On Wed, 2005-02-09 at 18:36 +0900, D_C wrote:
Have you ever
asked what the users think about such sites?
The system should give flexibility to the designer as much as the
user.
No, it shouldn't. In matters of user interface policy, the system
should tie the designer's hands as much as possible, so that
users have some chance of predicting, and controlling, what
happens next on their computers.
He probably knows more about his site's req's
than you do.
The web is filled with poor user interfaces by designers
who thought they knew better than their users. Unless there
is a really, really good reason to do otherwise, common
user interface actions like "clicking on a hyperlink" ought
to offer to me, an end-user, the usual range of choices and
behaviours. That way, *I* get to decide to open it in the
same window, another window, a tab, save it to a file,
my scrapbook, or whatever.
Unless this choice by me fundamentally interferes with the
purpose of the web site, it is arrogant presumption by the
web designer to deny it to me.
if the designer chooses to make an art-piece and
ignore the users, he
should be able to.
What would an 'art-piece wiki' even mean? Something that
encourages user input and participation while simultaneously
ignoring it? Eh?
For example this guy might be doing a bank intranet
site where he
needs to make really clear what is an external resource.
He might be, but the question he asked suggests that it's just
a personal preference being embedded into a design:
> My convention for sites I do is to make links that
go off-site open a
> new window. Is there a simple way to do this? If not a simple way,
Apparently, one designer has decided that how he likes to
do things is how everyone must do them; this is poor web design,
and I would be disappointed if mediawiki encouraged it.
The implication here is that mediawiki makes it
difficult for a
designer to pre-determine link functionality.
Mediawiki ought to make it hard to shove user interface
policy changes down users' throats; this is A Good Thing,
especially if it forces web designers to think more about
how their decisions can frustrate and confuse their users.
--
Frank Wales [frank(a)limov.com]