Website Feedback Popups

You want my feedback on your website? Here's my feedback: Website "feedback" popups are irritating and intrusive.

Font Size Units

I've always used points (pt values) for sizing fonts on web pages, e.g.:

body {
    font-size: 12pt;
}

Those of you who know me know that I'm a developer, not a designer (in the web designer sense; I design systems, but that's different). I couldn't visual-design my way out of a paper bag. (Okay, maybe that's a bit harsh.) I don't think I'm a one-trick pony, but I'm definitely much more left- than right-brained. The engineer in me says, I'm setting a font size, right? And fonts are measured in points, so I use points. Or at least, I used to.

Chris Coyier, on the other hand, is a designer. And he gives some good reasons even an engineer can understand why using pt values only makes sense for print stylesheets, not screen stylesheets. And apparently he's just recently been converting himself to using ems rather than pixels. Both articles are interesting reads.

I Don't Want To Create An Account

Note to online vendors:

I don't want to have to create an account to give you business.

Got it? By all means offer me the option of doing so, if that makes you happy, but if I'm buying 10 quid of lightbulbs from your site, or a one-off rail ticket, I really don't want to create a username and password, opt out of your effing mailing list, etc., etc. Imagine if you had to "create an account" with every corner store you bought £10 of stuff from.

And I really don't want to be prevented from making subsequent purchases because I can't remember the stoopid password I gave the last time you made me create an account I didn't want and your "reset your password" feature is slow/broken.

The relevant term here is "barrier to sale." If you're trying to sell things, here's a hint:
Barrier to Sale = Bad Thing^(tm).

(Are you listening, National Rail?)

9pt grey text on a dark grey background

Is it just me? Am I getting old? (Well, yes, but...) Surely 9pt grey text (#646464) on a dark-grey background (#1C1C1C) qualifies as a Bad Idea^TM? How's this for readable:

Form Factor	mini-PC
CPU Socket	Intel® Atom™ D525 (dual-core) (1.8 GHz) Intel® HyperThreading™ technology
Chipset	NM10 Express
GPU	Intel® GMA 3150
Memory	Up to 4GB
Harddrive	2.5“ drive bay SATA 3.0 Gb/s compatible
Graphics Output	1 VGA / 1 HDMI

And even that's better than the original linked above, I haven't managed to find all the styles they applied to mess up the text.

Grumble...

Dear Computer Product Manufacturers

The place for "Compatible with" stickers is on the box, not on the product. I couldn't care less that my new monitor is "Compatible with Windows 7", and if I did care, I'd've been looking for that information before I bought it, making the sticker on the base marring what is an otherwise lovely bit of modern piano black design completely and utterly pointless. </rant> Now, where's that bottle of "Goo Gone"...

Don't Default Destroy

Here's a little tidbit for UI designers: Don't default to destroying things. You'd think that would have been obvious, no?

No. VirtualBox is an excellent virtualization environment, one of the best in the world and possibly a contender for the top spot. But the default UI has a big UI fault.

VirtualBox, like most good VM technologies, lets you take "snapshots" of VMs that you can then restore, going back in time. Very, very handy for when you're about to do a tricky update and want to be able to roll it back.

In my case, the tricky update hard-crashed the box, which means I had to use the handy Machine | Close to terminate the VM. And lo! The Machine | Close dialog box has a handy tickbox for "Restore most recent snapshot". So I ticked the box, and it worked a treat. I went ahead and kept using the VM for several days.

Then something unrelated made the VM crash, and I did a quick Machine | Close. The next time I fired up the VM, something seemed wrong — files were missing, configuration changes I made a while back were undone, something was amiss!

You guessed it: The Machine | Close dialog box had remembered the "restore last snapshot" setting and so VirtualBox happily destroyed my data.

Should I have noticed the tickbox was ticked? Yes, but it's one UI element of about eight on that window, and the penalty for failing to notice it is unacceptably high. If I had just ticked the box, I could see not asking for confirmation — but not when the box was ticked by default.

Amazingly, this very thing was pointed out in a bug report, and the report was closed as "fixed" when they added the ability to have VMs override defaults if you explicitly set that up.

Um. Yeah. Because that addresses the usability problem. If you know you might make this mistake in the future, you can go update each and every VM you have to make it impossible to use that feature of the dialog box. And then remember to do it for all VMs you create in the future. All because some UI designer wants the purity of either remembering all the options on the dialog, or none of them. I don't think so.

So I've opened a new bug report on it. Hopefully they'll see this as the bug it is, but the point of this post is: Don't destroy things by default, you're likely to piss people off.

Beyond Either/Or

So I was doing a massive file comparison operation (hundreds of thousands of files, >100 GB of data) today on one of my Windows boxes and so naturally fired up the excellent WinMerge, my favorite — by a wide margin — Windows-based visual diff/merge tool. And it did something that is so smart, I just had to mention it.

Usually when you ask software to do an operation on a set of files you identify by wildcard or what-have-you, the software does one of two things: It either goes off and finds all of the files first, and then starts processing them; or it just starts processing and discovers the files as it goes. The former is useful for progress bars, for an early indication that maybe you've messed up your filters, etc.; and the latter is useful for those "I don't care how many there are, just get on with it!" situations.

So what was the smart thing the developers of WinMerge did? They did both. One thread went off to discover files, and another thread got on with the business of doing the comparison for me. It was exactly what I didn't know I wanted.

Are there trade-offs to this approach? Probably. You'll be asking the devices you're reading from to do two things at the same time for a while (list files and read files), which could impact overall performance. Or not, it depends a lot on what the devices are — do they have thrashing issues, are you maxing out your channel to them or does your post-receipt processing take most of the time, etc., etc. In my case, I was dealing with HDDs which presumably did have to thrash a bit (or a lot) early on, but for me it was still a really useful user experience.

So the point is, as it frequently is, to remember ask whether "both and" is an option when looking at an either/or choice. (One of probably three questions you should automatically ask when faced with such a thing, the other two being "is 'neither' an option?" and "are there more options?")

Or maybe the point is just to say "nice one" to the WinMerge devs. Either way.

Happy coding. -- T.J. ;-)

A simple point about design

A good friend of mine pointed me at this comic and I just had to share it. I've rarely seen this point put more...simply.