[Sigia-l] Facets, Flash, and Fun

[Christopher Fahey [askrom]]

Travis wrote about <http://iokio.com/>:
> Nice, but it would have been better 
> if the data visualization experts had
> thought to put scrollbars on the screen, 
> so that I could read all their text 
> (or find the camera demo) without 
> resizing my browser.


Disabling the scrollbars seems does indeed like an odd thing to do at
first, but I think it makes sense for this site, and perhaps it makes
sense for a lot of rich-interface applications like this. (I would guess
that they thought about disabling the scrollbars quite carefully after
evaluating the site with and without the scrollbars.)

Think about it: It's probably better usability-wise to require users of
this site to resize their browser window *once* during a visit to their
site, rather than requiring the user to scroll up-and-down on every page
over and over again just to be able to use the interface properly.
Scrolling is good for pages where you don't need to see the whole
interface at one time, like text pages, spreadsheets, and long forms.
But for interfaces where the whole interface is dynamically responding
to the user's actions (changing the price range in the camera demo
causes the bottom row of cameras to change, for example), scrolling is
pretty absurd when a quick resize would improve the experience
immeasurably.

You can actually check the camera finder in a scrollable window using
Joe10's link. Make your browser shorter or skinnier and you'll see how
useless it is:
 <http://www.iokio.com/demos/camerafinder/>

You might argue that they should have designed the site to work with
scrolling and to not rely on dynamic user interfaces with rich
application-like features. I wouldn't. I like what they did.

-Cf

[christopher eli fahey]
art: http://www.graphpaper.com
sci: http://www.askrom.com
biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com