Wanted to share a confusing search box.

If you're working down the form, and if you want to type a postcode, then the chances are that you'll type the postcode into the Location box, as it suggests that box should have a Location OR Postcode. I know this because that's what I did, and that's what the other person I asked to try did.

There's really no need for two different boxes for the same piece of information (search location).

Now, if you combine them into a single box, and rename Permanent/Contract (the only two other options in that drop-down) as 'Any,' then you've got a tidy little search box with no confusion.

"For every reaction, give your user an action"

I just got a surprise action! And one so awesome that I had to share.

Rdio is now in the UK (it's like Spotify, but without Facebook sitting on the sofa uncomfortably stroking its legs while you're trying to listen to your stuff and straining to not notice), I signed up, and as is the tradition of the day, they sent me an email to confirm my address.

Now, I could have typed my Gmail account into my browser address bar, but, guess what? I didn't have to! Someone at Rdio recognised that they could save me time by writing a tiny piece of code that realised I had a gmail account, and gave me a direct and clickable link to the aforementioned account. Huzzah!

They wrote a piece of code so insignificant that I'm surprised it wasn't cut by a project manager at some stage.  That line of code will never generate income, but it made me so happy that instead of clicking on it, I'm here telling you lot about Rdio.

You should all make lovely things like this in your websites. Ignore your project manager, or that grumpy developer who only wants to do the bare minimum, sneak them in.

Have a look for yourself https://www.rdio.com

This kind of thing makes me want to give up working on Teh Internets and do something else instead http://socialcommercetoday.com/uk-pub-chain-ditches-web-for-facebook-traffic-up-2000-percent/

(Note - What follows is a completely hypothetical scenario, made up in my mind)

Imagine you are a tiny café. You have some lovely customers and use all of the main social networks to amplify your voice and build up your brand.  Well done.

You then decide that you are so all about the social stuff that you move your entire web presence to Facebook.

In six months time, a fast-food chain is looking around for a new, real-life, location . To find where hungry people with spare cash are, they ask Facebook for a list of popular establishments such as yours that are far enough away from their own existing restaurants.

Once they've settled on your area, they say to Facebook, "seeing as we give you £15m a year in advertising, give us a list of every customer of Tiny Café Ltd.  Can we buy some targeted ads and vouchers for those users?"

So, here are my problems with moving your web presence to Facebook.

1. Do you really want Facebook to know more about your customer database than you do?
2. Do you trust Facebook with those details? 
   
3. Many people refuse to use Facebook. Are you okay locking-out those potential customers?

There are many benefits to using a social network as your base CRM, but before you make the jump, please remember that it's not as free as it looks.  If you don't have enough money to buy into Facebook's data, then you're potentially the one giving them profiles and patterns to sell to someone else.

So, I spent ages carefully crafting and tweaking my words and phrases - far longer than I'd like to admit.

When I forwarded it on, I was delighted to receive this response from a lovely person at the on-line job board...  someone who clearly loves the word, "now."

I have just finished posting your ad now and I am now building your Company Home page now! 

  That has to be the BEST job ad I have seen, quality!! Loved it!

I really can't believe that someone is trying to sell their company with, "unless [...] then don't bother applying." Why would you do that?  It makes the company, and the recruiter, look arrogant and dismissive and I'd hate to be involved in a project, never mind a career, with whoever put this together.

A job vacancy notice is a very underrated, but vital document in making sure that you bring in the best-fit staff. Make sure its tone compliments your company culture.

When I sign up for a throw-away site, I have a batch of passwords that I like to use.  When I can use one of those passwords, I can sail through a form and hit [register] at the bottom.  It's painless.

But I find that more and more companies are dictating their own password patterns to me. And any time I've raised this frustration on Twitter, a few of my peers have agreed that they've abandoned a form because of the "your password must contain 3 capital letters, 4 symbols, a space, and a smiley face ☺" stumbling block.

By all means let users know that they password is not strong enough.  Give them a link to a page of further reading and evidence should they wish to read the rationale.  But, whatever you do, don't stop someone from signing up to your inconsequential site, just because their preferred password combination doesn't match the one your developers prefer.*  Modern-thinking suggests that it's better to have a sentence as a password, than eight randomly generated numbers, letters and punctuation marks.

So, here's an idea.

Suggest to the user that, in your opinion, their password isn't strong enough, but let them overrule your warning.  I'm old enough to decide to take the risk.

*Unless you're a bank, or other institution where security is absolutely paramount, obviously.

I really should wrap this UI gem with a suitable pre- and post- amble. 

But I can't, the sheer WTF-ery of the thinking behind this message breaks my head in two when I try to think about it.

I gave it a week or so to get used to, but i'm afraid that I'm not a fan of the new BBC Sport website.

Frustratingly I can't put my finger on any big reason, it just seems like they were chasing a bigger picture, while neglecting to take care of the minor details.

For instance, take a look at the middle column on the left.  I can see what they've tried to do, sports stories look to be in a hybrid order of chronological importance.  But it's clumsy, the repetition of category names really clutters up the menu and makes the part of the page that's supposed to be scannable, un-scannable.

If I'm a football fan, it's hard work to scan down, stopping at each and every football story. It's really hard work.

My recommendation to them would be to group stories by sport/category. Instantly you can see a huge difference in the scanability of the list.

I have just received an email from an online shop, and (as always) it's their proper, biggest, ever, really, this, time, sale.

So when I get to their site, I want to see all of their discounted Xbox 360 games.

Which one do I click?

As a customer, do I care about the difference between "All Special Offers" and "On Sale"?  Come to think of it, why are "Fast Dispatch" or "Game Highlights" even in the "Special Offer" section?

I have no idea. No idea at all.

If you are in charge of big sites, be careful that your navigation menus don't turn feral.  Make sure you take some time now and again to review your content, where it lives, its labels and how the user finds what they are after. 

When I track my parcel, I can see that it's "Awaiting Payment of Charges"

So, how do I pay the charges....?

Turns out, Parcelforce

1. Send me a letter through the post. That should probably get here tomorrow
2. That letter contains a code. 
   
3. I can then take that code, go back on-line and type it into a different page on their website.
   
4. I pay the customs charges on-line.
5. Then they will approve the letter to be delivered
6. It's shipped from their hub to my house.

So, I have to wait on a letter telling me that I've got to go on-line... despite the fact that I'm already on-line and looking at the exact package.  Hopefully I'll get my letter tomorrow.  But even then it's going to be a minimum of 2 days completely unnecessary delay.

When you build on-line tools, there is little point if you are not going to consider your users.  When I build tools, I always try to consider this rule...

"For every reaction, make an equal action"

If you are going to give your user an important piece of information, please try to think about their possible reactions and cater for a sensible range of the actions they'd want to perform. 

So, here's an idea Parcelforce (and even though I hear that you're going to charge me £13 on top of the customs amount for this nonsense, you can have it for free).

I recently launched a new site, a league table of Twitter follower for official football club feeds.  The site gives users the ability to send a tweet that says things like...

Clyde at @clydefcwebsite have the #13 most followed official football club twitter feed in Scotland - http://folos.im/category/38

If a follower of that person clicked on the link in the tweet, they'd arrive at a sub-category of the entire folos.im database, and in this case would only see Scottish clubs.

From looking through Twitter comments and searching for blogs online, I spotted that some people thought that sub-category was the entire site.  So I needed to add a "Reset Filter" button after the search box to show that the current view was not the bigger picture.

I added this  (I don't particularly like the phrase, "Reset Filter" and I'll probably change it soon).

But, obviously, I didn't want the button to appear when no category has been selected.  I could have used Javascript, but remembered an easier method.

Here's the HTML for that input box and button.

What I wanted to do was hide the A tag when the value of the input box was empty.  And here's a lovely piece of CSS to do that...

#filter input[value=""] ~ a{display: none; }

So, if an input element has an empty value attribute, then all sibling (~) A tags should not be displayed.

In the example above, the value attribute of the input element is "Scotland" and not "", so there is no match and the A tag is not hidden.

But when you look at the parent category

And here's the HTML for the parent category page.  Value of the input box is "", so the A tag is hidden.

Lovely.

Probably doesn't work in IE6 and IE7, and might be buggy in IE8.  But I don't care. They'll just have to see the "Reset Filter" button on all the time - they'll live.