Get out of my interface: Babel III

I know I should let this go, but I cannot.

I have been trying to do a lot of catching up on my reading about presenting information on the web. My first web site was up in 1994, back in the days when your choice of page background colors was a Henry Fordish choice: any color you want as long as it was gray. Been in the ink-on-dead-trees design world mostly since then, just dabbling in pixel manipulation as time would allow.

Much of what I have read in the usability and user interaction (and their ilk) literature seems to ignore what I think is an important point: not all info consumers (still can't go with users) are alike. We have a wide range of people using the web from propellor-heads to boomers to Gen-Xers and Yers to even some Digital Generationals who either (a) are not as computer savvy as they think they are, and/or (b) are only borderline literate, or at least not literate in the same way their parents are. It is not as bad as the problem one has designing for people who read left to right and for those who read their native language right to left or vertically. But it is a problem.

Designing an interface then becomes a much more complex problem than either the TechDesigners (those who approach information presentation as a technical problem) or the ArtDesigners (those who approach information presentation as a visual/aesthetic problem) seem to admit.

Beyond the obvious children's web pages and books, which do adjust the interface for the young consumer, and beyond the relatively simple personalization allowed by some portals (e.g.,Yahoo, etc.), and perhaps here we should even count those sites that recognize which browser and version you are using, the mainstream web is still "one size fits all."

And speaking of browsers, maybe that's where the problem lies. Over the years, IE, Netscape, Opera and Mozilla have made numerous improvements, but the basic interface is still the same. Maybe if browsers were better, we could present information better.

Maybe even Blogger could figure out how to place new posts at the bottom instead of at the top, causing people who miss the start of a thread to jump down the page and scroll up.