Showing posts with label usability. Show all posts
Showing posts with label usability. Show all posts

Saturday, October 23, 2021

Fixing a novice document design issue

When it comes to document design, it's an interest of mine and I'm passionate about it. I think of how useful the document is to the end user when I'm either creating or updating a document.

A few months ago, when I looked at a document that a fellow colleague was working on, she had repeated the service that she was documenting in the title of every page. I asked her why she did that. She told me that her team lead, the diva, told her to.

Ugh. That's poor document design. It's pretty clear that you're in a document talking about the service. Why have it as a prefix for the title of each page that you have? You're taking the user read the same prefix over and over. Is that practical or helpful? No.

Her argument was that it was a best practice from a previous solution that she worked on. Um, no. Your page titles needs to be meaningful, but not monotonous and redundant.

My manager sent her a request to fix this issue in multiple documents. 

I'm such an advocate for the end user. This person wants answers immediately when looking at a document. It's not happening with unnecessary fluff.

My colleague had brought up this issue, but the diva was adamant that she was right. The issue is that the diva doesn't come from a writing background and it shows here. Our colleague does. I do, too.

The other sad thing is that she has been a writer on our team for seven or eight years now. She hasn't caught on.

Sunday, May 31, 2020

Labels in the new Blogger interface is horrible!

I am still trying to get used to the new Blogger interface. On the whole, I like it. However, what I dislike is the horrible usability of labels. Sometimes, it works when I reuse existing labels. When I introduce new labels and select existing ones, I get an error message and can't save my post.

My workaround is to go back to the old interface and add labels like a normal human being. It works well.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who is frustrated over this feature. I found this support post, which recommends a workaround where you don't select the labels when you are writing a new post. Rather, you save your post, go to the Posts section, click the tag icon for the post that you want, and select existing or add new labels there.

Do I like this feature in the new interface? No. It seems ridiculous to offer adding labels while authoring the post and it doesn't work. Why does it need to be an afterthought by going to a different screen?

I like change, but not when it makes the usability worse than it was.