At 01:45 PM 1/03/02 +1100, Tony Barry wrote:
>And that is one of the reasons I use a text browser for my first scan of a
>page. If I see enough to interest me I proceed. If I see too little to
>indicate what the site is or how to navigate I make a judgement about the
>competence of the designers and go elsewhere.
This has been an interesting thread. It appears that there is lots of
interest for good things to happen in website designs, particularly for
forums like the WCIT. It is fortunate that someone from the forum itself
happened to be on link in order to find this out, including the problems
associated. Unfortunately, the site itself, VERY ironically, is for an IT
conference and in its own design does not allow for this type of
feedback! One would have thought that if anyone would/could/must 'get it
right', it would be this sort of effort, 'world first' [which isn't exactly
true except perhaps for this particular event] or not.
Just another winge, since this seems to be the place. :-) Why such a light
text on the page? There is so little contrast that the eye strain must be
higher than normal and certainly not optimum for viewing. And sadly, the
size is also a problem and the way it's coded, the text size control on the
desktop is defeated.
And finally, I figured out why it takes so long to download, at least
potentially why. I had a look at the forum archives instead of going to
through the subscription, logging in, etc. process. If scripts are
disallowed, you can't see the actual messages, just the message
title/author [a problem in itself if your browser doesn't support js]. But
if you do turn on js, you get the whole thing downloaded, all messages, so
that when you click on the title, the message immediately appears. Sounds
good, but I also notice lots of suspicious backchat from may machine back
to the server [why??!] and if there was any real amount of content in here,
it could take a LONG time to get that info through. Once again, a design
that is to the advantage perhaps of the designer, but certainly not for the
end user.
One of the advantages of seeing these various implementations, and seeing
the name of the software driving it, in this case Janison Solutions
Toolbox, makes anyone else who may be designing these sorts of 'services'
in the future to be more discerning in their choices of
vendors, programmers, and 'features'. Sorta like the CBA criticism of the
industry as part of the program about the IT industry if you get my
drift.....[exposure]. Doug has figured that out and responded as best I'm
sure he could at this stage.
Jan
[who supports these types of online efforts wholeheartedly and has done a
few pretty successful ones without the extra zingers that seem to be
continuing to appear regardless of the criticism by the user community;
does everyone remember the early problems with frames?]
JLWhitaker Associates
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit@primenet.com -- http://www.primenet.com/~jwhit/whitentr.htm
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