Monday's recommended reading

Written by Adrian Holovaty on October 7, 2002

"Common Principles: A Usable Interface Design Primer" offers good tips on "maximizing interface efficiency." "14 Principles of Polite Apps" applies to Web sites, as well. (Links from InfoDesign)

Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman rips into Knight Ridder sites' URL schemes, which, when played with, are completely nonsensical. And I thought www.ohio.com/mld/kentucky/ would give me Ohio news.

Comments

Posted by AgentKen on October 8, 2002, at 7:25 a.m.:

It gets worse. There's a headline there (on the "front" of ohio/kentucky.com) as I write:

MLB postseason

Giants top Braves in Game 5 to reach NLCS.

ยป In Sports

The "MLB postseason" is a headline link that goes to the Sports index page?!? And the baseball story isn't even at the top of the page. It's seven turns of the scroll wheel (nice, precise measure, huh?) down the page. And this is a breaking news story.

What the heck is going on?

Posted by Carl on October 8, 2002, at 4:37 p.m.:

Interesting side note - Nathan's blog had a huge spot without text (Win NT running IE). At first I thought the story had abruptly ended, truncated, but then I scrolled down a bit and found the rest.

The one link was longer than the column, so my browser skipped down to past his right column's end, and THEN put the link. Interesting bug.

I totally agree with his rant. Urls are not hidden code, but openly seen - therefore they should be seen as part of the user interface and treated accordingly.

Posted by Carl on October 8, 2002, at 4:41 p.m.:

oops- correction, or at least to be more clear, the one link was WIDER than the content column. Instead of breaking the link into two lines, the browser kept it on one line and placed it down where the column widened (due to the end of the right column). Clearer?

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