Not Clicking & Not Resizing
Smashing Magazine have posted a list of 10 usability nightmares in web design. This is a great list and they’ve found some good examples of some common sense rule breaches, but I think they’ve missed the point on a couple of them.
Firstly, they’ve called out dontclick.it as one of their nightmares. Anyone who’s even read the front page blurb much less spent any time on the site will realise that this is an interaction design experiment, not an attempt at a website for disseminating information. I love this project; it’s a very refreshing indication of how ingrained the conventions of point-and-click have become. Having such a basic precept ripped away is (not surprisingly) unsettling, and acclimatising to the point-and-hover alternative takes a lot of concentration.
The article also advises against resizing browser windows. No web designer worth a damn will ever do this. When you see this happening on a site that’s otherwise pretty good, it’s either because a stakeholder has been allowed to overrule the designers, or because the site was conceptualised and/or executed by graphic or print designers with no understanding of the web as a design medium. These situations are both management problems, not design problems, so what follows is not a rant at designers but a thought for anyone who will have to hire or otherwise direct them.
It’s suggested in the article that this practise of resizing is bad because some browsers might store the new dimensions as the defaults for future window instances. That’s true enough, but there’s a bigger picture being missed. How about the fact that it’s just plain inconsiderate to assume that you know better than the user how their software environment should be configured? This is the equivalent of going to the bookstore and asking an assistant for a particular title, and the assistant saying “Yeah, I can help you with that, but first I think you should wear your clothes like this,” and then they start rolling up your trouser legs and pulling your jacket hood over your face.
As the designer, your canvas is the browser’s viewport area. Everything beyond those borders is out of bounds, and yes, you need to accept from design stage 0 that people will come to your site with different browsers set up in different ways. Deal with it.