Thinking of usability in the context of web surfing, I thought of 5 Little Things I am really grateful for! Here:
1. Sounds On/Off
Its often that I end up on websites where they’d have a music jump me and startle me and often its even likeable, but what I am raving about here… is not the actual music, but the ability to control it. Talking about a volume bar, or at least an On/Off option. I might be at home already listening to some music and suddenly theres a new layer of sounds to it creating a strange effect! When I find out that there is no button to turn that website music off, it really doesn’t make me feel like sticking around it any longer.
2. YouTube’s Dim the Lights
YouTube had an idea to put this feature that when clicked, just turned everything around the video player window dark! For watching a video, you might find it more comfortable that way to reduce the bright white surrounding so your focus is more on the video. Unfortunately, this feature is now only available for videos longer than 50 minutes! So, as a sample you can see this video. At the top right of the video window, click the image of the lightbulb
3. Autocomplete
When I have to select stuff from long lists, nothing beats having an autocomplete feature! For users of GMail, you might recognize this as the feature that brings out the list of recipients when you are trying to type in who you’re sending the email to. We’ve actually implemented this feature in Therap SComms too hoping our users will also benefit from it.
4. GMail Labs’ Attachment Reminder
As forgetfulness of human nature goes, its a very common thing to forget to actually attach that important feature to an email before sending it out! I have heard of one story where someone sent 3 mails before finally remembering to attach the file. The second mail apologized for not sending the attachment and it was still forgotten! So, anyway, this feature picks up from the written email whether the author intended to send an attachment if it finds words like ‘attachment’ ’sending a file’ etc in it! Pretty smart, and it has saved a lot of time for me personally many a times. Mind you, that this feature is not there by default in GMail, you’d have to go to Settings, and then Labs to find it. Don’t forget!
5. Search As You Type on Firefox
As far as browsers go, I LOVE Firefox! Theres a world of useful plugins, and the build in search engines for google, imdb, wikipedia and others .. .its all very cool! But theres one feature that really helps me out – Thats the “search as you type” feature. Its not turned on by default (I don’t know why) and for that not many people know it or use it! But if you have often ended up on long pages and you are interested in a certain part only, this feature can help you out immensely. Turn this on from Options > Advanced > General. I have already once raved about this before, so I’ll just end here and point you to that blog for more on this. And this feature also comes into good use when I am testing Therap out for usability issues, on browsing the FirstPage. Often the FirstPage can have many many modules and go south quite a bit. In those circumstances, I just start typing in the module name – ‘Personal Finance’ for example, and as soon as I have typed till only “Perso” the browser has already scrolled to where that name appears on the FirstPage! This way, I don’t have to scroll down and read through the names on the FirstPage boxes to find the module I am looking for. Of course, users of other browsers can very well use Ctr-F to search for it, but with this option on Firefox, its faster doing a lot of things throughout the day.
Cheers!
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