The Nielsen OK/Cancel dilemma solved
As this blog is merely a pretext to fill a web design portfolio website with regular content, I suppose I should knuckle down and write something related to the day job.
Jakob Nielsen, as well as being a good candidate for a Bond villain, is, according to many, the world’s leading authority on website usability, and as such I reckon he’s a good egg.
Contrary to what you would expect his website isn’t – in my humble opinion – very easy to use. The trouble is there’s very little sense of hierarchy, or use of visual clues. One of the golden rules of usability is that sticking to conventions tend to make things easier for the user, and he doesn’t make his navigation look different enough to ordinary content.
Also, despite writing a regular column on web usability, it’s infuriating that he does not publish a feed of this column, thus making his website more unusable still for RSS reader user s (which surely make up a higher percentage of his readership, given the subject he writes about appeals to people with an interest in all things good and webby). (Fortunately, somebody has used their initiative and put it right for him with this feed).
Anyway, one of his latest columns, on whether to put ok to the left of cancel or vice versa on web forms (the dilemma is that non web applications on apple put the buttons the other way round to windows) got me thinking about whether it’s possible to detect he operating system of a visitor, and change whether the buttons are floated left or right, depending on the OS, which would eliminate the problem.
And it turns out it is possible. One day maybe I’ll follow this post up with some example code.
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Tags: alertbox, feed, float, jakob nielsen, ok cancel, operating systems, usability
Hey, so far I have worked out that the man in the photo is Robert Osband, he is a 58-year-old living in Titusville Florida.
He created the area code for the Kennedy Space Centre which is 321. An idea Jeb Bush called ” A simple, bold idea to reccognize Florida’s Space Industry with this Area Code”.
The photo was taken in 1975 shortly after he returned from a spacesuit sale in Delaware.
There have been about 20 found that I know of so far, normally sellotaped to lamposts or the floor.
Anyone else works out anymore info I’m all ears.