Not to complain, but there are some elements of some websites that make me just a little crazy sometimes…
One of them is the “Close Window” button you sometimes see. I just saw it on a window that popped up when I clicked on a link to view an enlarged image of a product at a retailer’s website. It’s a normal window, one that could be closed by clicking on the X (or the red dot) in the top corner of the window, or by a Ctrl-W (or Command-W) keyboard command, or even clicking to File — Close Window. But no; some web designer in his/her wisdom thought it would be a good idea to a button that can be clicked that will do it for you. It’s usually just one of those things I ignore, but for some reason(?) I clicked on that button today and got an alert from IE (on Windows XP):
How stupid is that? I can see how IE would maybe want to alert the user that something in the web page was trying to trigger something in the application, but why would closing the page be a concern? Shouldn’t the app be aware that it was a user’s mouseclick that initiated what was going on? Aside from that, just the presence of that button means that someone somewhere thinks that people using a computer aren’t smart enough to figure out that closing the window that just popped up involves clicking on the same user interface element as closing any other window. Excuse me, but it’s not exactly rocket science.
The second thing that bugs me is when a website displays an image that is either click-able or has a link nearby to view an enlarged image, and when clicked you get the same image with no enlargement in a different window. I realize that most of the times this happens is when a retailer gets its product images from a vendor, they only get one size — small — and the pages are automatically built from a template. But would it really that difficult to code so that nothing happens if there isn’t a larger image available? Or that no link is generated in the first place?
Probably not much of an issue with a faster computer and connection, but still, how annoying; if a site shows a tiny product image and I want to take a closer look, when the page tells me to click here for a closer look, I’d like to get a closer look. Is that too much to ask?
Ok. I feel a little better now.