Apr 21

Blocking ‘unsafe browsers’

User Experience No Comments »

I remember back in the day when I was on the UE team for Citibanks c2it, a now defunct Paypal competitor, how we bent over backwards to secure our application without annoying and discouraging our users. We used to debate endlessly the minutia of browser support and security but the mandate was always the same. Support all browsers and get people using the software at all cost. Some who have met me may remember my joke about our support model being one where we had to design and code to support the users who found a computer in a ditch, connected it to the interwebs and wanted to apply for a Citi card or service. I was half-joking.

The wheel has turned and Paypal has abandoned the old web standby that we should build to support all browsers or at least degrade gracefully. In short, Paypal will block the service from users that are still using outdated browsers. It was rather surprising to me to read this but I think there must come a time when we must cut loose from outmoded concepts and technologies for the best interests of our users, our businesses and our practice.

Your thoughts?

Link to BBC Article
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7354539.stm

Apr 21

Joomla = Meh

User Experience, general 1 Comment »

Here we go again with the website thing.

I have discovered that after wrangling with interaction design and usability all day I am not at all interested in doing more of the same when I get home. However I do like having a web presence. As such, whatever I use for web publishing needs to be super simple or I just won’t do it. Imagine that, a usability engineer advocating simplicity. Shocking, isn’t it?

So the last iteration of humanpackmule.com was in Joomla. Granted Joomla is rather powerful CMS structure and yes I still use it for my Koi club website (www.pkwsonline.com) but the admin tools are clunky and a bit of a pain to get setup. Once you learn it it goes rather smoothly but the ramp was a bit higher than I liked. Mostly due to the fact that once I get home my motivation to continue working drops considerably. Available themes are ok, but it will take more effort than I want to expend to learn the structure to code my own themes. I found myself just finding themes and making do by tweaking.

In short, I am just like the users I design for.

This leads me to Wordpress. I’ve dabbled with it and a simple blogging tool appears to fit the bill. We’ll see how this goes.