Somewhere Jakob Nielsen is crying
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One of the things our product does is lets the user set up notifications to go to a group of people with embedded links that are customized to each recipient and allow them to perform actions. There's escape sequence in the template which is replaced by the link in each actual message. The recipients can also see a version of the message when they log into the portal, and it's always been displayed to them with the escape sequence (which is human-readable).
The boss really cares about making things easier to use, so in the new version, when showing the message inside the portal, we're going to recognize the escape sequences and render them with the proper link text and formatting. Then, when the user hovers over or clicks on them, they'll get a message telling them to click the buttons up top for those functions instead.
So we're going to do all the work of making the links functional, just so we can lure the user into a trap and tell them UR DOIN IT WRONG.
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What you see is what you get.
And what you get is a shitty, unusable product.
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Silverpop? shakes fist
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This sort of thing reminds me of my previous employer. At one time, I wanted to add a link in a screen somewhere. I don't quite remember what and where, but the product we were working on was a public web site, and it was a link to the home page, or back to a category or something. So I said, "I think it would be good to add a link to X in spot Y where I think users might look for it."
His reply? "Well, we've already got a link to X over there, very small in the corner of the page: having two links to the same place on the same page is kind of redundant, don't you think?" in a tone that dripped with patronization. Yeah, I totally forgot about the Highlander Rule Of Hrefs. Stupid me, right?
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@toon said:
Yeah, I totally forgot about the Highlander Rule Of Hrefs. Stupid me, right?
Don't you know it was in Berners-Lee's original specification, that every page on the web should link to, and be linked to, exactly one other page, to avoid redundancy?
He wanted to call it the Big Bad Book, but everyone said that was too many consecutive B's.
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@eViLegion said:
Don't you know it was in Berners-Lee's original specification, that every page on the web should link to, and be linked to, exactly one other page, to avoid redundancy?
Early on, every page linked to every other page. It was glorious!Then some fool started putting in real information…
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We have "links" in our application that are functionally buttons. When clicked, they swap JS content panes. Why? Because the "button look" should be reserved for things which "actually do stuff". Great UI design principle right there.
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@toon said:
Yeah, I totally forgot about the Highlander Rule Of Hrefs.
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/GSol74c.png[/IMG]
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@toon said:
This sort of thing reminds me of my previous employer. At one time, I wanted to add a link in a screen somewhere. I don't quite remember what and where, but the product we were working on was a public web site, and it was a link to the home page, or back to a category or something. So I said, "I think it would be good to add a link to X in spot Y where I think users might look for it."
His reply? "Well, we've already got a link to X over there, very small in the corner of the page: having two links to the same place on the same page is kind of redundant, don't you think?" in a tone that dripped with patronization. Yeah, I totally forgot about the Highlander Rule Of Hrefs. Stupid me, right?
When Al Gore wins his internet patent lawsuit and hyperlinks are licensed, your boss will be vindicated.
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