Note: This is a post written on August 29, 2010 in my personal website, Bibakis.com.
It has moved here, mostly for archival.

The hover effect or “mouse over” back in the early days is quite common in websites these days. Unfortunately it’s one of those bad habits that harm the user experience. I guess in a few years we’ll be laughing at hovers, like we now laugh at frames and tables.

Touch is here to stay
As we speak about 200,000 touch screen devices are purchased in the US alone every day. This includes Android smartphones, iPhone and the iPad. You can easily imagine that in a couple of years touch screens will be the norm and mouse based interfaces will be considered “business tools”. Instead of creating multiple versions of your web application why not consider getting rid of mouse-only features ?

Even if people continue to use computers at the same rate as they do today in the future, and even if you don’t plan to deploy your application on mobile devices you still need to forget about the hover. The average user will soon forget that you can expect something to come out if you place your cursor in a link. The reason is that users won’t be running into hovers on the majority of devices (and the most part of their browsing time).

Drop down menus
This is one of the major annoyances in the web for quite some years now. When evolutions in CSS popularized the use of drop down menus, a lot of designers tried to imitate the behavior of desktop applications. Unfortunately they forgot a very important aspect of desktop-like menus. Once you click, they stick! The sudden disappearance of sub-menus made surfing an adventure since users were expected to hunt menus around the page. Have a look at this great study on the topic: Users Decide First; Move Second

If it’s not visible it doesn’t exist
From time to time I’ve happen to surf Facebook with a friend or two. The majority of people I know are not aware of the additional options when hovering over some areas of the page. This is not a surprise as hover destroys the principle of what you see is what you get.

Can you imagine a car or a cd-player with hidden options ? I guess not. Then why should we design web interfaces that way ? Can we realistically expect people to scan the whole screen with the mouse, just in case the designer had the idea to hide some elements ? Most people have a quick look at the page and if something doesn’t appear there they just assume it doesn’t exist. Of course they are right to think so. Nothing else requires you to imagine where parts of it’s functionality are hidden but the web of today.

How can you replace mouse over

Organize information the smart way

The best way to de-clutter an interface and therefore avoid the need for hiding things, is to organize information in a human friendly manner. If you build your information structure in a simple and efficient way, everything can be “hidden” in the next page. The best example I can think off is the apple homepage.

Apple is a multinational company selling a huge variety of products and services, from smartphones and mp3 players to business server operating systems. Yet, in the main menu of apple.com website there are only seven options plus the link to the home page. Let’s take the “Mac” section for example. Instead of having a drop down menu with sub-options like MacBook, MacBook Air, iMac and so on, you are given these options only once you are taken to the “Mac” section. Each page has as few options as possible, yet you never feel that something is missing.

Apple.com’s main menu: Only seven options in a website with a vast amount of information

Use “click and drop” (pop-over)
This is a relatively new technique to the web. When you click on a button, you are presented with some options regarding your further actions. This is a great way to hide things like advanced search options. In the picture on the right you see an implementation in the main menu of startupdonut.co.uk.

In this case, a user with a touch screen device can navigate as good as the mouse users and all the extra options are well hidden until you click topics button. An excellent use of the “click and drop” technique is anywhere you need filtering. For example, search results, viewing a list of products or like in our example, viewing blog posts tags.

Clicking “topics” on the main menu of startupdonut.co.uk opens up the list of tags

Don’t forget lightbox
Lightbox is a nice solution when you want to give some information to the user quickly without sending him to another page. By clicking on a button you display a box on top of the page which can be an image, some HTML, or an iframe. You can use lightboxes for things like displaying notifications, showing the terms of use in a registration page, giving the user a quick preview of a shopping cart or for zooming images in a gallery. In the example on the right you can see the way facebook implemented it for sending a quick message.

The most common implementation of lightbox: Sending a message on facebook

Note: This is a post written on August 13, 2010 in my personal website, Bibakis.com.
It has moved here, mostly for archival.

Content Delivery Networks are one of the latest trends on the web. The idea is simple. Instead of having a single server in a central location, place lots of servers of smaller capacity in a variety of locations. This allows you to avoid bottleneck and reduce delivery times.

Some major web companies (most notably Google and Microsoft) have started offering public CDN services to open source projects. A lot of developers advise to use public CDNs in your websites to serve javascript libraries like jQuery and Prototype. Before you make haste to take advantage of this new trend keep the following in mind.

Your websites will be depending on the CDN
Although CDN providers have an advanced infrastructure and are generally considered very reliable, they cannot guarantee 100% availability. In fact even commercial CDNs cannot do that. Given the fact that we are talking about free services here there will be times when the CDN will be offline. If the CDN goes offline so do you.

You are as slow as your slowest part
If a CDN is performing at high speeds then everything will be ok. However consider the following example. If a page from your application takes 4 seconds to load and a javascript library takes 6 seconds to load from the CDN then the loading time for the user is 6 seconds. So while a CDN is often used to offload a site and increase loading speed it may result in the opposite if it’s not in the peak of it’s performance.

The client will have to open a connection to a second domain instead of using the already existing connection to your one. Also the client will be forced to make a second DNS lookup to determine the CDNs IP.

Unsuitable for intranet applications
If you are developing a web-based intranet application then using a CDN will reduce performance. Instead of loading the files from a central location within your Ethernet based network you will be loading them from a much slower internet connection. Also your application will become dependent on your internet connection, therefore disabling the biggest advantage an intranet applications.

Offline development becomes painful
There may be times when you’ll have to develop your application offline for a variety of reasons. Whenever you go offline you must change you code to temporary use local files. This can be a real pain depending on the structure of your application.

JavaScript is cached anyway
JavaScript files are cached by the client’s browser. The only real benefit of using a CDN is for first time users. Are you willing to take the CDN risk just for the chance of increased speed on the single first pageview? I guess that depends a lot on your bounce rate but you get the point.

Conclusion
Before making the decision of using or not a public CDN take some time and make some performance tests of your own. Get YSlow and test loading speeds yourself. This is the only way to see if it makes sense to use a CDN.

Note: This is a post written on August 11, 2010 in my personal website, Bibakis.com.
It has moved here, mostly for archival.

My latest experiment. A redesign of my website using a literature magazine as a source of inspiration. The idea came to me while I was reading this magazine in a local cafe.I thought that the newspaper and magazine industries have been existing for decades now. Thousands of talented people have evolved the science of text layout in printed media. The web is not very different from that. If you think about it, both the web and printed press give you a flat surface where text is displayed.

What I see all over the web is a lot of people trying to create a great layout for their website or blog. I don’t recall seeing anyone looking back in the past. This has been done over and over before. Why reinvent the wheel ?

I used a two column layout to achieve better readability. Mainframe CSS framework handled the layout through the 960 grid system. On the server side, I moved from Drupal to a custom made system based on CodeIgniter which will power all the websites I’ll build from now on.