Simon Griffiths Blog

Since the update to mobileme on my mac I have been noticing more and more ‘qwirkyness’ on my MacBook. It started in the Mail app, but now seems to happen when ever I access the net.

Safari only loads part of the page and I keep having to refresh to get the complete info and iTunes errors when I try and download podcasts. Yesterday it actually kernal paniced.

The bit that is worrying is that I have only changed one thing recently and that is mobileme and the associated updates that needs. The fact that it is on accessing the net also makes me suspect mobileme.

So here’s the weird thing. There seems to be mo way of turning mobileme off independantly of your Internet connection. My only choice looks like it might be an operating system reinstall, as I have pretty much done everything else to isolate it.

Is anyone else seeing these issues?

Cool iphone wordpress blog posting tool is now available. I like it already.

I have spent the afternoon working on revising a CSS menu system. Having got it working, and with multiple level dropping down, I was actually amazed at just how easy it was to do. Why am I excited about this? Because it works in pretty much all legacy browsers, and does not require scripting. If you look at typical drop down menus, they tend to require javascript support, which is certainly common, but is not universal. A CSS based menu means that all your users will get the same experience.

So why am I so bothered if a well designed javascript based system is designed to degrade gracefully and still allow navigation? Simple reason is to make my life easier. If I know that every user will get exactly the same experience, I don’t need to design multiple ways through the site, or redundant navigation.

I guess that the other thing to explain is why we are doing this. I have recently done some user testing on one of the sites I manage and found that none of the users saw the 2nd level of horizontal navigation we have. I know that this second level is used but my feeling is it is used by people who know our site, although I am yet to test this.

The second reason for looking at this multiple level navigation is that if you focus on your user, under your product or services menu, you should have various methods of a visitor finding the content they are looking for. What do I mean? Our products are enclosures, metal boxes basically, people may want to find them by material, application, size, industry etc. Using 3 level navigation you can easily push them to the content they want and reduce the number of steps they have to take to get to their content.

Having said that I intend to test this navigation on our site and see if or user like it. I will report back then.

I had to post this report http://www.itnews.com.au/News/80086,british-boffins-build-electric-speed-machine.aspx. The bit I like it not only that things seem to be pushing along on this, but the sound generator option is awesome!

I am just trying out flock (the browser) as I seem to spend an awful to of time twittering and posting things in various places. Flock looks like it smooths this process a bit, and as I haven’t tried it since the beta version I thought I’d give it a go.

Tags: webdevelopment

Okay so I know that there is quite a bit of software that will allow you to do user testing a lot cheaper these days than in a studio, but I hadn’t come across http://www.usertesting.com before. I used them today for the first time and they were quick, taking a day to have 5 tests done with video and written reports.

The reports I got were excellent, backing up the problems I know one of my sites had. The reviewers were good and explained their problems well. Only problem was probably that they seemed to be quite experienced internet users in some case, even though I had asked for moderate or beginners users.

Overall I would really recommend anyone do this as it only costs about $25 for a test. A bargain for the info you get.