Web dev

Bad and good UI

It’s shame how wonderfull features can be diminished by junior-high-grade mistakes.

I visited today new MS Office web site and got the following warning at the top:

Warning: You are viewing this page with an unsupported Web browser. This Web site works best with Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 or later or Netscape Navigator 6.0 or later. Click here for more information on supported browsers.

So I followed the link to page where they practically repeat the same information above.

I clicked the “No” button at the bottom and was pleased to see wondefull use of DOM - form has changed to allow instant user feedback. But then, when I clicked on “Next” button, I got Javascript error saying that Mozilla couldn’t find the form with rather obscure name (it has : in the middle of it).

No feedback from my side then.1 Average user will see no way out of this situation and will leave the site.

An excellent user-interaction followed by developer error. Sigh.

Learn from other’s mistakes.

1 OK, I lie. This error was eating me somewhere in the back of my head, so later I went to this page in IE and reported it.