oh the fun that is the internet

Monday, January 05, 2004, at 01:32PM

By Eric Richardson

I don't know how long it's been since I've made changes to the look of this blog as I've made over the course of the last few days. Today another small addition. Entries older than the first day are now collapsed by default, and you have to expand them to see the full text. The idea is that this makes it easier to scan the entries and also allows me to have more posts on the page without making it a mile long and unwieldy.

User Interface work is always interesting because you never really know how people are going to come at what you're doing. The preconceptions and style they bring to browsing your site determine how they're going to use it, and you can't really predict that fully. Read on to get more of my UI thoughts.

When I first added expand/collapse the indicator was an arrow, as it was on the site I borrowed the idea from. It either pointed to the right (collapsed) or down (expanded).

This made sense to me, but not to everyone.

I showed my mom the site, asking her if she would know what to do if she happened across it. She wouldn't. To her, the right-pointing arrow was just a bullet point.

I've now switched to using plus and minus signs, which seem to me to be a bit more unambiguous. Just because two concepts can do the same thing doesn't mean they're functionally interchangable.

Also, unlike the site I originally liked so much, I thought it would be helpful to show a bit of the post text, so that the reader can see that there really is more there. I decided to emphasize that I was cutting the text by running a dashed border halfway down a line of text. It's subtle, but it emphasizes the disconnect. This I think really works well.

I'm interested to hear what people think of any of this.