Usability Forum

"Lack of control" induced panic

By Eddie_Lopez. Wednesday, 4. October 2006, 13:47:06

Website designers, I know you want to create a beautiful site. I want you to as well. I also understand that technology marches on, progress is made, conventions are broken, new standards evolve, etc etc. I understand that design, art, and implementation is often on the cutting edge and ahead of its time. But please designers... please don't throw usability in the trash in the process. Please don't take control away from me... I own my interface, not you. Function doesn't have to follow form, form doesn't have to follow function. You can have functioning form.

This Go2Web20.net website has an navigation scheme that takes control away from me. It's a gigantic field of icons that you can surf through and click on things you're interested in. The problem is that the site is all in flash and there is no vertical scroll bar!

Helpfully, the designer placed the purple buttons to quickly get to the top or bottom of the listings, but getting to something in the middle is very frustrating. This appears to only be accomplished by using the mouse scroll wheel, which moves *way* too slow for me...and you can't even use the mouse scroll while your mouse is hovering in the field of icons.. you have to move it off to the side.

Sorry to the websites that are not at the very top or bottom of that list. I couldn't easily get to you, so you can't easily get to me.

"Comfort-Fit" collar: Not comfortable. Doesn't fit.A new ally in the war on product packaging

Comments

coxy # 4. October 2006, 14:05

I concur. Somewhat. I hate sites that have blatently stupid errors which render elements of them unusable or fustrating to use.

Eddie_Lopez # 4. October 2006, 14:15

I don't think the author anticipated the number of icons to grow so large? What happens when the first and last "pages" of links ends up being a very small percentage of the total links listed? It may be like that now, I can't tell. When you click on the purple buttons you get a rapid fly through of the sites to get to the end, so I can't tell what's in the middle. And I'm *not* going to mouse-scroll through that field at the snails pace they force me into.