My Weblog

How do we determine the usability of a form? Do we design web forms with the user in mind or for the form's sake? Both these questions popped into my head while I was dealing with web forms extensively the last couple of weeks.

I have noticed a rather worrisome trend in the web industry lately, and that is hiding secondary form fields "until they are needed." I do acknowledge the value of such an approach in creating "pretty" form fields. But that's not really coding forms with the user in mind, now is it? Forms should not be coded to look pretty by themselves, forms should be coded with the user in mind.

So what exactly is the value of hiding form fields from the user? We live in a busy world, most of our lives revolve around one thing: <b>time</b>, or the lack thereof, so it is normal for us to allot units of time to our activities. Such as filling in an application form. If it's a paper form you might glance at it and be able to...

I got recently into a rather intellectual debate about what is the commonly agreed upon "standard" on expandable collapsible list behavior. Thought I should share the summary in the hope of offering some guidance about the complexity of the problem.

The question is rather simple: How are expandable /collapsible menus (+ / -) supposed to behave as a best practice? The answer is very simple for simple lists, where the heading expands or collapses a list of items. You got a plus sign if it's collapsed and a minus sign if it's expanded.

Real life collapsible lists are rarely that simple. First what happens if one heading does not contain any items. Do you display a plus or a minus? Do you let the user click on it and toggle between plus and minus with no effect because there is nothing to display? Or do you just not display neither a plus nor a minus.

Well from a usability and user friendliness perspective don't let the user click on it in the first...

It's been a while since I wrote something in this log, it wasn't intentional, but I really did not have the time.

Lots of things happened ever since, including this new website design (questions, comments, opinions on the new design are all welcome...). So let's start with all that is visible first.

I'm sure many have noticed the new design and probably a good chunk didn't notice it at all. I have re-evaluated my priorities in terms of this website and discovered I want to play with the latest toys in the sandbox, and some of the older ones might not fit in it anymore. As a result the current design is not backward compatible with anything lower, including, IE6. Yes IE6 still holds a good chunk of the market but hey... The reasons are PNG alpha blending and Ajax. Microsoft finally decided to implement the PNG graphics format properly in IE7 thus making it possible to work with transparencies and shadows across all major browser vendors. Ajax, wasn't so much of a...

I've been following the entire Microsoft/EU showdown for the last couple of months and got so sick and tired about all what has been written about it, that I decided to write something myself about it.

I'm not really a fan of either of them but and i cannot help noticing that about all the articles attempt to portray either of the two as the bad guy. Or better said: why do you all people out there writing about it have to tell the story in terms of good and evil? Let me be the first breaking y'all the news, neither are good nor evil. So stop putting the problem that way and start thinking how to deal with it effectively!

FACT 1. Microsoft's Windows Opsys is the defacto monopoly on the non-server, non-specialty computing market , partly because of the fact that it tried really hard to become a monopoly, and that's why it's evil. But also significantly because it spend billions of dollars (at this point, i suspect) to develop a GUI that is insanely user friendly, easy...

Let us be clear, i hate creating them and i hate using them... and by "D" i mean any of the following: dynamic, DHTML, drop down... call it as you wish it refers to the same general concept and i think it's a dinosaur.</p><p>It's not that i don't acknowledge their usefulness at some point in the distant past but i think they outlived it.

So what are drop down menus after all? Well a nifty idea in the PC era. When people started working on and with computers with GUI's they needed a way to organize the plethora of options available for a program, that previously were written down in manuals and the like. Anybody remember all the options of the 'ls' command? -- Thought not. So they invented the drop down menu, a program has a menu bar on the interface and when you click on a menu category, a drop down opens with all related options: hence "File", "Edit", "Help" and the like. So in the Internet era somebody had the wise idea,...