CSSquirrel A look at web development and web design by Kyle Weems

Today’s comic, featuring Jeff Croft in a fictional scenario where he’s rebuilt into a duller, less spontaneous being by Jakob Nielsen after a tragic karaoke accident, is something of a lighthearted poke at the death of spontaneity in the name of… well, I’m not sure what, exactly. (It also guest stars Bruce Lawson as the HTML5 Doctor)

The sequence of events that inspired this micro-drama is as follows: Firstly, Jakob Nielsen decided to talk about iterative designs in tweets (or as he likes to dress them up: “stream-based postings”). He guides us through a process where in only five easy steps he has drained the blood from a sample tweet, leaving a dried husk that will rise in thirteen days to join the legions of humorless drones that find the useit.com design both fascinating and useful.

After this, Jeff Croft cuts through the meat of Jakob’s ‘findings’ with a tweet that probably did not require five iterations: “An article by Jacob Nielsen on how to take all the spontaneity and humaneness out of your tweets in five easy steps…”

Granted, at least one iteration more might have helped in his case to get Jakob spelled right.

The fact is, Jeff hit it on the head. If you’re writing down your tweets and re-writing them repeatedly to maximize some sort of marketing message, you’re not tweeting. I’m not sure what you’re doing, but I’ll bet that most people that see the message can see what it is, canned artificial crap. You don’t have a medium of micro-messages just to waste all the time and effort of a proper e-mail or blog post on a single sentence. Spending that effort on the message not only is contrary to the purpose of the medium, it’s counterproductive when the end result is what Nielsen presents, complete with shouting-style caps, months in parentheses, and different wording to make it “punchier.”

I’m going to say Jakob Nielsen does not know what “punchier” actually means. If he did, useit.com might not look like a canary got stuck in a mid-90’s school administration newsletter.

Tweet how you like, but if you spend a half-hour at a time maximizing your tweets in some sort of business formula, don’t be surprised when people stop paying attention to your massaged marketing attempts.

Sometimes I find myself participating in a discussion or a debate that sounds like a theoretical exercise involving recreational intoxicants. The unfortunate part of such topics is that not only are the participants sober, they’re also well-informed.

As we’re about to learn, being wise and making wise choices do not always go hand in hand.

Today’s comic imagines Jakob Nielsen and Bruce Schneier intentionally exposing themselves to danger in a gladiatorial arena (overlooked by a Caesar-esque Dave Shea) with the predictable results. Sadly, this scenario reflects reality (with a little editorial excess) in a way that shocks me.

Let’s lay out the recent events.

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Last week I spent a good deal of my time at Mindfly trying not to die from the heat wave that hit Bellingham. Tucked along the coast in northwest Washington, Bellingham is usually a rainy, temperate place. When the sun came out for a week straight and cooked the town into the 80’s, our studio’s air conditioner was hard pressed to compensate.

(For those of you from hotter climes, I’m aware how weak this must seem. My town of origin, Redding, CA, easily tops 110 during the height of summer. However, it’s really hot compared to the local average.)

So perhaps I was suffering from heat stroke when I thought I heard a co-worker championing in conversation the use of blue, underlined text for all hyperlinks on all web sites. Anything else, they assured, was difficult, if not impossible, for your average Internet user to see or use. Without the vibrant blue (always backed up by purple for visited links) and the noble underline, these commoners of the web would be lost, incapable of navigating from page to page.

Balderdash. Poppy cock. Bullcrap. Etc.

Somewhere near the dawn of time, when the World Wide Web was a mewling infant homunculus suckling at the breast of Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, I’m sure all twelve people capable of browsing the twenty pages available on the web were barely able to comprehend the idea of a hyperlink. Blue, underlined text on a stark white background was likely the only thing saving their minds from imploding in horror at the thought of some elder gods prowling the phone lines and dragging their souls through the 14.4k modems they’d spent hundreds of dollars to purchase.

I’m positive, however, that in the years since then that the average netizen has come to expect a richer media experience. They may have even “tweeted” (and giggled when it first happened) about a funny thing they saw, and uploaded a picture from their phone of this very event. They’ve watched cats play on pianos via YouTube and wept in silent awe as they realized that they lived in the best of possible worlds.

If a hyperlink had the audacity to be a shade of orange, I think they might just be able to pick it out of the surrounding text enough to click on it. If, instead, the bright blue links were bold instead of underlined (on a page where only links received such treatment) users of the web just might posses the ability to tell that clicking on aforementioned text would result in them navigating to a new page instead of providing them with a can of tuna.

I choose to believe this because I have the honesty to admit that most people are in fact not total idiots. Yes, we wail and gnash our teeth at trying to help clients understand what a paragraph tag is. Sure, we’re hard-pressed to not swallow our own tongues when explaining for the fifth time to our grandparents how to send email. But to claim that there is only one way to mark a hyperlink in a way that a peer of the web is capable of recognizing is exactly like saying that every non-developer is a complete moron who is incapable of telling that a peach is a fruit because it doesn’t look exactly like an apple.

Today’s comic places Jakob Nielsen in a hypothetical scenario that illustrates my disdain of the position that he’s advocated in the past on this issue: If you want it to be usable, it needs to be blue (or purple if visited) and underlined. Period.

There’s a special kind of hubris associated with this sort of statement. I’ll accept that blue, underlined hyperlinks are easy to spot. I’m also going to say that green, underlined hyperlinks (on a page that lacks green, underlined text elsewhere) would also work as effectively. Or perhaps blue, bold text. I’m guessing that underlines generally help, but I think ultimately any combination of highly visible traits that exist only on the link text and stand out from the non-link text is going to do the job.

Why does this issue rile me up so badly? Because I’m tired of old wives tales of Internet wisdom on how a page must be made. Especially when these limit our ability to explore the cornucopia of designs or features that we can make on the modern web. Such wives tales that annoy me include:

“Your site’s content? Well, it’d better be short, because people won’t read long texts on a screen.” Tell that Amazon as they laugh like madmen while they sell Kindles like hotcakes.

“Text needs to be near-black on a white background.” Right, except when the opposite is easier on the eyes for certain applications (like Mozilla’s online editor Bespin.)

Someone’s going to be a wit and jump on the fact that this site’s links are blue and underlined. I chose the color because it matches the sky in the header, and I liked the feel I got from tying that color into the rest of the site. But take a look at Twitter or YouTube and tell me that you can’t find the links even though they lack underlines. Go to Apple’s site and tell me the menu isn’t clearly a menu even though it’s not blue. A well conceived design can communicate to the “average” person without having to assume it’s being used by idiots.

The web has grown up. Its users are growing with it. Let’s put aside the juice boxes and start treating them like adults.