Can you really build a great Web site without having the visitor click their mouse button? I think that depends on the goal of the site. Don’t Click It is virtual catnip for those of us who feel compelled to click their mouse. I spent about 4 minutes on this site and although I mentally prepared myself not to click, I accidentally clicked within the voting area, damn it!

I enjoy a good site which makes me rethink my perception of a great user-interface; however I’m not sure we are ready to give up the mouse button just yet. For me, the experience of using mouseover as an alternative to the mouseclick just isn’t acceptable for a multitude of reasons:

1. Accidental Movements – While reading text I often will move the mouse off the page to avoid the distraction when reading. In a mouseover-only interface, this causes the content I’m reading to change. In addition, when moving across these regions the interface is constantly changing. This type of interactivity feels more like a loss of control rather then user-empowerment.
2. External Sites – Mouseover-only interfaces really eliminate the ability to link to external sites from within the Web content.
3. Direct Linking – This interface type doesn’t give the user the ability to share a link location to a particular page or frame within the site.

For me the overall experience was like cotton candy; nice to try but not something I want everyday.

I’m a firm believer that Twitter has both a follow & tweet threshold which after crossed starts to diminish the effectiveness of the service. I believe it’s impossible for a user to adequately follow 300 plus Twitterers. If follows are posting a minimum of 4 tweets per day, that is over 1200 messages in one 24 hour period, far too many to create social dialog.

I smell fish anytime I see any Twitterer who is following 300+ users. Those individuals are likely “phishing for follows,” essentially following with the hopes to be followed. Arbitrarily, I believe a Twitterer starts to loose their ability to follow a community of users at around 150 follows, and it fully breaks down around 300 follows.

In just an informal survey of those I follow and respect, this number holds true.

@jasonfried – Following 55 / Followers 4643
@kevinrose – Following 122 / Followers 79,693
@randfish – Following 13 / Followers 3,213
@simplebits – Following 234 / Followers 9,781
@bfled – Following 172 / Followers 2,869
@copyblogger – Following 216 / Followers 9,532
@gruber – Following 252 / Followers 17,462
@davetaylor – Following 167 / Followers 3,656

While I’m having a hard time gathering numbers, I believe there is a certain number of Tweets which a follower will tolerate during the day. I’d love to see someone write an app to display the Tweets/Day on any user over a 30 day period. Anyone want to write that?

Speaking from my own personal experience if any of those I follow post more then 25 updates in one day, then I drop them like a bad habit. Not so much because I’m not interested but more to the fact that their constant updates begin to push down and out the others that I am following.

Regardless, I’m loving Twitter!

Today I posted this question to LinkedIN and I was floored by both the speed and the detail of the responses. Informally surveying the responses I’d say most are in favor of the HOME button call out in the main navigation.

Here’s a highlight of some of the responses.

• Sometimes clicking on the logo takes you home and sometimes it does not.
• I click on “home” links quite frequently, especially in bread crumbs.
• I personally don’t even look for a home button, though I do like breadcrumb navigation links.
• I got 4 blank stares from the very educated 30 to 50 year old normal web users in the room. “Clicking a site’s logo takes you to the homepage?” one of them asked me. Which was justification enough for me to keep the nav button.
• Maybe 20% of users are aware of the logo-as-home-link standard.
• On rare occasions I’ll use if it’s there.
• I don’t think everyone is aware that the logo goes to the site home and in any case one of the most frustrating things about many sites is that you have to *think* to navigate.

What to do?
Andy Bosselman said it best “look to the leaders”, so I did. I looked at usability leaders and well-known sites and the results were mixed.

Using It

AdaptivePath

Nielsen Norman Group

37Signals Basecamp

Adobe

There’s No Place for Home

Microsoft

Apple

Amazon

The Verdict
Clearly, there isn’t a standard that is widely accepted on the top-tier sites. In our case, for the last few years we really have restrained from using the HOME button unless the client specifically has requested it. Based on the responses and discussions within the office we’ve arrived at a decision. We’ll include the HOME option in the navigation as long as the navigation isn’t overcrowded. It just appears that the logo-clicking standard has a long way to go before it is widely accepted.

On a daily basis I spend anywhere from five minutes to three hours cursing and wishing ill will upon Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. Sometimes I do this silently under my breath and sometimes, to the dismay of my coworkers, I do it quite vocally. The reason? Internet Explorer 6 is an: insecure, slow, outdated, and non-standards compliant browser.

Let me illustrate this a bit further. If browsers were cars — IE6 would be an El Camino truck that’s been sitting outside in the rain for 20 years. Underpowered, ugly, basically useless in every scenario, and ready to explode and kill you at any moment.

Development of a website that supports IE6 adds about 15 to 20% of additional time to a project. And further, IE6 doesn’t support the everyday commonplace technologies of all other modern browsers. Meaning websites simply don’t function or look as good as they do in today’s browsers.

So here’s the question.

If today’s modern browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, IE7) are easy to get, run faster and safer than IE6, and are free. Why are some company IT departments still forcing users to browse on IE6? In general it seems to boil down to three big reasons.

1. The company has internal software that was built specifically to run on Internet Explorer.
2. The company manages a ton of machines and the workload/headache of upgrading them all to a newer version is too much.
3. The company and users feel comfortable on IE6 because they “know it”.

Here’s the problem. When we as an industry don’t embrace new enhancements in development it’s the client’s viewers and the client’s brand that suffers. We’re still building phenomenal web sites. But the straight truth of the matter is they’re not as good as they should be. The web has soooo much potential but it’s not being utilized. Why? Because we’re still supporting a legacy browser* that was released in 2001.

As I’ve said before. In order for things to get better sometimes you just have to make the jump. Other companies are already doing this. Apple, 37Signals, and Comedy Central just to name a few. Notice anything about those first two? They dramatically care about their user’s experience. So much so that they’re willing to sacrifice incompatibility for some users to benefit the rest of them**. Cheers to that, I hope we see it more.

^{* As long as companies ask us to support IE6 we will. We’re not afraid to share our thoughts on the browser landscape but we also recognize the need to compromise.
** I understand that some users don’t have control over what browser they use. For these poor souls I cry (really, I’m tearing up as write this).}

Google just recently posted an article talking about their opinion on dynamic vs. static URLs. In short, Google is saying that dynamically created URLs from a content management system, i.e. URLs that contain information talking to a database such as:

/media_review.php?user_id=25&article_id=315

should be left as is instead of rewriting them to look cleaner (static):

/media-review/bruce/dnc-ratm-concert/

Here’s a direct quote from their blog post on the topic:

Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That’s our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems. If you transform your dynamic URL to make it look static you should be aware that we might not be able to interpret the information correctly in all cases… …if you’re using URL rewriting (rather than making a copy of the content) to produce static-looking URLs from a dynamic site, you could be doing harm rather than good.

The problem is that Google seems to be making a recommendation on what is best for their search engine crawling and not what is best for the user or web usability in general. There is no debate, URL rewriting makes websites easier to use. It makes people understand what they will be looking at when they visit a link, and in general provides clearer information than dynamic URLs. For instance, here on our blog you can see all of my posts by going to http://blog.imulus.com/bruce the url is clear and easy to understand. If you want to see all my posts for a certain category you can do this http://blog.imulus.com/bruce/css. This functionality makes logical sense. Websites with extremely complicated URL calls can utilize rewriting to help their viewers better understand where they are on the site. And in regard to marketing materials — the time I see a company willing to use a url with ?id=237 at the end for a marketing or advertising campaign will be my first.

The fact is this, URL rewriting is an extremely useful tool (ironically Google’s blog post about dynamic rewrites uses rewriting for the URL). And while certain rewrite schemes may hide data that Google would like to parse, that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t use rewriting. The idea that a usable standard should be changed just to make Google’s web crawling better is ludicrous. Google throughout their history of search has continuously accommodated for changing website methods. By stating that URL rewrites are improper Google is taking a strike at one of the best standards to come out of Web 2.0. They’re suggesting a machine’s readability is more important than a human’s. And guess what: they’re dead wrong.