culann.com

Decisions, decisions

My only explanation for this post is that I got impatient. I just couldn’t wait ’til the deadline for entries closed, so here you go:

As I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve finished and submitted my Version 2 entry for March. The selected site this month was for the Cooperative Bug Isolation (CBI) Project, which is an effort by several computer science grad students (and their advisors) to gather and analyze data on how software fails in real-world scenarios. Linux users (and this is important) who visit the site can download specially-modified versions of some open-source applications (like the GIMP, Gaim, and Evolution) that monitor their own performance during usage and report back to the Project staff occasionally with the data.

I’m not going to go into a lot of detail on the process I used while building my entry - instead, I’d like to talk about a few of (possibly controversial) decisions I made during the process. It may be helpful to go take a look at the entry before I begin.

Back now? Good. Here we go!

IE Support

Without a doubt, the biggest decision I made on this entry was to avoid going through contortions to support IE. As the CBI Project is targeted towards Linux users - only they can participate - I felt this decision was justified. (Of course, this action could have been more justified had I been able to look at a breakdown of the site’s audience.)

One result of this choice is the use of <abbr> instead of <acronym> for acronyms and initialisms - IE doesn’t support <abbr> without hacks, so on most sites you’re forced into <acronym> (which isn’t always semantically correct). I was free to use padding, borders, width, and the like (though I in fact didn’t do much of that - most likely because I’m so used to developing for IE that coping with it is almost second-nature now). I didn’t even open the site in IE until it was done, and then only in IE6 (no IE5 for me!). It’s a freeing experience.

Accessibility

I made another important (though smaller-scale) negative decision on this entry; I chose not to include a skip navigation link at the top of the page. But before the accessibility wars start, let me explain the two factors about this homepage that led to the decision. First, there are only three navigation options at the top of the page (About, Downloads, and Contact). This is hardly the burden to tab through or listen to that some menus are, so from a frustration standpoint I don’t think this would be much of an issue. More importantly, however, the content on the homepage is static. Unlike my entry for the February edition of the competition (Project Gutenberg), there’s no News module or any other sort of content that would change all that frequently. After the first visit to the CBI homepage, then, I’m guessing people are much more likely to use the navigation than they are to read the content - so a skip navigation link wouldn’t be all that useful, even. Of course, if this assumption is wrong, a skip nav link could be added easily; I just didn’t see that one was necessary here (even while keeping an eye on the accessibility of the site).

Design

The final decision I want to discuss is one dealing with the overall design of the site. One of the people I showed the entry to asked me, “Why is it so simple? Where are the images?” I don’t have an extensive, well-considered answer for this. What I do have is an idea that the CBI site isn’t there to entertain - it’s there to inform, to guide people to the downloads section, to get the Project going. I couldn’t think of or find any (non-cliched) images that would contribute to that mission, and the ones I tried seemed to detract from the page more than they added. In the end, I left the page as it is now - spare, minimal, and (hopefully) effective.

So there you have it - a brief look into the mind of a so-so designer. Wish me luck in the contest, and good luck to all the other entrants!