Entries Tagged as “usability”
List Abuse or Best Practice
I am researching the practical use or abuse of unordered/ordered lists on web pages. I have started using the JAWS screen reader to assist me in producing better solutions for my websites. I have also spent some time surfing other peoples websites with JAWS to get a feel for what works well.
I made an alarming discovery that I felt was not acceptable. It seems that the latest trends for semantic markup is to place the entire website in a huge unordered list. One term to describe this approach is called "divless" and is quoted as:
"DIVless is W3C friendly and was designed to give developers another method to create website layouts in a standards-friendly fashion."
Divless means very piece of content is in a list. Everything from navigation menus, sidebar content, paragraphs, to footers. In my experience this made JAWS read out every list level and nested lists level on a page. This process took a long time to go through. This also had a side effect of causing JAWS to progressively slow down it's speech rate. Items near the bottom of the page were reading back so slow that I stopped the screen reader and went to another site. It was just plain painful.
The argument I read most often in favor of this method is that older browsers understand the unordered list element and therefore render better. I have tested this theory and the older browsers do not support the level of css required to render a layout of this complexity and will simply render a massive list of items that don’t belong in a list.
I feel that the degraded visual appearance of a div based layout looks vastly better to a user of an older browser. It also does not adversely effect a screen readers ability to parse your pages content.
During my research, I found an article that says just about everything I wanted to say in this article. Rather than restating what’s already been said, I urge you to read this article titled "Are Lists Becoming the New Tables?" by Mike Cherim He goes into other issues with this methodology that I had not yet discovered. His argument is better than mine and has more facts to support up his philosophy.
I think that lists are better served to do what they were intended. Make lists. Not replace tables.
So my question to you all. Are divless websites the best method for presenting content? just because it's semantic and validates does that make it more accessible or more usable? Until I can see evidence that points to the contrary, I am in the camp that divs are better suited for markup than a list.
→ Respond NowTags: Accessibility · CSS · usability
How users look at scrolling
I recently got into a discussion with some co-workers that still believed in the myth about users not wanting to scroll long pages. Apparently they had it in their mind that users did not want to scroll. They were likely referring to information that was handed down to them 5 or more years ago. Certainly times have changed by now. I laughed a bit, and explained that it was old information and simply not true anymore. I wish that more was written on design sites about scrolling habits of users. Perhaps then it may dispel any myths that designers have about users not wanting to scroll. I wanted to write about the topic, and so I went on a search to find a good recourse to support my claim. I did find several articles on the topic. Most of them were older articles. However, I did manage to dig up a recent article titled ClickTale Scrolling Research Report V2.0. It’s a two part article so be sure to read both parts. It is a short article and has plenty support graphs, so it is a quick read.
To summarize the article, users do scroll long pages and a good percentage of them scroll all the way down to the bottom. In fact it would seem that scrolling has little effect on users experience. According to a podcast produced by User Interface Engineering, users would rather scroll a longer page scanning for their “trigger words” than click through to multiple pages to find their desired content.
Jakob Neilson wrote in a 1994 article that scrolling was no longer as significant an issue as long as the content was valuable to the user. He did recommend not scrolling more than three full screens on an average monitor. It is also my recommendation that content links, or links to important tasks be in the first screen, or in the first 1000 pixels as users will typically look for the most important items at the top of the page. However my personal believe is that long article pages are completely acceptable. I would rather scroll a long page, than click annoying next buttons. Perhaps those next buttons are only there to increase page hits and user loyalty stats?
With blogs becoming increasingly popular and users becoming more knowledgeable of the web I believe the issues of scrolling will only be important for very long pages.
My personal design philosophy: if the content is interesting to the user, the line lengths are kept at a good length around 520 pixels, and the leading is kept at a good height (approx 130%) your users will not mind reading your longer content pages. In the end it takes balance, and it is our job as web professionals to strike that balance.
→ Respond NowTags: Design · usability
