I’ve previously written that I was using Wordpress PDA Plugin in order to give mobile users a nice user experience. Today during lunch time I’ve upgraded the plugin which now has a iPhone/iPod version. (I must give a word of appreciation to the new “one click upgrade” feature in Wordpress)
It has animations in page transitions and all. Pretty cool. It still have some bugs (at least when testing it in Firefox with a fake User Agent), but it is usable. Maybe one of my readers will give me feedback from his iPhone experience navigating in this website. 
While testing a project on which I’m working I accidentally went to TMN’s website (a Portuguese cellphone company) with Javascript disabled.
First of all I think that is great that they use a <noscript> tag to warn the user that the user experience quality will be decreased because Javascript is disabled. Because of this message I switched it on right away. Without this message I would probably get some strange behavior while using the website, complaint about it and then maybe I would remember that I had Javascript disabled (or just leave the website without realizing it).
Something that you can’t see in the image above is that the website look & feel doesn’t get too damaged by the absence of Javascript support which is nice too.
One thing that I didn’t like that much was the fact of this website language is Portuguese but the warning message is written in English… TMN’s clients don’t have to understand English, and I believe that many don’t. This issue seems like a “copy-paste” without message customization.
In my daily work It is quite usual facing applications and websites which have what I consider some usability issues (including projects in which I have worked, its true). It is so common that I’ve decided to start posting some thoughts about usability using examples that cross my path.
I am not and usability expert and what I will post may not be accepted by usability experts or by any person at all. I’ll just write about things that annoy me and which I think that should be different. So, if you think that I am not right about something, just comment the correspondent post. This way I can get different points of view and learn about usability from you.
Today while using Live Mesh Remote Desktop I noticed something. While the ActiveX is connecting to your remote computer you get a loading screen. You have a “Cancel” button in order to cancel (how obvious is that caption 
). In the button’s normal state you can see a “Cancel” message below the loading animation, but you don’t really notice it is a button until you put your mouse over it.
If it is a button, I think it should look like a button before I try to click it (this is the moment when I need to know that it is a button). Or at least it could resemble like a link, which would have the same effect. Since Live Mesh is still a Tech Preview, maybe this usability issue will not be present on the final release.
In understand that to make Windows Live Messenger profitable and free to all of us to use it has to have some kind of advertisement system attached to it. Sometimes these ads are useful, since they are different for each country and there are several major brands that use Windows Live Messenger advertisement.
Nevertheless, recently I’ve not been pleased by Messenger advertising. It has been really annoying. Now there are a lot of ads that just pop up out of out our main Messenger window showing some sort of flash animation. Some of them are pretty big and annoying when I trying to reach a contact that is hidden beneath the ad… Most of them disappear when the mouse leave the ad area (it is the minimum that I expect…) but other ads are only disabled by clicking a close button.
I am starting to understand those people that use software that patches Windows Live Messenger to remove all the advertisement. It violates the terms of usage and it is wrong to do it, but this Messenger advertisement “feature” is becoming to invade the user space. Some day in the future maybe I will consider the hypothesis of moving to a IM software like Pidgin (which I like pretty much ) that is compatible with MSN protocol.
There is even a portable version just like I love in software).
Since I’ve created this blog I’ve been using a nice Wordpress plugin to allow a nice user experience while visiting this website with a mobile device. It is called Wordpress PDA Plugin and it’s installation is plug-and-play. Since this is a blog, and probably most of the readers just subscribe my RSS feed into some reader or aggregator, this plugin isn’t essential, but is still pretty nice.
These are some screenshots from my website mobile version.
As you can see, in the homepage it removes all the images and shows only part of the text, to optimize performance. By entering into a entry details you can read the whole content, including images.
