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Some usability nits that grind my gears

When I listen to music on Windows Media Player, it has a volume slider. This slider is apparently different from the volume control that the two buttons on the top row of my keyboard do. And of course, both two are separate from the volume control knob of my speakers. At times this can be slightly annoying.

I wonder who it was who originally came up with the idea in Blogger blog templates that the date field is actually a permalink to the post. When I first started blogging with my first Finnish blog in February 2003, it took me more than two months to understand this convention in other people's blogs so that I became able to create links to their posts. Naturally I had assumed that the post date link would take you to a list of all posts made during that day, instead of being a permalink to that particular post. This silly and illogical convention annoys me so that even though I still use one of the Blogger standard templates, I modified it by hand so that the post title works as the permalink to the post. Typepad and other similar blogging services seem to offer much better templates in the sense so that the post title works as permalink. This is nice, because the post title is easy to see, locate and hit with the mouse, as opposed to some teeny tiny 6-point font date field at the bottom of the post, or even worse, a single pound sign or other similar character. Fitt's law, anyone?

And while we're at it, whatever blogging service you are using, please make the blog title itself on every single archive or post page to be the link that takes you back to the main page, instead of having some separate "Back", "Go home" or "Main page" link hidden somewhere in the blog sidebar. It's always a hassle to try to find it, or usually simply not even try but manually move the focus to the address field and erase everything from the blog URL after the hostname.

Blogger automatically organizes posts into weekly or monthly archives (and come on, nobody writes so much that his posts should be organized into weekly archives, which in most blogs become a Chinese water torture of two or three posts each), whereas some other blogging services organize the post simply into "pages". There doesn't seem to be an established consensus whether the user should click "previous page" or "next page" to move to the next page that contains older posts. This annoys me when I find some interesting blog and try to read through its pages, since when I have read the interesting posts on that page and reach the bottom of the page, my short-term memory has already forgotten which way this particular blog works, and then my wrong click takes me back to the page that I read before this page. Many blogs that are organized into pages also don't seem to understand that the 99.9% of the time the user wants to move to the next page, but this link is as small as the links to individual page numbers. Which, by the way, are completely useless in blogs in which "next page" takes you to older posts, since the contents of each page change whenever a new post is added to the blog.

One of my favourite annoyances is when a blog uses almost the same colour for unvisited and visited links, so that you have to look really close to see if you should click some link. This is such an excellent passive-aggressive "screw you" to the readers that I can't even think of anything more devious. It's like the blog designer is telling you that he fully understands the difference between visited and unvisited links and can use it, but he cannot be bothered to make this distinction actually useful, instead dangling the candy above your head just so that you can't reach it.

1 comment

how did you permalink post titles?

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