Watch Usability!

The semester in our universities ended and today we had 9 hours of oral exams in Media Design. We were discussing topics like usability, layouts, design decisions, ... of the student projects. The students did very good jobs, but if I look around I see that there is still along way to go.

As an example, I just tried to download the latest Mercedes Benz Mixed Tape (Nr. 13). That is a nice collection of music published regularly for free. I really like it, but the website is annoying. It seems they hired the web designer of hell. If you start the first webpage shows that you use a popup blocker and therefore you have to click on a link to open a new window (who in the world is NOT using a popup blocker?). The new window is very tiny running a Flash animation. Maybe it is nice if your web application can be viewed in 640x480, but when you are working with 1600x1200 (like me) this means just a thumbnail-size application. The application is not only tiny, it is also awful: Navigation in the app is poor, you have to watch an intoductory animation again and again, new windows open several times, ... really annoying.

And this is not the only example where someone stopped thinking before starting the development process of their application. Some while ago I had to report a hardware problem to Fujitsu-Siemens. The webpage required to use Internet Explorer and to change security settings to low (!!!). Thanks god, they revised the page.

A point which annoying me very much is audio terrorization. Some minutes ago I visited a webpage with a Nikon banner including background water tune. It was not possible to turn off the sound. I accept, that commerials like banners are necessary for financing, but no webpage can be that important that I have to endure noise on and on. I immediately hit 'Back' or 'Alt-F4'.

Not just webpages are that bad in usability, desktop applications are as well. Look at Microsoft's Office. It is enriched with new features from version to version, but decreasing in usability. Now it is in version 11 (never trust a version xxx1) and I really hate Word. But it seems they noticed the problem, MS promized to improve usability in the next version. And even the Linux community starts to improve their software, which is of good quality but has room for usability improvements. One example ist the Fedora Usability Project. It seems their is some hope to get better and not just more powerful computers.

So, if you start a project: Implement 'Skip Intro' and 'Sound off' buttons and work yourself with your software for a while. Watch usability! Please think about your audience and not about features. And THINK FIRST!!!

Bug in handling .wmv files by Tomcat 5

Tomcat is often used as web server for executing Java Server Pages. In Tomcat 5 there is a problem in handling video files.

If there is a link in a web page to a video of type Windows Media Video (.wmv), there is a problem to run this video. First the Mime type is not known by Tomcat. You can add the correct Mime type in the file web.xml in folder conf.

<mime-mapping>
    <extension>wmv</extension>
    <mime-type>video/x-ms-wmv</mime-type>
</mime-mapping>

The Mime type is known after restarting Tomcat, nevertheless the file is not handled correctly. By example I could view the video using Internet Explorer, but not using Firefox. This is very annoying, because I hate web pages 'best and only viewed by my preferred browser'.

But there is a solution for this bug. Change the Mime type to the following (incorrect) setting:

<mime-mapping>
    <extension>wmv</extension>
    <mime-type>application/octet-stream</mime-type>
</mime-mapping>

Firefox will ask to download the file and Internet Explorer directly starts the movie. The fame for this solution does not due to me, it was posted by Patrick Willart in a mailing list.