One of my pet hates are lousy interfaces. I have just stumbled across a "beauty" ... at least a beauty in terms of its counter-intuitive nature.
Pop along to Marc Canter's blog .
Mouse one of the juvenile images at the top of the page. No I am not being insulting using the term juvenile - the images at the top of the page are of a juvenile male at various stages of development.
A piece of text appears below the image when an image is moused.
My intuitive response is to move to the text to click a link, since that is where the meaningful textual information is displayed. However, there is no link there. The link is the image which, of course, in its unmoused state has no logical indication what it links to.
I see no logical way to associate, for example, the picture of a 5 year old child with the notion that it links to the blog author's biography.
Why not have text links rather than non-meaningful images? That would be much simpler. Why not include inside a link the text produced by mousing an image? It seems to me that either change would significantly improve the counter-intuitive situation that presently prevails.
Posted by Andrew Watt at October 6, 2003 01:38 PMWhere does it say that text = links? Why is it intuitive to click on underlined text? I don't get that that's intuitive. I hereby challenge you to a public debate on the subject..... I don't buy that text = links and that images are not to be clicked on. In fact I believe it's exactly the opposite. So go hang out with Jakob Neilsen and leave my GRAPHICAL interfaces to the creative types - the folks who think images are to be clicked on.
Posted by: Marc Canter at October 7, 2003 11:12 PM