Some Sites Are Irritating On Laptops

Web sites should be designed so they are easy to use on all browsers, on all platforms, at all resolutions. But many sites are very irritating to use on a laptop.

The biggest problem is wasted space at the top of a page. A good example of this is mapquest.com vs. maps.google.com.

Along the very top, Google maps has a small line of text links and the search box, and about 3/4 of the page is a map. No scrolling required. Brilliant, since that's why you go to a map site, right?

On the other hand, I see nothing on Mapquest other than their huge logo and buttons across the top, some links that take you off the map page, several search boxes, and the top inch of a map. Plus a massive ad to the right, which literally takes up a quarter of the screen. So I type a location, but when the result comes up, I have to scroll down to see the map. Then scroll back up to search again. Then scroll back down. This wouldn't matter on a home computer, with a mouse and bigger monitor, but when I'm using my laptop in a car or other awkward place (the only reason I ever got a laptop), I don't have time to screw around scrolling up and down for no good reason. I'm not lounging around on a couch like some college kid. I want the map.

Another problem with some sites is when you have a page you sign into, and the cursor is NOT automatically in the text box. So you have to click the cursor into the box before you can type anything. Go to Twitter or Facebook and the cursor is waiting for you in the sign-in box. But go to Compete.com and there's no cursor at all. This site has 3 boxes where you type sites to compare, but no cursor anywhere. Pressing the TAB key does nothing, the cursor simply doesn't exist until you click within a text box. This can be solved with one line of code.

Now the unfortunate part of all this... I noticed that some sites I've built are pretty irritating to use on a laptop as well. When designing sites on a 22" monitor, it's easy to get lost in that environment and forget that few people have such a big display.

I went back through all the sites I've built over the past few years and reconsidered some things. I got thinking - how many visitors would be using laptops? This might vary depending on the site, and analytics show it's a small percentage of visitors, but I decided to err on the side of caution and make some simple changes.

I changed some sites so the header area was smaller, and more useful content was shown immediately. I made some text bigger, some smaller. Some navigation buttons were moved. Navigation buttons that work better down the left side are now nearer the top and visible without scrolling. These changes made a few sites easier to use on a laptop, but they also made them cleaner and more immediately useful on any size monitor. If you are a designer, I encourage you to use a small laptop display in your development, it's a good tool to help keep sites as simple and useful as possible for the end user.

An Inevitable Look At Google Wave

Google seems convinced that real-time communication will change the world. As opposed to the current, and absolutely intolerable, 3-second delay in uploading blog posts, emails, or tweets.

(Some of my friends have actually discovered something called the "telephone", which is truly brilliant for "real-time" communication. I've even heard tales of multiple people using this device to chat at the same time! Don't look up "Skype" or "iChat" unless you are prepared to be amazed.)

- OMG, they're having a live chat!? That's MAGIC!
- Build your own blog... you mean like Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr, and a dozen others? Amazing!
- Embed stuff like videos, pictures, links, and feeds into your blog? Uh... you mean like Facebook, and Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr, and a dozen others? Incredible!
- Share photos? Sure, I'll believe that when I see it! Wow, you people must be on drugs!
- Real-time collaboration tools? You mean like the business software that has been around for years, that only a tiny fraction of the market ever has, or ever will, use? Genius!

Sites like Plaxo and Friendfeed already aggregate your content from multiple other sites. Almost all of the blog and social sites I've joined have asked for a dozen other logins during the signup process, so I could do everything from that site without logging into the others. All my blogs, messages, pictures, video, audio, and friend updates from all over the web can all be organized by any of these sites. Kind of like Wave, except they really exist.

Pretty soon Google will "develop" something that is simply Skype, but they'll have a big press release, call it Google SpeakBonanza, and tell everyone it's groundbreaking for some reason.

Here's why I think Wave will suck by trying to cram everything you could ever do into one window:

1) If your browser crashes, everything you are doing crashes all at once. How dumb is that?
2) It takes away the freedom of being able to move any window anywhere on your desktop (two desktops in my case).

It won't make anything faster, or easier, or safer, or cheaper, or more fun. I honestly don't understand what they're thinking. It's lame, limiting, and a step backwards compared to what already exists.

Or maybe there's something I'm not understanding. We'll see what happens over the coming months.