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Stop Being an Idiot
11–20 of 46 posts
Re: Stop Being an Idiot
#12I think the author makes a great point. I pursue this concept in what I call "elegant design". What this means to me is taking as much functionality as possible and putting it into a simple to understand package. There is a huge difference between "intuitive" and "Dumbed down". Want some exapmles? Think Apple products or, online, facebook. Both have a lot of features available, but you aren't overburdened by them. You take what you need and you leave the rest. On top of that, both offer an intuitive GUI that is easy to comprehend. A lot of times this comes down to interconnecting all of the aspects of your system to be accessible where your users need them to be.
I feel this is an area Microsoft has struggled with in the past and they are finally catching up with their more recent Office program. A good case study here? Compare Microsoft Outlook to Gmail. Gmail is an elegant solution, Outlook is incomprehensible to the point that there are companies whose business is making it easy to understand (ie. Xobni).
There are many other examples, but I'm interested in what everyone else thinks too...
Re: Stop Being an Idiot
#13Nobody likes the unfamiliar. Then why is your blog dim white letters on a black background? The first thing my reptilian brain thought was that this was some kind of left-brained new-age artistic fluff. But it's not. You have important points to make. So do your readers (and back button pushers) a favor and practice what you preach. Combine your artistic tendencies with a more familiar, more functional white backgrou…
There is a difference between unfamiliar and unconventional. Text rendered in a white font, in a language I can recognize is familiar. Text written in Klingon, rendered in dingbats is unfamiliar. In my mind the designer _should_ be unconventional, while remaining familiar. Ever see a condo development? How boring are all the houses, lined up and all the same? I would hate the web to be the same way.
> I would hate the web to be the same way.
Welcome to Netscape Navigator 2 :)
Re: Stop Being an Idiot
#14Tufte rehashed
Re: Stop Being an Idiot
#15Stop reinvinting the wheel. Don't be an asshole and replace the browser's scrollbar with one of your own.
Especially when the scrollbar you invent doesn't work in Chrome.
Re: Stop Being an Idiot
#16I agree with Tracy's comment on this post. What specifically are we talking about, other than generalities?
Re: Stop Being an Idiot
#17I agree with the author's point, but I really wish there were some examples. It's one thing to say that you're against stupid, boring interface design. I think we could all agree on that. But I bet we'd have a slightly harder time agreeing on just which interface designs are stupid/boring and which are simple/elegant.
I'll throw out an example: The Drupal admin interface is an example of stupid/boring, while the Wordpress admin interface is an example of simple and elegant.
Anyone agree?
Re: Stop Being an Idiot
#18Stop reinvinting the wheel. Don't be an asshole and replace the browser's scrollbar with one of your own. Especially when the scrollbar you invent doesn't work in Chrome.
Stop Being an Idiot.
Re: Stop Being an Idiot
#19Nobody likes the unfamiliar. Then why is your blog dim white letters on a black background? The first thing my reptilian brain thought was that this was some kind of left-brained new-age artistic fluff. But it's not. You have important points to make. So do your readers (and back button pushers) a favor and practice what you preach. Combine your artistic tendencies with a more familiar, more functional white backgrou…
He's talking about web apps and you point out that he's not practicing what he preaches b/c his blog isn't on a white background? I really wish comments a/b people's personal blog design preferences and the unreadability of said blog post wouldn't get voted up so often. Use Readability and talk a/b more important, less personal tastes/monitor resolution & brightness-related things instead.
a/b? Are you entering your sentences through a twitter client? 'Readability' looks like a handy tool but so is plain English.
Re: Stop Being an Idiot
#20Stop reinvinting the wheel. Don't be an asshole and replace the browser's scrollbar with one of your own. Especially when the scrollbar you invent doesn't work in Chrome.
Stop Being an Idiot.
All using the same blog template is definitely not in the same ballpark as overriding default browser behavior with something that doesn't work.
It's not even the same sport..
Edit to respond to your revised comment that replaced its content with the title of your article (wow, way to be accepting of criticism, dude! When you do usability testing and a user finds a bug or complains about something, do you tell them they're an idiot, too?):
Even if it's a bug in Chrome's rendering engine, you have an IE7 specific stylesheet, assumedly to support the bugs in its CSS rendering engine. And considering IE7 usage is 11.7% while Chrome's is 10.8% [1], you've just alienated a fairly large portion of your potential readers.
[1] http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp (orderedlist's statistics may be different; being a usability-oriented blog, it probably has a higher portion of Chrome users than the general public)