Category: Journal

I’m suffering from a lack of time at the moment. Weekends seem to disappear in a blur, and the working week is almost over by the time I get a handle on things. Not sure what I’m doing wrong, but I need to slam the brakes on somehow and spare some time for stuff I want to do.

I have never been a genius at time-management, even getting a Palm personal organizer for my birthday last year has failed to cure what is a fairly seat of the pants life style. Not that I do much on a daily basis that I’d consider to be frantic. I just seem to run out of time and I cant quite explain why.

I’m thinking that a lot of it hinges on how tired I am. I spent most of last week in a daze due to insomnia, so even when I did have a couple of spare hours in the evening, I didn’t feel motivated to do anything other than sit in front of the TV. This week I’m going to try and take control by making myself go to bed at a sensible time. Perhaps a routine would help too, like, if I decide that Monday night was jogging night, Wednesday night is five-a-side night and Friday night is pub night, I can do the other stuff on the spare days in between.

Hmmm… but what about computer night, games night, skateboarding night… and other stuff. Wow – this is harder than it first seems.

I just received an e-mail from Paul Sowden of idontsmoke.co.uk which leaves me slightly dumbstruck. I was mistakenly under the impression that if you kept a weblog and you spent every single day on your soap box, that you actually invited comment from your audience.

Paul said on his site that he thinks that lower case stuff is “so 2001”. So I sent him a mail – and I swear I was just having a bit of fun, pointing out that his page title and a couple of other parts of his page were in lower case.

I wont paste his reply here, as it’s just… *sigh*, you know – I really should have guessed that someone so anal couldn’t possibly have a sense of humour. What the hell is the world coming to, I wonder? Answers on a validating e-mail, please.

Anyhow, I have been visiting Paul’s site every day now for months – I think I found it last October or something when he was mentioned on ALA. But over the last week or two he’s made some pretty rash remarks and my guage on the value of his comments has swung to the negative during that time. Fortunately I’ve found another journal that contains similar thoughtful content… but without the holey-er than thou’ posturing. Guess you’re back down to two visitors a day, Paul.

At present I’m building an intranet site which will be used for displaying quite a lot of wordy content. The core of the site is an area which is displaying the equivalent of 80+ Word documents (I know because some poor bugger had to copy and paste them into the admin system I wrote). While designing all the forms and thinking of the layout of buttons, text fields and the like, I started paying a lot of attention to how far the mouse pointer has to travel as you narrow down the information.

For instance, I added a “view” icon to the right hand side of the list of documents, so as the user scrolls down the page they don’t have to move the pointer too far from the scroll bar to the view icon. I was asked if the icon was necessary, as you can also view the document by clicking on its title. Maybe because I was talking to managment (or maybe because I was being a smart arse!) I answered that having the icon “reduced the mouse miles for the user.”

At the time I was more pleased that I’d gotten away with throwing in some reasonably clever BS than I was with the implications of the term. However, further down the line I have had nothing but positive feedback regarding the positioning of the icons and other items on the screen. That little boost has made me concentrate on the “mouse miles” aspect even more – I’m paying more attention to far the mouse has to travel around the screen in order for the user to progress. Taking it one step further, when someone clicks on either a submit button or a link to jump to another page, the mouse pointer will be left sitting on screen roughly where it was when they clicked. So it makes sense to arrange the next screen with that in mind.

Some of the above might seem obvious and common sense, but it’s amazing how easy it is to create aesthetics at the expense of the interface. The best thing about it is that the end user wont even notice for the most part – and that’s exactly what making a site more usable is about.