MICHAEL MCWATTERSThoughts on digital design, and other nonsense.

Oh, how I miss thee.

As we all know, Apple likes to try to make things easier, to streamline things. However, their recent decision to abolish the iTunes shopping cart was a big mistake. Now, instead of adding a song to your shopping cart, you can either add it to a wishlist, or buy it immediately.

Sounds reasonable, right? Wrong.

Say, like me, you want to give several songs to a friend as a gift. Well, unless those songs are in one album, you’ll have to buy and send one song a time. Oh, but wait…you can add them to your wishlist, and then purchase and give them all at once, right? Wrong again: if any of the songs you want to give are already in your own library, they cannot be added to your wishlist.

Some people have claimed the reason Apple got rid of the shopping cart was to streamline the buying experience, similar to the one-click option at Amazon. However, Amazon didn’t get rid of their shopping cart; they merely added the option to purchase with one-click. In other words, they didn’t remove a feature, they added an enhancement. In fact, Amazon not only provides one-click and a shopping cart, they have a wishlist, as well. Why? Because a wishlist is, in fact, different from a shopping cart; it’s a place where you keep things you’re not ready to buy yet, but might want to consider later. Apple’s decision to make the wishlist act like a shopping cart is incongruent with how people think of wishlists.

Is this just a tempest in a teapot? Probably, but it points up an important usability issue: never remove any feature users are familiar with without providing a functional, obvious alternative.

Avert your eyes...to the left.

One of my biggest pet peeves is sites that do not center their content. In the past, it was technically difficult to center pages, and since everyone had low resolution monitors, most of the screen was filled up with content anyway.

These days, though, the proliferation of high resolution monitors means that sites that are left-justified will end up creating vast amounts of dead space to the right of the content well.

More to the point, however, is the usability issue here: when we read things (books, magazines, packages, newspapers), we put them directly in front of our faces, not to the side (pirates excluded). However, these left-justified sites require users to either manually shrink their browser windows or crane their heads to the left side of their monitors, causing fatigue.

The strange thing is this: many new sites are being developed that are left-justified, despite the obvious usability issues. I recently heard a client say that they thought left-justification looks better. Really?