Usability : Print.css and Feed Subscription
Two things I have come across in my recent musings on user experience of websites in relation to printing web pages and subscribing to RSS feeds, both bits of functionality have been around for a long time, both leave a lot to be desired on the usability front.
What do you mean subscribe? Does that cost money?
Firstly RSS Feeds, until this is native in Windows, the actual use of this technology will be limited to those who know about it and what it can do. I’ve been reading discussion ranging from clicking the orange button and getting garbbled text right up to “you mean I need to download something to read these things?”. General gist of it is that a feed link should be something that a user clicks and the browser handles that as if it would a mailto: link. Also a feed should be formated so that if the borwser fails to load a feed reader the user should be presented with the content of the feed and more importantly a description of what the hell it is they are looking at, how to use and why it benefits them.
Some brillent disccusion on getting RSS and Atom as being as defacto as mailto: and even the torrent file can be found here
Printable versions
Printing a page also is an area where user experience takes a nose dive, should there be a “print this page” link on the page or is this a task better left to the browser. Have we been shackled to the thinking that says because we have always done it, we should continue doing it. When was the last time to read a PDF document and saw a pront this page link? CSS offers a range of options to do a way with the extra “printer freindly” page, using such style rules means that you as the developer only need to code one web page for this task and two CSS files. The disscusion I have seen points to the fact that users almost expect a seperate version of the current page to pop up, almost as a print preview, indeed even using CSS may lead to some users thinking well I want what I see on the screen.
Conclusions range from using a “print this page” button and switching the style sheet to show the print.css on screen before printing, or replacing the “print this page” link with a javascript call to the function Print(); which in any case is the same as selecting print from the file menu and thus not showing a user a print preview. It is lack of browser functionality again that has lead us to this situation and I personally can see the same fragmentation heading for mass take up of Syndication feeds such as RSS.
Real issues, the RSS issue is crucial to the future usage of the web, particually in conjunction with the raw power of BitTorrent and Podcasting.