I was wondering if it was ever ok not to have a submit button (Ok, Go or Search for example) near a search box in Web pages.
I know that hitting enter is much faster and that it will perform the search.
However, is it an accepted convention for the average non tech savvy user or only for the tech community?
For example, the search box here at stackoverflow doesn't have a submit button, but I don't think anyone is complaining (and I sure don't).
On the other hand, someone suggested using Google as an example: would people notice if the buttons were removed?
I just started reading Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug and he mentions that every search box should have something that tells me I can click on it to launch the search.
Your thoughts?
Why you should have a button:
Not everyone knows they can hit
enter, so you are leaving some less
savvy people out in the cold.
Some devices like phones and consoles may not have a way to submit without a button. The PC based browser is still dominant but don't assume it is the only way people access your site.
You may not have a button if (both conditions must be satisfied):
Your audience is tech savvy (as on SO)
You provide a visual cue that the search box actually is a search box
By adding text inside it mentioning it should be used to search
By adding an icon inside the box
Generally I would think that hitting enter is a shortcut to submit rather than the primary means.
I think it depends on your target market. If you are StackOverflow it's not too hard too think they know how to use a browser (using a back button on a browser to navigate is a similair design convention) and pressing Enter = submit for search.
However if your target market is say mechanics (no offence to mechanics) that don't use a browser/computer often then look at how Google does it (and they target the broadest scope) - they have a button to submit.
There is a middle ground you could look at, which is have a water mark like StackOverflow which tells users "Click here, type in search values and press enter to search" - or something like that (hopefully shorter) where you actually catering for users of all levels.
Whether or not a button is required depends on the audience. Here are issues to consider:
Technically oriented users may not need a button and will usually not have to think about hitting enter to submit a search request.
Conversely non-technical people may not even know it is possible to hit enter to submit a search request. So no amount of thinking might work for them.
There may be technology limitations that require a button. If you expect your audience to be browsing your form from a platform that does not provide an implicit way to submit a search request then you may need to provide an explicit button.
So essentially you need to know your audiences and determine where the edge cases lie and how critical they are. Using SO as an example, it is directed at technical users so an explicit button probably isn't required. However for a site like google where you need to be accessible to every single user using every possible platform, a clear explicit search button is a must.
"Don't Make Me Think" - so gimme a button.
There will always be someone using the application for the first time; don't make them think either. And your screen shouldn't be so fussy that it is impossible to fit the button in comfortably - that would indicate a different set of problems.
I think for a non-tech person some sort of submit button is needed. Think about people who don't use computers very much. They often click all of the buttons needed instead of hitting enter because they don't realize enter does the same thing. My opinion...if it isn't for tech guys only then it should be as simple as possible.
It depends on your audience. Steve's audience is everybody. Majority of which are so far from IT you'd need a telescope to see them. If your auditory is a single user, you might skip all clues: button (with or w/o names), in-box label.
For my own login window I leave two fields: no labels, no buttons, no javascript to tell you which one is which. But that's not a public project.
A while ago there was an article on Smashing Magazine about this.
There were some alternatives like a looking glass or another icon, but basically there is always a button, or something which represents it.
Having a button makes it clearer that the text field is a search field. Merely having the text field itself indicate this in its contents is unsufficient.
Related
I have a question about Ultimate Special Offers plugin. Has anybody used it?
The problem is that this plugin sets the table with discounts in a special place where it wants. In my case, it shows up under the "add to cart" button. But I want it to appear above the button. How can I regulate the place where the table shows up?
You have two choices. One is to dig into your theme and move the table yourself. If you right-click the element displaying the table while having your browser console open, you will spot where it is in the HTML that makes up your page. Now click the Add to cart button, and see where it is. Memorize the name of the button, and now look for that in your product.liquid page. Chances are, the plugin itself has some liquid, so you can cut it out of the page, and move it the before the add to cart button in the liquid.
If all that seems like a mountain to climb, just ask the makers of the plugin to do it for you. It is a simple task for them, and should take them a minute to do. If they choose to ignore you, I would call them out as unreliable, and try a different plugin, from a company that will help you with your simple task.
Per user feedback, I am opening a new question for this topic.
So I am currently using Struts-Menu to handle my menu needs for my Struts 2 J2EE application. It is not necessarily a package I wish to work with I have found by playing around with it. So what are some alternatives to this package? I immediately flocked to Struts-Menu because I saw a fair amount of web search traffic pointing to it, including those who use Struts2. What I am worried about is difficulty in the future of making it work with other packages, given its 2007 last update and the extra tap dance I had do to make it work with my configuration. It seems too fragile at this point for my taste.
I have several different menus in my app, but the one I am specifically addressing at the present is like this ... The top level menu drops down upon mouse hover over it. The submenus expand horizontally upon mouse hover. Exactly one menu item can be selected as no radio buttons or check boxes are contained in the menu. This particular menu does not require db access to populate its children. It works sort of like Velocity CoolMenus4 from the Struts-Menu demos.
I've never used struts-menu, but it looks like overkill to me.
I would recommend that you locate a menu that you like and then write a tag file to handle outputting it in your view layer. To me, that's a lot easier than using a framework or library just to output a menu. Plus, its specific to the actual menu you want to use. Your tag can handle doing security checks to ensure that the user only sees what they have permission to access, etc.
After much online research and getting close to what I am looking for by hacking it together (ie. modifying templates and other files, exactly what every expert out there appears to advise against in terms of SharePoint customization) I have decided to go ahead and post my issue here to see if anybody has ever had any experience with this.
In essence, I start off with a plain My Sites host. I would like to keep the My Profile and My Content pages, and add a bunch of new content of top on that. For us, simplicity is of utmost importance and so when I created a new Web Part Page and noticed that it added an additional ribbon under the navigation menu, I decided that it had to go. This is what it looks like out of the box:
With ribbon
Notice that at this point I have already made a few modifications, such as removing the My Site link that by default appears all the way to the left of the other options. This sadly was accomplished in a very brute-force way.
Now, here is the ribbon-free navigation bar, which is just what I want to be able to design without making system changes that I will regret in the future (and that may be easily overwritten by a CU or hotfix)
Without ribbon
So I guess I should make this clear, I don't want the navigation gone, just customized (ie. no My Site string to the left of my options, no Site Actions drop-down for read-only users) and the Browse/Page ribbon that gets added by default everytime you create a new page, well that one just needs to be gone completely, as shown in the second screenshot.
I have read all about hiding ribbons (which just hides the whole thing, including navigation), customizing ribbons (no success in accomplishing this type of basic navigation after trying them out) and simply don't know what to do anymore.
Maybe I am just taking the wrong approach by modifying something instead of just creating it from scratch, at the end of the day it is nothing but a static navigation bar common to all the pages with the special current user drop-down all the way to the right, then if a user has write permissions, she would also get the Site Actions drop-down under Home, that's it.
Hopefully an answer to this question will help others as well who are looking to simplify their SharePoint My Sites host a bit, as out of the box the number of web components that users are presented with might be just a little too overwhelming for your everyday employee, at least in the industry that we operate in.
Anyway, thank you kindly in advance, I look forward to your replies. Do let me know if there is something that is not entirely clear from my explanation :)
If you take away user's Create Personal Site permission (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262500.aspx) in your User Profile, the "My Site" link will go away.
I create a program that simulates me browsing to gmail, entering the user name and password and clicking the submit button.
All this with C#.
I would appreciate two kinds of answers:
One that tells how to do this programaticaly. Since I may be interested in automating more
sophisticated user activities.
On that tells me about a program that already does that.
Thanks!!
I want to access my mail account with a double click (without browsing, entering username and password and pressing submit).
Why not check the 'stay signed in' box, and add a bookmark toolbar item for Gmail?
alt text http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/6240/picture5zw.png
Do it once, and all future logins are a one-click process. Am I missing something? Why overcomplicate this with a C# program?
Well, depending on the browser you're using, it might be much simpler to use a greasemonkey userscript (on FireFox) that does auto-login for you.
If you want to simulate user activity take a look at AutoHotKey.
Also if the issue is specific to logging into websites take a look at LastPass. They have plug-ins for every major browser and mobile device. I haven't type out a user name or password on a website in months.
If your ok with clicking 'go' (or wharever) on your application and then clickingin the username field. Look into Sendkeys:
Put this in the onClick event of a button and replace text with your user details:
SendKeys.Send("USER#DOMAIN.COM{TAB}PASS{TAB}{TAB}{ENTER}");
You might also want to put a timer or make your program wait a few seconds before actually sending the keys to give you time to click in the username box.
Use WatIn. and this is a placeholder to get to 30 Chars answer
My Google analytics shows the second most used keyword to access my site is the url of the site. This doesn't particularly surprise me, but I wondered if any of you have tried educating your users out of this (i.e. detecting search term from referrer and showing a popin encouraging them to create bookmarks etc.) or is it just a waste of effort or likely to annoy.
UPDATE
I was watching someone the other day and discovered one possible reason why people do this. If you try clicking in the address bar and click twice instead of once, then type your url, you get a big mess. Far easier to type into the nice empty google search box (which is also selected by default). So basically you have the choice between:
Type > Enter > Click
or
BadClick > Type > Enter > "Bugger!" > Click > Type > Enter
Similarly, Microsoft noted long ago that many people just type search queries into the address bar. If there are essentially between two and four unlabeled text boxes on a browser window (address bar, search box, maybe Google start page, toolbars, etc.) don't expect the user to find the right one when they should.
As long as they end up where they wanted to they couldn't care less.
Google Chrome did the right thing imho by merging at least the search and the address bar again.
for most people, google is the internet.
Focus your efforts somewhere else, like providing good contents. It does not matter how they get there.
Good luck :) Most of internet users may even not realize if the address bar gets removed from their browser. Typing a URL is far too technical.
I'm not sure anything can be done. Users are known to be extremely stubborn in their habits.
One my fellow googles for the login page of his online-banking system, being too lazy to type it in or bookmark it. That scares me a lot. It only takes for someone to manipulate search results even for a day or so to hijack the credentials.
I suggest you ignore the matter. With luck, if they google enough for your site, then google will start to show the name of your site in suggestions as your type which is rather nice.
I've tried to encourage the use of a browser at work to access the data I put on the company intranet. It's proving difficult — they would much rather open My Computer and drill down through many levels of folders, while muttering 'Where was that file? What was it called again?'
I prefer the idea of web pages on an intranet site, with images, hyperlinks, etc, but I have to be careful not to use the term 'browser' since people don't really know what it means. For example, I demonstrated the site to one colleague by telling her to start 'Internet Explorer', then I typed the URL, rather than explain it to her. When the web page opened, she said 'Oh wow, what program is this?'
I've gone to some trouble to use 'friendly URLs' — no complex query strings, but it was probably a waste of time. I'm sure no-one types them in and uses bookmarks/favorites instead.
If the address bar disappeared, it wouldn't be missed by the majority of Internet users, and there's a Google/Yahoo/whatever search tool in the corner of each page.