Barkerburgh

I’ve had two livejournal accounts for a while. I had a recent one, forgot about it, created another one, then rediscovered the first one. I vaguely remember having an account way back when it first got popular, but it wasn’t easy or straightforward then so I let it lapse, and it’s worse now, years later.

Is navigation and design ever fucked up.

Often, the labels are vague, misleading, or dumb. There are too many steps from Point A to Point 2 and there are things on the page that are unexplained, misleading or pointless, and I don’t just mean the ads.

(If you’ve been at it for a while and everything is second nature, well and good, but it ain’t chess, it’s a blog. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to get the brunt of the gist of it. Really. Code geeks shouldn’t design interfaces. Neither should co-ops. Or bosses. Or recent graduates of Devry. Christ.)

Some things just don’t make sense at all, like the fact that when I’m logged into my account, there is no easy or obvious way to view the results of a poll, and you don’t seem to be able to edit the poll itself once it’s posted. Sure, it may be right in front of me, but it sure as hell ain’t right in front of me, if you catch my meaning. (You can edit the actual entry the poll appears in, but you can’t edit the poll itself. And the editing page for the poll entry is just dumb…)

Yeah, if I spend a couple of hours clicking around, I’ll figure it out. But a> I don’t have a couple of hours to do that (I’m not that busy but my online time is very limited), and ii] why the fuck should I have to?

Website designers who think they know best about page design should take Thoreau’s advice: run off into the woods and live by a pond. I mean ’simplify’.

Yeah, LJ’s got more features than Wordpress, but that don’t mean I can forgive the design flaws.

For a nicely designed website for a specific purpose, with lots of information and options, see W3Schools. Yeah, of course I know it’s apples and oranges, but it ain’t apples and octopi.

(But to misquote Matt Damon’s character from ‘Dogma’ in the brief elevator scene at the airport near the beginning of the film; “Oh, I don’t mean you!”)

This entry was posted on Friday, September 8th, 2006 at 9:47 am and is filed under I Am So Smrt, Opinions, Pox Populi, Rants, Rails & General Inarticulate Splutterings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.