Good UI Design

I'm a stickler for good UI design.  I don't claim to be a wiz
at it myself, though I'd like to think I'm better than many.  I
love coming across web sites that are a breeze to use.  Hell, I
love coming across web sites that aren't painful to use.  In a fit
of spastic home-all-alone Googling, I hit the "I'm Feeling Lucky"
button on a search for "monkey nuts", hit the 'enter' button on the
splash page, and was rewarded by this site,
which had a quasi-prominent UI element that not only made me smile, but
happened to be EXACTLY what the page needed to elevate it bad to quite
good.  Enough of a shift that I couldn't help sharing.

For
those of you who don't see it, it's the handwritten element.  The
one that says, "hey, I'm a dumbass and put a scrolling frame in the
middle of my page, but I have the courtesy to flat out tell you I did
it, and help you deal with it, because while I know it's not a very
good way to do things, it was the only way to get what I wanted, so I'm
going out of my way to make it as painless as possible for you: 'this
is a scrollbar –>'."

I love it.

3 responses to “Good UI Design”

  1. Chris P.

    Uhm, I see the arrow and the caption.
    However, when I follow the link (in firefox), I don't see a scrollbar where it's pointing?

  2. Barney

    Yeah, shut it. ;) The center content area no longer is long enough to warrant a scroll bar. There's a link in the content to 'old-ish news'. Click that, and you'll get a scrollbar.

  3. Chris P.

    Ok.
    Now that I've seen it, I'm wondering why he didn't put the same thing at the bottom to point out the horizontal scroll bar?…