IdealStyleAndDesign.com » Poll

New Poll: Action Verb Clarity

admin — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 03:15:57 +0000

Let’s say you were writing some text-only documentation describing how to do something on a website. The idea was that you came to a point where someone was presented with a list of users and their job was to select one, then there was a button below that they needed to interact with in order to get the job done. You decided “Select a user” was clear enough because of good user interface. But what is the best way to word [clicking] that button. Here are some options:

Select a user and then click the Update button.
Select a user and then press the Update button.
Select a user and then choose the Update button
Select a user and then click Update.
Select a user and then press Update.
Select a user and then choose Update.
Select a user and Update.

In my opinion, “click” is a ubiquitous enough term that most people would understand, but technically, keyboard navigation also works fine and doesn’t use “clicking.” The word “press” or “choose” might solve that, but also feel slightly strange to me.

The design is also an important consideration. We’ve already said this is a “button”. People know what buttons look like, so does it help to indicate that with text, or is simply the text inside the button good enough? Since our text is “Update”, which is an action verb already, do we even need to use click/press/choose? Perhaps just “Update” is good enough…which is also the shortest option.

The poll doesn’t include include this, but it is a worthy talking point, what about emphasis (e.g. bold/italic)? If you were going to emphasize a word (or words) in the choice that you pick, which would they be?

Thanks to Brent Traut for the idea.

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Poll Results: How Many Websites Do You Launch Per Year?

admin — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 21:34:58 +0000

20+ (14%)
10-20 (12%)
5-10 (24%)
2-4 (31%)
1 (13%)
0 (6%)

I’m probably in the 2-4 camp myself, which is the winning choice. I don’t freelance, but I do do sites for family and friends once in a while. Even when I was at Chatman Design the vast majority of work we did was on sites that already were launched. This data would be more interesting if it was cross referenced with what kind of job you have. I would theorize that freelancers launch a ton of sites where web workers that work for specific organizations launch far fewer.

Here is the fun part about this poll:

How do you feel about your number? (Does it feel like too many or too few?)

What would happen if you worked on half as many websites per year?

What would happen if you worked on twice as many websites per year?

Did you just read those questions and scoff, like that would be impossible? Why?

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New Poll: How many websites do you launch per year?

admin — Sat, 29 May 2010 21:36:39 +0000

There is a new poll in the sidebar. RSS readers, you’ll have to make the jump. The question is:

How many websites do you launch per year?

The idea is to gauge how many different projects you all are involved with that actually launch in a year. I’m sure some of you work on sites that we launched long ago and you just work on maintaining and growing them. So if that’s the only web work you did this year, your answer would be zero. I’m sure also some of you work at churn-and-burn design agencies that are spitting out sites very quickly for clients.

Include sites that you worked on in any significant capacity. If you did a some backend coding for the site, that counts. If you just did the markup part for a good chunk of it, that counts. If you designed the header, that counts. If you spent one hour consulting on the project, that doesn’t count. Just count the sites that you played a vital and significant part in its construction.

Feel free to vote based on an average or quick appraisal, but if you want exact dates, let’s say June 1 2009 to June 10 2010.

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Poll Results: Server side language of choice?

admin — Thu, 27 May 2010 11:38:23 +0000

Over 18,500 people voted on this last poll, making it the most voted-upon poll in this site’s history, when I asked:

What is your server-side language of choice?

Now I’m definitely a front end guy writing about mostly front end stuff. Because of that I kind of a assume most of you folks are too. That doesn’t mean we don’t care about or have an opinion on server side languages too, just know that these poll results are probably indicative more of designers than developers. I essentially got started hacking up WordPress themes and I haven’t moved to far from that, developmentally. So my affinity is for PHP. My favorite part is how it kinda “just works” on just about any server out there out of the box. I also like how at the basic levels I use it at, the app doesn’t really need to be “running,” it just is a series of scripts that do their thing when they are hit with a request. But anyway, on with the results:

Looking at these results it looks like PHP’s domination of the server side language market is just about as complete as jQuery’s over the JavaScript library market =)

I’ve moved this over to the polls archive. Any last words, leave them here! New poll in a few days.

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