Calligraphic Code | Tudor Munteanu

Dear Facebook,

The new font-size sucks. Thank you for the support in my strive to live with bad eye-sight.

What’s wrong with you?

ktnxbye, Tudor

This is the result of a 24h experiment I tried, to see the web in a different perspective. In an environment prone to distractions, finding applications that allow me to focus are a breath of fresh air.

So I’ve set my Mac OS to render everything in grayscale and continued my daily tasks as normal. Most of the apps I use daily are fairly simple, w/o many flashy buttons and call to actions. Mainly because most Mac OS apps follow simplicity patterns. Then I opened my browser…

The solid shaped interface elements on Facebook and vast areas of white space are a good solution against clutter. I see more and more big websites solving the problem of clutter. Then my eyes fell upon the boxes inside the columns. It’s a friend’s birthday? I must say “Happy Birthday”. A new friend request? A new like? That’s it, I was lost for 10-15 minutes. Extremely distracting, but I guess that’s the whole point of Facebook and why it became so successful, aside from other controversial stories.

Back to interfaces

The solid colors and well-defined interfaces elements on Facebook are fantastic for usability.

Let’s see Apple.com. Not surprising, a few similar patterns. Well-defined navigation elements, a lot of white space and clear calls to action. A really big part of screen estate are pictures of Apple products. The main focus is impossible to miss and a choice of pictures to which people can relate are a pièce de résistance. Apple.com looks just as good in grayscale as it does in colors.

Gmail (especially with Priority Inbox enabled), StackOverflow, Twitter, Google Reader and many other mainstream web applications seem to get it. I’m happy to say that people who advocate for clean design seem to have an impact on the major trends.

Designer websites

A place where I (used to) get my inspiration for interfaces is CSSRemix.com (now dribbble.com is numero uno), which is a showcase of creative websites. I must say that most of these websites lose their souls in grayscale. Even if most of the headers are huge, their impressiveness surely seems to die when viewed without colors. The message sent across to the reader loses its appeal.

There are a few exceptions like http://vladgeorgescu.com, but that’s mainly because the designer’s focus is on interfaces. When usability is at stake, art gets a second role. Gradients appears less and less, solid shapes rarely overlap and the user’s eyes are have a predefined path. That’s is one of the skills of good interface designers: they control the user’s behavior.

My current favorite topic. Mobile Interfaces

The principles noted above should be the guiding rules of ALL mobile applications. There is no place for mistakes on a screen that is the size of half my palm. No fancy gradients, no layer and layers of information, no noisy shadows. The mobile interface should look good in grayscale too, w/o arising frustrations.

Disclaimer

This short analysis is strictly about aesthetics. Usability is much more than just visuals, but because as human beings a big part of the information is received trough our eyes, visuals are an important factor. Usability also implies good composition. i.e. content. What to show? When to show? What NOT to show? What can I interact with?

If somebody tries this experiment and notices points, please share. I’m more than happy to listen.

One of the most fundamental rules of user experience on the web is that developers are rarely qualified to evaluate it. As developers, we know far too much about the web in general, and intuitively grasp details that mystify people who spend their days contributing to society in other ways. For this reason, it’s all too easy for us to build websites and applications that are hard to use. Good user testing during the development process can mitigate the problem, but in many projects, the testing budget is limited if present at all.

quote from this awesome article about user experience.

IE 6 crawled out of the primordial soup 8 years go, at the peak of the dot-com boom. Compared to it’s predecesor, it improved CSS support and for the box model. Nice of MS to do that !

The user didn’t have much of choice. Browsers were still something understood by very few. I heard about Netscape, but that blue “e” on the desktop was still easier to use and seemed to do it’s job, which was enough for my 13 year old brain, at that time. IE6 peaked at ~90% market share in 2002 and 2003.

As the interweb trend evolved, some other alternatives came, but IE still seemed to do it’s job and that’s the quality standard for most of the population. Besides this reason, there is the fact that IE came already with Windoze. “Why bother with terms like updating and heavy processes as making shortcuts, when that blue “e” is already on my desktop and it’s doing it’s job ?”. This is why all the big companies bought Windoze and got IE6 for free. Suddenly that hot blonde secretary or the old accounting lady were using IE6, w/o knowing, caring or willing. Only the tech-guy had Netscape.

Visionaries were pushing the limits and IE6 started to get old. As the internet evolved, the need for rules and standards rose. It’s easier when everybody talks the same language.

Since 8 years ago IE6 still has that 6 at the end. You can ignore the following service packs (SP), because that 6 still remained there.

In typical MS style, developing a website for IE6 is pretty mysterious. It doesn’t follow W3 standards completely, a pixel is not actually a pixel and there is no feedback for developers.

IT industry is not as old as other industries, but 8 years is a decent lifespan for any industry. Dragging it’s lifespan will just make it worse for MS. I’m sure MS is smart enough to know this problem and how to solve it. Maybe they need some help, so I’m willing to give them a hand. From today onward I decided to drop all support for IE6 and prompt these poor IE6 users to upgrade their browsers. By this, users will have an alternative.

As an UI developer, I can leave my ego aside and not ask for the cutting edge stuff, like CSS3, HTML5, but working with a coleague who’s mute is making me have grey hair.

Thank you IE6 for showing me the internet. Don’t overstay your welcome. Rest in peace !