DougofTheAbaci
1000+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Apr 20, 2007
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Hello fellow head-fiers. I brought some of these up in another thread and it was recommended I make a list here so here, as it were, is my list:
1. Use "mega-menus" instead of "tiered menus". This is probably the biggest one. Mostly, because tired menus are horrible for usability. Stray too far off the edge and you have to start over again. Mega-menus are bigger but they have a much higher conversion-rate and are much less error-prone. There's a great article by Jakob Neilsen that goes into the specifics of why. If you don't know who he is, he's the foremost expert on usability for the web. Though, not aesthetics. The man knows nothing of aesthetics...
2. Fix tabbing to quick-entry field bug. There's a bug where if you tab to the quick-entry field, the field will highlight as active and the cursor will pop up, but until you click on it nothing starts typing. Now, that's not just a bad usability problem but it's also a really bad accessibility problem. My guess is it's directly related to the rich-text plugin you're using.
3. Right-click is over-ridden on textareas in forum. Again, directly related to the rich-text plugin you are using. Right now, if you right-click you get the plugin's own alternative. The problem with this is that on Macs (and with certain assistive technology) you lose certain really handy options. Personally, it bugs me because for those of us Mac users there's a built-in spellcheck in every text field in the OS. Small thing, I know, but the accessibility issue isn't.
4. If you quote one post, start writing, then quote another, the quotes stay but your text is lost. Again, directly related to the rich-text plugin. Basically, if you're typing a reply and have a quote in the field, if you go to add a second quote that you hadn't planned on, you have to copy all the text first. Otherwise, anything you've typed will be lost when it adds the new quote. It will, however, keep any other quotes you've added. Weird little bug.
You know, to be honest? I'd say swap out the rich-text plugin all together. The HTML it generates is a bit on the messy side anyway.
I've replicated the bugs in Safari and the WebKit nightlies so I'm willing to bet Chrome suffers from them as well. I didn't check Firefox of IE but I wouldn't be surprised to find they all had the issue.
Anyway, those are the bugs that have stood out for me. The only one that I think really needs to be fixed is the mega-menu one. I know a lot of people (especially those with fine-motor skills) find tiered navigation to be very difficult.
1. Use "mega-menus" instead of "tiered menus". This is probably the biggest one. Mostly, because tired menus are horrible for usability. Stray too far off the edge and you have to start over again. Mega-menus are bigger but they have a much higher conversion-rate and are much less error-prone. There's a great article by Jakob Neilsen that goes into the specifics of why. If you don't know who he is, he's the foremost expert on usability for the web. Though, not aesthetics. The man knows nothing of aesthetics...
2. Fix tabbing to quick-entry field bug. There's a bug where if you tab to the quick-entry field, the field will highlight as active and the cursor will pop up, but until you click on it nothing starts typing. Now, that's not just a bad usability problem but it's also a really bad accessibility problem. My guess is it's directly related to the rich-text plugin you're using.
3. Right-click is over-ridden on textareas in forum. Again, directly related to the rich-text plugin you are using. Right now, if you right-click you get the plugin's own alternative. The problem with this is that on Macs (and with certain assistive technology) you lose certain really handy options. Personally, it bugs me because for those of us Mac users there's a built-in spellcheck in every text field in the OS. Small thing, I know, but the accessibility issue isn't.
4. If you quote one post, start writing, then quote another, the quotes stay but your text is lost. Again, directly related to the rich-text plugin. Basically, if you're typing a reply and have a quote in the field, if you go to add a second quote that you hadn't planned on, you have to copy all the text first. Otherwise, anything you've typed will be lost when it adds the new quote. It will, however, keep any other quotes you've added. Weird little bug.
You know, to be honest? I'd say swap out the rich-text plugin all together. The HTML it generates is a bit on the messy side anyway.
I've replicated the bugs in Safari and the WebKit nightlies so I'm willing to bet Chrome suffers from them as well. I didn't check Firefox of IE but I wouldn't be surprised to find they all had the issue.
Anyway, those are the bugs that have stood out for me. The only one that I think really needs to be fixed is the mega-menu one. I know a lot of people (especially those with fine-motor skills) find tiered navigation to be very difficult.
