what other sites I read, and adding to that SEO factor (passing on the linklove).

• Social bookmarking buttons. I think these just clutter the design of a blog. If readers were already users of any of these social bookmarking sites, they would know better and are likely to have their own easy-subscribe or easy-tag buttons for bookmarking sites of interest. Besides, not everyone is into all of these social bookmarkers. I, myself, only use del.icio.us actively. The others I only get to stumble upon (hey, that’s another social bookmarking site!) every now and then.

• Feedreader buttons. Same as the bookmarking buttons, there’s no sense in putting in all of the available feedreaders out there when your readers are likely to be using only one or even none at all. I’ve included only the more popular feed readers, and these buttons are only present on my “about this site” page.

• 80×15 buttons. More ways to clutter your site even more. If you must include links to affiliate sites, I think they’re best relegated to your “about this site” or “about me” page, and not plastered on every page at your sidebar. I do have some of these buttons, but only to a limited extent—and I plan to move them sometime.

• Tag clouds. These are all right, if kept to a minimum. But if you’re like me, you’ll be bound to be attaching all sorts of tags onto your posts, and the tag list could get unweildy at some point. Just like an ever-growing blogroll. Now my tag cloud is on a separate page.

• Ads. Well, this is subjective, but I’ve opted against ads on the J Spot, at least for the foreseeable future. I’m earning enough from my other problogging and freelancing activities that I prefer not to be pressured in writing at this blog. Also, I don’t want to divert the attention of my readers to other things, especially as clicking ads will lead readers outside of my site.

What else?

Of course, there are other design no-no’s, such as those atrocious auto-playing music, crappy color schemes and even crappier fonts. But we’ve had enough of things to avoid for now.

What do you think? Are there any other blog elements that irk you? What about ugly dogs?

I’m not very fond of Nokias, but I’ve been posting about them like there was no tomorrow. My primary motivation: usability.

My most recent posts on ForeverGeek involve mobile phones and mobile technology (and how they also apply to design concepts outside of mobile telephony). I basically rave about how, no matter how high-tech my mobile goes, I would always go back to using it just as that—a mobile telephone—for calling, texting, and the occasional alarm clock needs.

First, on ForeverGeek, I find it funny how mobile phone junkies (like myself) always have this urge to buy the latest gadget, but end up using the phone’s basic features after the novelty wears off.