I’m not a fan of “cute” navigational elements. As a rule all they are good for is showing off the coding skills of the developer and giving the user a brief “Oh, that’s cool” moment. Very quickly, that “cool” factor devolves into “God, that is so annoying. How do I turn it off?”

An excellent example of this is ESPN’s navigation. When you first enter the site, you see this- a typical primary nav (black bar) and a corresponding sub-nav (white NFL bar):

However, if you scroll down a bit the sub-nav jumps into the primary position, covering the main nav:

Where this gets REALLY annoying is that if you are a mouse scroller (as most of us are) once you get past a certain point on the screen every UP click exposes the black bar and every DOWN click hides it again. So if you are reading an article and wheel-scrolling it through it there is an almost constant black/white strobe going on at the top of the page.

ESPN- give me a way to turn this off. Please.

10 biggest tech fails of 2014 | Fox News.

A very interesting list. Give it a look.

They agreed with an earlier post that I made about  the Blackberry Passport being a total piece of crap from a UX perspective.

I think it’s a little early to put a stake in Google Glass, but it is hard to imagine how much damage in the market the term “glasshole” caused them.

This blog’s name comes from an old joke that any child knows the answer to:

“What is red and smells like blue paint?”

“Red paint”

The idea that an adult would think of the most complicated answer while a kid would just look at you like “Duh” appealed to my sense of simplicity.

Something just happened to me that reinforces that.

Have a look at an icon you’ve seen a thousand times:

We adults know what that is… an old 3.5 disc. However, it’s very doubtful that a teenager like my daughter has ever even seen one. Yet, the icon is so engraved in their brains that they know WHAT it does without knowing WHAT it is.

Out of curiosity I asked my daughter’s boyfriend (God it kills me to type that) if he knows what that is.

His answer… “You mean the thing that looks like a SIM card.. or a floppy?”

It never dawned on me that it could be read to look like a phone SIM card. He took an icon that dates back to 20 years before he was born and re imagined it to something that makes sense to him.

At least my little girl isn’t dating a moron.

I saw the sign below last night on my usual torture run around the neighborhood. Since the house has been on the market for some time it had to have been the 100th time I’d seen it, but this was the first time I’d actually read it.

Have a look at the website. Not the huge “www.terifox.com” in red, but the small one in white near the bottom.

I’m pretty sure that this local Realtor doesn’t own the URL “www.website.com”.

If you’re going to use a template when creating some artifact for your business… double check it.

-Jay

The Army recruiting site gets a NO-GO at this station.

There are two major problems with this screen.

Can you spot them, boys and girls?  Go on, I’ll give you a minute.

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Ready?

1- The floating “Social Bar” blocks a good chunk of the navigation. Very annoying to the user.

2- It violates “RPR #2” in a huge, lazy way.  Have a look at the “About Us” text box. Lorem ipsum, anybody.

Sloppiness like this makes joining the Coast Guard look like a better move.