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In this category for exactly the same reason is the “this page” or “this site” or “this post” link. It means, roughly, “click here.” Vacuous and useless.

Web authors, please stop. Tell me more information, so I know if that’s a web page I want to load before I activate your link. Also, this makes web search engines like Google work way better.

iTunes’ UI is designed to look like a music player, whether CD, DAT, or cassette tape. Up until 6.0.2, the controls acted like music players, too. The reverse control, when operated once, reset the current track to its beginning; operated twice, it reset the current track to the beginning of the previous track. With 6.0.2, this simple, intuitive behavior is degraded if you’re listening to a podcast. Reverse changes the current track to the previous track. Forward or double-click on the track you were listening to takes you to the position last played in that track/podcast, unless the track is marked as unplayed, in which case it starts at the beginning.

Unclear? Reverse — the back, the two triangles pointing to the left, or your left arrow key — used to take you back to the start of the current podcast. Now, it takes you back to the start of the previous podcast.

This is an improvement, I suppose, if you’re a moron. For the rest of us, this breaks a consistent and intuitive expectation of music player user interfaces — one that is met by nearly every other software music player on the market.

If I were the guy who suggested this UI change, I’d be embarassed that someone took my suggestion seriously, when I thought it was clear that I’d had one too many shots of Jaegermeister. If I were the superior who took this suggestion seriously, I’d be making sure my résumé were in order.

On the other hand, this has the stink of Jobs all over it.

Accessibility is perhaps the most glaring issue posed by the new OCA website. The opening abstract in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines of the World Wide Web Consortium (the body responsible for the standards that make up the web, like HTML) makes the most convincing case for designing accessible websites:

These guidelines explain how to make Web content accessible to people with disabilities. The guidelines are intended for all Web content developers (page authors and site designers) and for developers of authoring tools. The primary goal of these guidelines is to promote accessibility. However, following them will also make Web content more available to all users, whatever user agent they are using (e.g., desktop browser, voice browser, mobile phone, automobile-based personal computer, etc.) or constraints they may be operating under (e.g., noisy surroundings, under- or over-illuminated rooms, in a hands-free environment, etc.). Following these guidelines will also help people find information on the Web more quickly. These guidelines do not discourage content developers from using images, video, etc., but rather explain how to make multimedia content more accessible to a wide audience.

The new OCA website consistently employs images with empty “alt” attributes, which violates the above referenced guidelines. Disabled users, as well as users of non-visual browsers, cannot use the site as currently designed. “Alt” attributes give a description of an image for use by screen-readers and other text-only browsers, such as those used by blind users, other disabled users, mobile phones and PDAs. Many images on the site are being used instead of text; the omission of “alt” descriptions makes the site unusable for these users.

A major impetus of the site redesign was creating a database driven site that is easier to administer. I am sure that this goal has been accomplished, since the webmaster is clearly irritated by complaints that all inbound links have been broken by the redesign. However, links are what the web is all about. If you break inbound links to your website, you make your 404 error page the first thing that many users see. When you redesign a site, preserving the integrity of inbound links should be your first priority.

The use of banners for faux advertisements is cute, but it wastes screen real estate. In usability studies, “Banner Blindness” has been shown to cause website users to miss important information that looks like a banner ad. (Search Google for more information on banner blindness.) Creating faux ads would be cute for a parody site like The Onion Dome, but its cuteness seems misplaced on a serious project like the official website of the Orthodox Church in America. Users of ad blocking software may never even be aware that they are missing content, since all of the faux advertisements have “Advertisement” in their URL.

The most annoying area of the new website is the new photo viewer. It employs pop-up windows, which makes it a major annoyance already. Once the pop-up viewer is loaded, the interface leaves much to be desired. The viewer provides a drop-down menu for selecting events, then labels the events with dates and locations rather than useful text such as “The Meeting of the Lesser Synod of Bishops.” Further, compare the printable version of a photo with its viewer version. The photo is larger, no particular screen size or resolution is required, and it is generally a better designed page. (In fact, printable versions of web pages are generally better all around.)

Let’s be clear on one thing: The OCA website has some great content. The daily readings, hymns and hagiography, the “Life in Christ” series by Archpriest John Breck, downloadable musical settings for choir directors. Its problem is not that it doesn’t have great content; the problem is the work that it makes users do to get it. Arguably, the daily commemorations are the strongest area of content on the site. Why make the user go through a circus of ten or more steps to get all of this wonderful content? Would it be so difficult to put it all on one page?

On the positive side, I applaud the website team for using the Bible Gateway API or something like it to get the Scripture readings for each day. Too bad it’s below the fold; I almost missed it. If a fellow user hadn’t pointed it out to me, I might have taken forever to find it. The huge photo of a guy reading the Bible is nice but gratuituous and just gets in the way of the real reason I asked to be served this page: the actual stuff from the Bible! Content below the fold is a big problem on the new site; the front page has tons of links to great content hiding out down there, while a confusing menu takes sits on the top.

I am looking forward to seeing what others think of the site redesign. I have looked for positive things to say about the new site, but I have found few. The web team has clearly worked very, very hard, but they do not seem to have a clear vision of what makes a solid web presence. A good starting point would be Human Factors International’s “UI Design Update Newsletter” from December 1999. Most websites have long since integrated these suggestions into their designs; the web team at OCA.org seems not even to be aware of them.

As I plan what I will write, I was pointed to an “advisory” from the OCA webmaster. Does this make sense to you? “We broke your links to our site. Stop whining and fix your website. We’re more important than you.”

Typical scenario 1: An inquirer looking for information about the Orthodox Church types in “orthodox church history america” in Google. After looking at the top few links which inaccurately skew the history of American Orthodoxy toward Hellenic Orthodoxy, he goes to click links to the OCA website that look promising. What does he get? A very unhelpful default IIS 404 page. The OCA webmaster’s answer to this inquirer? “Stop whining and fix your links.” Right. He’ll probably just get his information from the Greeks or the Antiochians. If he’s persistent, he’ll look at other pages that link to the same two pages on the OCA website. And he’ll keep getting the same 404 errors.

Typical scencario 2: A faithful Orthodox Christian uses the OCA’s daily readings and hymns in her daily rule of prayer. Using her handy bookmarklet to get today’s readings, she finds the default 404 page. Not only unhelpful, it interrupts her spiritual exercises, breaking her concentration and forcing her to find out what’s gone wrong. The OCA webmaster’s response to this Orthodox pilgrim? “Stop whining and fix your links.” That’s beyond inexcusable.

Will Google spider again and update its links? Of course. Will other websites change their broken links? Some will, many will not. “I am the OCA.org webmaster! Change your links before me, for I am….” Let me be the first to assure you, you are deluded.

A while ago I also wrote about “The Biggest Design Mistakes of 2004.” This is the top mistake: Believing People Care About You and Your Website.

Write these two sentences where you can see them as you’re working on your computer:

1. The only reason my web site exists is to solve my customers’ problems.
2. What problems does the page I’m looking at solve?

Nobody cares about you or your site. Really. What visitors care about is getting their problems solved.

Why is that number one? Because it’s the most important part. The site is not about the webmaster, it’s about the users. Piss off your users, and at best your website will be irrelevant.

Also in Firefox news, Netscape 8 beta was released today. Screenshots reveal a hideously unusable interface. Unsurprisingly, it is only being released on Windows platforms. Mac users don’t go for blecherous interfaces. (Well, sometimes they do; but they’re spoiled by the goodness of the Mac interface, so it’s less likely.)

When you redesign a site, your first priority should be that your existing users continue to have a positive user experience. This means creating redirects for moved pages and testing your new design against a wide variety of browsers. A redesign that alienated 25% of your users would get you fired in any corporation that valued its web presence (or at least moved to a position in customer service). I see no reason to be kinder simply because this is a non-profit. In fact, since this is my church, I feel obligated to be forthright.

I will perform a more thorough site critique later, but early impressions are highly unfavorable.

Hat tip: Web Standards BUZZ.

Some of WordPress‘s features to control spam in comment and discussion areas trip you out. Unfortunately, some annoy you till dead.

Requiring my email address tops my list of annoying bugs features purporting to limit comment spam. I already get tons of gooey, sticky email spam in my Inbox; I want to limit what I get in the future, thank you. Only my closest friends and associates need my email address, and most of them already know it. If they do not, they can use my handy-dandy email form to email me. If I think them worthy of a reply, then — bingo! — they have my email address. Requiring me to reveal my address annoys me when I know the owner of the blog and frightens me when I do not. Once you have my address, what exactly do you plan to do with it?

Adding to the obvious privacy issue, one must ask: What exactly is requiring an email address supposed to do? I find just as many spam attempts with email addresses as without. Additionally, legitimate comments from readers wishing not to give me their address are usually worth it. (See the privacy issue in the previous paragraph.) Plus, it usually seems not to matter if a fake address is provided, like stop.requiring@this.silly.info.

Another annoying bug feature is holding all comments in a queue until they are moderated. This is not nearly as bad as the previous feature, but it slows down conversations. Some of the best conversations in blogspace explode in seconds. Good insights can be lost when a moderator loses track of time. This is especially the case on a blog like mine, where sometimes days elapse before I get a chance to moderate.

The best spam killer is holding comments in a moderation queue if they match certain conditions. There are two ways WordPress checks for conditions that look like spam:

• more than five links in a comment
• words on a disallow list are present (cialis, tramadol, paxil, your pet-peeve–word)

These catch nearly all the spam I ever get. If I start getting spam with a new word, I go back and delete the comments (very easily done with WP’s new comment moderation interface), and I add the word to my no-no–list. Easy, and transparent to users. Transparency++
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