Upside-Down Inverted Triangles and Other Interface Details

050816_triangle.pngHere’s how much tiny user interface cues can matter: this afternoon, I spent about five minutes scratching my head in front of an Open dialog box in Adobe Photoshop, trying vainly to locate the files I’d saved several months ago to a particular folder. They just weren’t where I expected them to be.

The dialog box was displaying the contents of the folder in list view, and I had clicked on the Date Modified column to sort most recently modified items last. At least that᾿s what I thought I had done; the triangle icon was in fact in the correct mode — pointed end at the top, wide end at the bottom. But apparently, some kind of preference file had been corrupted, and the list was actually sorted so that the most recently modifed items appeared first.

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Form Doesn’t Function

The black art at the heart of information design in XHTML and CSS is wrestling forms into some semblance of orderliness. In building a small site for my girlfriend (more later), I spent about three times the effort that should be necessary for getting a handful of standard form fields — name, address, phone, email etc, — lined up properly. It was a relatively straightforward job in Safari, surprisingly difficult in Firefox, and just hopeless in Internet Explorer. Fields were misaligned, clearing oddly, refusing to conform to declared widths… painful.

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