Ugly non-transparent titles still being used by The Conversation

A year or two ago I contacted The Conversation (Australia) and pointed out that the then recent change in the way that titles of articles  were displayed was a turn for the worse.

My attempt to influence this poor design were unsuccessful, so for the last couple of years titles have been displayed as non-transparent areas with a solid white background superimposed on the image that appears at the top of each article, like this one:

Just like Closed captioning (CC) on free-to-air television the solid background is very ugly, and it hides sections of the underlying image (which can block out major parts of TV broadcasts such as charts and weather maps).

In my opinion, the captions should (perhaps selectively) be presented with transparent backgrounds, like the subtitling used by Netflix and Amazon Prime TV. (You may have to use configuration options to change from solid to transparent background.)

It is bizarre that on the home page of The Conversation titles utilise transparent text, such as:

Obviously they could use transparent title text everywhere, not just on the home page, and I remain puzzled why they don't.

I notice that both the  "Africa" and the "Global Perspectives" editions of The Conversation use the original layout, for example:

 

This is a weird inconsistency.

I promised myself that when once I became an octogenarian (which happened in early July this year) I would try to stress out and stop being annoyed by such things, and try to live a calmer life.

But it seems that I can't. Every time that I read an article in The Conversation I still have the same reaction. C'est la vie!

Calculating Documentation Cruft

There's a new (13 July 2007) article over at Dr. Dobb's Agile Modeling Newsletter portal, titled Calculating Documentation Cruft

Here "cruft" is designated as:

• C = The percentage of the document that is currently "correct".
• R = The chance that the document will be read by the intended audience.
• U = The percentage of the document that is actually understood by the intended audience
• F = The chance that the material contained in document will be followed.
• T = The chance that the document will be trusted.

Read the article to find out how the "cruftiness" of your documentation is calculated.

At the bottom of this newsletter there are also some very useful hot links to other agile documentation strategies and approaches, including the following one for general issues surrounding communication.

Poor web page design of "My Vodafone" (Australia)

I tried to report this very bad page design about a year ago, and it was only today when I revisited Vodafone Australia's "My Vodafone" home page that I found it unchanged.

I'm not surprised, actually. This is just another case of some combination of poor web page design, woeful usability testing, weak project management, who knows what. Apparently it was done by an external web design firm. Vodafone shouldn't have paid for this. As one of the very early Vodafone Australia customers from around 1994 or so, I'm quite disappointed about it, really. (Those responsible for creating and releasing this weak page design should get a rap across the knuckles!

(Click to view a larger image)

When I first opened this page soon after "My Vodafone" was launched, I kept clicking on various parts of the central area of the page (in the image, surrounded by a thick black line), this to me seeming to be the natural thing to do for a page laid out like this. To my annoyance, this central part of the page was entirely "dead" (no active hyperlinks whatsoever), and despite my fault report still is a year or more later. The only live parts are restricted to the navigator column on the left.

This page would make an excellent discussion point (as a bad example) in Jakob Nielsen's book: Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed