From Accessibility to Zope

On a couple of websites I’ve noticed an unusual style of side tab which oddly doesn’t seem to conform to the “tab” metaphor and which I find oddly baffling to use:

Jakob Nielsen offers 13 design guidelines for tabs but this is not covered. Not only does the the shape fail to convey these are tabs, the rounded corners appear to emphasise the deselected tabs over the selected one. It’s as if the selected tab is cut out from the set. Only a very slight change to the shape or shading would make these apparently negative tabs pop out, and usability would return.

Look, an actual website which uses Swatch Internet time! If you haven’t heard of Swatch Internet Time, it was Swatch’s bizarre marketing ploy from 1998 to unify time on the Internet by promoting a time system which was baffling to everyone the world over equally. With an @-sign so that everyone know’s it’s all Internet-y.  A sensible approach to i18n for time is included in the HTML5/Web Apps 1.0 draft. I’ll talk more about this spec soon.

In other news,  my desktop box has a dmesg entry stating that it inserted a leap second last night. Leap seconds are the extra seconds that get wedged in on the occasional 30th of June or 31st of December to correct UTC for the gravitational deceleration of the Earth. However, there was no leap second scheduled for last night. I have investigated a little bit but not deduced the cause. Apparently leap seconds are configured by ntpd using the kernel linux/timex.h API. NTP servers pass out announcements about leap seconds. Either my kernel or ntpd has its knickers in a twist or a low-stratum NTP server I’ve trusted has erroneously issued a leap second. Obviously this is pretty much immaterial but for some reason it really frustrates me.

Ha! For as long as I’ve had an account, MySpace has been plagued with messages saying “Sorry, an unexpected error has occurred”“. This happens quite a lot, probably every couple of minutes. Obviously, MySpace has unique load problems, but I’d be cautious that any application the size of MySpace written in ColdFusion as opposed to plain Java Servlets won’t just fall apart.

But now, the MySpace administrators have come up with a really clever solution. It appears they’ve changed the error message. It now reads “This user’s profile is down for routine maintenance”. Not an error at all!

It’s easy to tell this is a lie, because the errors appear when you aren’t viewing a profile, like when checking your mailbox or viewing bulletins: in fact, at the same frequency as the old one used to appear. Even if you buy it’s relevant somehow, profiles going down for maintenance ever couple of minutes sounds equally incompetent to a software engineer. Atomicity? Isolation? Hello?

Cineworld Cinemas’ website has been revamped again recently. It was not all that long ago that it was last done, but it has frequent had performance problems which leads me to believe that this is why it has been redone (more or less from scratch). I use our local Cineworld Cinema a lot. I saw 37 films there last year. This stuff matters a lot to me.

This makes it the third iteration in a row with severe accessibility and usability problems.

1. The earliest website I saw was static, but ugly with a large spinning raytraced star. This was their branding style at the time. Although it had weekly film times, you could not book online. You had to phone a telephone number which had a horrific voice recognition system to book. Film times were displayed in one weekly timetable, by cinema.
2. This was replaced by a much more contemporary website in their new branding style with AJAX drop-down menus for booking and searches for film times. This was clumsy and unintuitive; the menus looked exactly like tabs, and you were supposed to select one item from each tab/menu - cinema, film, showing, number of tickets - before moving on to book. The link I needed was a less prominent “What’s On” at the top of the page to get showing times for the week ahead. However there was no way to bookmark the showing times for my local cinema, because it was a form POST. Most people are unlikely to want to search for their nearest cinema every time they are thinking of going! As I mentioned, this site ground to a halt regularly.
3. The new one looks similar but works even worse. There are three somewhat cryptic tab/buttons called Cinemas, Films and Dates, plus a larger button saying “Find out what’s on here and book now” which doesn’t do anything. Cinemas takes you to a horrid Flash map to select region and cinema, but will then display showing times for today only: much less useful than a week’s timetable. But it can now be bookmarked. Films lists all films that are showing at Cineworld Cinemas. But not necessarily cinemas anywhere near me. Dates takes you to, via the Flash region selection map, to a screen which lets you pick one date, one time, and one cinema to see which films are on. It then ignores the cinema you chose and displays film times for all cinemas in the “region” (19 cinemas covering the whole of the South of England). The page title, for the whole site, is “Cinematheque1″. I can’t operate this site on my smartphone, perhaps because it doesn’t support the latest versions of Flash.

I just find it bizarre that their website should get so steadily worse, especially when Odeon was so strongly criticised for lack of accessibility.