If there is a Golden Rule of usability, surely it must be consistency. Internal consistency (i.e. whenever you click “home” you will always return to the homepage), external consistency (i.e. mirror “real life” - when I “send” a mail it goes to a “recipient” … when I do something similar I expect a similar behaviour.Experience has taught me when using Microsoft Office that I should continually save. Experience also teaches me that if I select “undo” that will reverse the change I have just made. Cool! In Word I make a change - save - undo and the change is undone. PowerPoint is in the Office Suite so I expect consistent behaviour. I expect to be able to save my document and still be able to undo any changes I made before I saved.
But Office breaks the Golden Rule and yet again looses all my work.
I wanted to send a single slide from a presentation to a colleague so I deleted all the other slides, and subconsciously hit control-S. I then realised that I didn’t want to save the document using the current file name, but should have selected “save as.” No worries, I can undo that delete… Only I can’t. And I’ve lost all but one slide of my PowerPoint masterpiece. Once again I’m cursing Microsoft.
What to do? No hesitation, straight to Tortoise CVS and a resolution to use source control locally on my documents. It’s not just Devs who check work in and out… Only problem may be when I come to share documents with colleagues - rather than calling documents v0.n, I’m always working with version 1.0. Now if I had a personal central repository that others could access…
February 20, 2006, 12:26 pm
Barclays have recently updated their web pages to reflect the new brand. Had someone told the brand guys that they no-longer needed to render fonts in HTML - they could use images for fonts. Immediate impressions with this is that it is getting the stylesheet to do something it was never intended to. Aren’t style and content supposed to be seperated? But it is for the developers to argue the elegence of the solution. You cannot argue that it appears to finally give those people in marketing what they’ve always wanted on the web - anti-aliassed fonts. (And accessible to! we’re using stylesheets, look! I can turn the style off on my browser and the image is replaced by a nice and large header! No more need for alt tags! Whoppeee But hang on. A little digging reveals that the web killjoy of accesibility says it is not a good idea after all. The ephemeral smile on the brand police face has vanished. We’ll be using html fonts after all.
February 17, 2006, 5:13 pm
The Guardian ran a good article about Lotus notes.
“Imagine a program used by 120 million people, of whom about 119m hate it. Sound unlikely? Yet that’s the perception one garners in trying to discover whether Lotus Notes, IBM’s “groupware” application, is - as readers of Technology blog suggested - the “world’s worst application”.” Good news! They are redesigning it and asking for feedback. So I dutifully went to the IBM feedback form and filled it out. “question 3: blah blah blah. If not skip to question 5. So I skipped to question 5. And when I submitted the form it wouldn’t let me progress until I completed quesiton 4. Doh! There were other blunders in the form. If they can’t get a simple form right…..
