Guideline 3.2 too liberal for WWW use

Guideline 3.2 seeks to avoid confusing users by sudden changes in user
interface paradigms, but it fails to account for:

- deep links into the site;
- users who learnt on a different site.

In my view, the no sudden changes rule should apply for all transitions
between pages in the accessible sub-set of the web.  I realise that this
conflicts with the desire of copanies to brand, but you cannot assume
loyalty to a site.

My exerience of trying to teach my 86 year old mother (whose mental faculties
are still sound) is that even Windows 95 standard applications have enough
unexpected surprises to panic this sort of user.  I despair of ever getting
her to use the web because of the numerous user interface paradigms that
need to be deciphered and allowing a site to be completely incompatible with
the rest of the web, as long as it is self consistent, doesn't help.

Received on Monday, 17 January 2005 22:46:59 UTC