Technovangelism

The full web interface for HappierHour has been improving from month to month, but with the summer came significantly more “usability testing” from mobile phones. From the start, we tested on phones to ensure the interface would be mostly usable, but it is time to make a first-class mobile interface.

Look for a release in the coming weeks that will include the new interface. If anything looks off or you want to request a mobile-specific feature, leave a comment.

Downloading anything from a website is such a common practice, but providing nice and usable methods for the user to do the actual downloading is much less common. A lot of sites I visit are software websites and the only thing I am interested in doing on these sites is downloading their latest release. If this is my, and most other users’ only intent, why do sites make it so difficult to do exactly what I came there to do?

One site I visit regularly to download from is WordPress. WordPress makes it incredibly easy to download the latest release. From the WordPress.org homepage, it takes one (well-highlighted) click to reach the download page, and one more to download the release. Not only is that second click simple, but it is a direct link to the file you are actually downloading. So if you like, you can copy the link location and use it elsewhere, such as from the terminal for a wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip.

Another site I have been to a few times recently is the NAnt site. Just like WordPress, all I want to do on the site is download the latest (stable) release. On the NAnt page, there is no download link on the page when you first visit it. You can even try using your browser’s find tool and search for “download” and you will get nothing. To find the download link, you must expand your way down the “Releases” tree view. After a few clicks, you are finally given the option to download what you were looking for.

Luckily for WordPress and NAnt, their target platforms do not vary widely enough that they need to have separate release for different operating systems. But a product like Firefox does, and once again, most users are only visiting the site to download it. Thankfully, the Firefox website does some work for the user by presenting the user a link to the download the correct, operating system specific release. When I visit the site on my Mac, I get a link to download a disk image, and when I visit it on a Windows machine, I get a link to download an exe installer.

Unfortunately, the developers of many products’ websites have not caught on to these huge improvements in usability, and leave you to do the unnecessary link-hunting on your own. But the good news is as I continue to find software worth downloading, I am finding more and more sites are improving the way a user downloads from them.