Form Over Function in the Web World
I’m been watching a really fascinating series of talks over at The Server Side, on the subject of J2EE best practices and project failures and scalability and all manner of serious geekaliciousness. Even better, I’m watching it right in my browser, on this neat Flash viewer that displays the video stream on the left, and the presentation slides on the right. This is great because it eliminates annoying cutaways to projector when new slides are presented, and allows the camera to stay focused exclusively on the geeks.
But I do have a gripe with this viewer, and it applies to many other web UIs I’ve seen around recently. The video stream window has a progress bar underneath it, but no other visible controls. There’s no obvious way pause the stream or rewind it or stop it or do anything at all besides (a) look at it or (b) not look at it. This annoyed me, and I was running my mouse over the progress bar in an impotent show of rage, when a control panel slid down off it and onto the page.
Now … sure, that’s a neat effect. But why? It’s not like there are any space constraints; there’s plenty of room on the page. And this isn’t an overly complicated set of controls, either, so there’s no question of overwhelming the user with complexity. That leaves aesthetics: it just looks cooler.
I think this is a terrible mistake. Although UIs must look good, their most important function is to be instantly intuitive. Armed with a few bedrock axioms — buttons are for pushing, checkboxes are for checking, scrollbars are for dragging — all users should be able to figure out the basic functions of any UI, instantly.
The problem here is that there’s no indication that the controls are there. You know they should be there, of course, but that’s all you have: assumptions. If the developers insist on including this effect, they should make the controls initially visible, and provide a way for the user to fold them up out of sight, if they’d like.
Another example of this trend: non-underlined HTML links. Links should always be underlined, because even web neophytes know that underlined text will take you somewhere else when you click on it (inversely, underlines should not be used for any other purpose). But lots and lots of sites use colors to indicate links, instead. This is a problem because (a) it’s not the standard, (b) pages use colored text for completely different purposes, and (c) there’s no good reason (beyond aesthetics) to not use underlines.
This is a small and trivial example, granted, and, probably not so valid anymore: color-links are so ubiquitous that they might as well be the standard. But now you’ve got two standards … underlined links, and colored links. Not a big deal, in and of itself, but when piled on top all of the other inconsistencies and complexities we find in our journey through the web (and through the world), it becomes important. Computers are too damn hard to use as it is. No need to make it worse.
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