Re: Web keyhole: order form issues.

I sympathize with these complaints, and at one point I toyed with the idea
of introducing a "Sequential Access Keyhole" to complain about wizards and
other sequencing issues.  But that leads to arguments about what goes
where.  For example, in a tabbed dialog, how do we decide what goes under
which tab?  Should I complain if I want to access setting A under Tab 1 and
setting B under Tab 2 because I believe they should be on the same tab
page?

Rather than get dragged into that quagmire, I decided to stick with the
simple stuff.  I'll let content authors determine what goes on what page,
but I'll reserve the right to complain if what they put on a page doesn't
fit when it clearly could.

Not all UI problems are keyholes, and not all keyholes are UI problems.  In
terms of stupid interaction design, I'm just scratching the surface.
There's room for many more books here, though a huge hurdle is likely to be
that people doing UI design don't read, sigh.

Scott

At 09:44 AM 8/4/2003, Edith Maverick-Folger wrote:
>Why do talented people construct 3+ different web page screens, when catalogs only need that one pull-out page in the middle?  Reminds me of when we were setting up my college's new VAX, and the DEC guy opened up the box with the printer cable.  There must have been about 50ft of it for the ~5ft distance.  He smiled wanly and said that DEC sometimes got diarrhea.  
> 
>Not being able to see my whole order at once has caused me to use the wrong stored credit card number (old canceled), ship to the billing address, and probably at least a fourth of the time I bail out of an order altogether because I have identified questionable functionality and decide the whole thing might be buggy.  At least for me, scrolling through a large order form page wouldn't be an issue, but I would say that, as a type, they do not use the horizontal aspect of the computer screen well.
> 
>I don't take things on faith, and my memory is faulty.  I need to cross-check.  Backing and forwarding through applet rich secure screens plays hell with the stored data often.  Toss in expiring prices, as in your Expedia.com like sites, and you have a perfect recipe for a waste of time.
>
>Edith
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