Image is everything
One serious drawback of moving house in Australia is you’ll typically wait no small time to get your internet connection moved. For the last three weeks, I’ve been in this situation, and as connection is not an option, I’ve needed and alternative until someone could be bothered providing me with a service which frankly should be close to essential as water or electricity these days no?
So, I opted for a 3G USB modem for my laptop.
Living as I do at the edge of the network, it’s been slow - like dialup slow - which has necessitated all kinds of tricks like turning off images when browsing to load pages in an even remotely acceptable time frame.
Which makes for an interesting user experience.
Most sites are close to unusable in this state, in my experience of the last three weeks. Time and again I’ve found myself turning images back on, reloading a page, then turning them off again in order to find a basic button or instruction. Some of the big names who you’d expect to do better, like Basecamp, and Wordpress (2.3 login) are guilty of this. But most sites have sizable chunks of their navigation, and user interface disabled once images are.
To tell the truth, in 2008, it’s a shock and a disappointment to find so many sites relying on images for their user experience. Even basic things like alternate text is missing on images that are blocks of text at site after site.
I’m happy to say our sites (westciv and web directions) fair reasonably well.
So, how do your sites do?
Ben Boyle
April 8th, 2008 at 4:04 am
oh man… you should try *living* in a “fringe” location where there’s waiting, and the possibility of more waiting (8 years here) … at least you’re in an “interesting but hopefully temporary” situation. Are you getting a healthy dose of packet loss too? That is one of the more interesting affects to observe with wireless connectivity… when links start resulting in random “server not found” due to packet loss between you and the DNS, a key css or js file may or may not have been (successfully) fetched, Web 2.0 apps repeatedly pop in to tell you ‘oops’ this or ‘lost’ that (like you need those reminders)… well, you know you’re not in kansas anymore… or anywhere really ~:)
thankfully it isn’t always that bad. but you’ll strike a patch like that every day or two, or every couple of hours, depends on the weather or something. Still pay a premium for the service :)
You’re very right, designers should be more aware of these issues. Especially here in .au
john Allsopp
April 8th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Ben,
oh yeah, I reckon packet loss is the big problem with this - theoretical throughput is all well and good, but the packets have to all make it!
The town I live in (officially a suburb of Sydney, but 25km by road from anywhere) is well enough serviced by telcos, but a few of us here are keen to share our wifi and make the whole place a cloud of free internet access. Is that feasible for where you are?
john
Leah Maclean
April 8th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
I think that with today being CSS Naked Day (started by http://www.dustindiaz.com) issues such as the ability to navigate with all images off, and without any styling at all, should be brought to the fore and more so called web2.0 and design businesses pull back the covers and really see what the sites are like without the CSS and images.
Stephanie
April 10th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
I had a similar experience in rural Quebec a few months ago. Facebook was virtually unusable, I couldn’t believe it.
I think image replacement techniques are contributing to the problem since the easiest ones hide the text off screen. I’m leading the project to re-do the templates for BCIT and picking a good image replacement technique took a lot of looking around.
Bad tools can sometimes be to blame too. We’ve been working hard with our content contributors to get them to fill in alt tags but many of them only update their sites twice a year so can’t remember all the picky details like what “alt” means, and our CMS can’t enforce it. If you ask Dreamweaver to enforce it it gives you a tiny little text field to fill in that’s never long enough.
Maybe in addition to CSS Naked Day we need a day when all developers are forced to use dial up ;)