Posts tagged: DESIGN

I have to admit that I carry big shield of skepticism when I circulate exhibit halls. Luckily a fellow attendee tipped me off to OpenLaszlo, an extremely spiffy system for server-side, declarative generation of Flash content. What this means for somebody like me – someone who, despite a lot of background in visual design, would really prefer to work directly with code – is that very sweet Flash-based interfaces can be constructed via XML. Their XML dialect, LZX, impressed me with its elegance and (for XML) relative lack of verbosity. The generation code is Java, which you can either run live on your server or run offline to generate standalone .swf files. They offer a nifty playground/demo for you to check it out.

I recently encountered an amazingly stupid outsourced Adobe.com “how was your support experience” survey. I got to the end of the survey and there was a single button with text above it saying something like, “Click the button below to submit your survey and close this window.”

I looked at the page source – the button does not submit the survey, which is already complete; it’s just a Javascript action to close the window. And the script is broken! So in Safari at least, it does nothing at all. Some poor schmuck is going to be sitting there futilely pounding on the button trying to “submit” the fifteen-page survey he just completed.