Let’s examine what I think is the best news in gaming for nearly a decade: StarCraft 2. But let’s not examine it for the game, let’s examine the design:
- First of all, in my browser of choice none of the obvious interaction areas work at the first click. I have to first click to activate the Flash control… for each of the six different Flash controls on that page.
- In my other browser of choice, in fact none of the six Flash controls render at first, I have to click to even get them to do that. But that is by choice, since I hate when a page I have opened in the background starts playing some music loudly at max volume when I am doing other things in some other tab.
- The intro starts automatically playing sounds without any means of controlling the volume for the user.
- Of course, the “SKIP INTRO” link is part of the main Flash control instead of an HTML link, so to use it you have to activate the Flash control first, and you can’t get to it by keyboard at all.
- If you try keyboard navigation, you’ll find the only thing that you can reach by keyboard is the language choice dropdown. Specifically, you can not reach the “TOGGLE FLASH” link which you would have to activate in order to be able to navigate the page by keyboard.
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- When you have toggled Flash off, via mouse, you still find that none of the items you can navigate to via keyboard in any way highlights when focused. Well, except for the language choice dropdown…
- But let’s toggle Flash on again. And examine the mouse interface. Of course, as I always do, I try middle clicking any link I want to open so that it opens in a different tab. Of course, this works on none of the Flash controls. Also, it doesn’t work on the “TOGGLE FLASH” link, because that link uses the “javascript:” pseudo-protocol. Likewise, right clicking and choosing “open link in new tab” doesn’t work on any of the links.
- The Flash-free versions fares better here, the only links that can not be opened in a new tab by middle click are the ones that toggle Flash on again.
- Also, seemingly at random, links turn up an error message “XSLT processing failed!” which is fixed by forcing reloading of that page. Not strictly part of the design, but still an annoyance.
Basic accessibility for non-disabled users isn’t that hard, really. But Blizzard fails at many points…
Some checkpoints:
- Skipping into and toggle Flash links should be plain HTML links, and be first in the tab order.
- Always provide a volume control before starting anything with sound, and never autostart sound. If people open a page in background they don’t generally want it to play that intro music.
- Most links in Flash should be repeated in HTML, unless they provide something that only Flash can give, such as interactive animation.
- When you have simple links with simple hover/focus display changes, there is really no reason why you shouldn’t use HTML links for them.
- Make sure links stand out when tabbing around, and that they can actually be tabbed to.
- All links should be plain HTTP links. That doesn’t mean you can’t use script for users that just click them, but don’t prevent users from opening in new tabs/windows if they want.
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10 Responses to “Some design annoyances”
May 22nd, 2007 at 11:23 pm
Most gaming/game based sites don’t really have accessibility/usability in focus. They all just want big presentation/eyecandy of their product.
May 23rd, 2007 at 6:50 am
And my point is that they could get much better when it comes to accessibility with just a few changes that can be done without changing the design. It’s funny though, I would think the gamer community would be filled with people with good rigs that are used to having many programs working at the same time; that use voice chat, music players and have their volume setting adjusted per program so everything has the right balance instead of through Windows global volume setting; used to doing many things at the same time such as using multiple tabs in their browser and knowing about and using keyboard navigation. So these issues should actually be more of an issue in the gaming community than for computer users in general.
May 23rd, 2007 at 7:12 am
rearding the “XSLT Processing Failed!” error message, it seems they’re taking an interesting technical approach to their website. This isn’t really an accessibility issue, but they’re using client-side XSL processing to gather the information and render the page.
This is quite a poor approach and wholy incompatible with older browsers (or those without the capacity for XSL). The actual XML content they’re providing for each page has none of the relevant information on it, either. XSL transformations such as this should be done server-side, but I guess they couldn’t afford the processing power. It’s a stupid way of rendering a bad website.
Thanks for pointing it out :)
May 23rd, 2007 at 1:37 pm
They have optimised the site for the target audience, I’m sure they would have thought about some of the issues that you have raised.
May 30th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Blizzard is usually pretty good about usability. I think the site will get better with time.
The Click to Activate problem in IE is either laziness or oversight. They should be using JavaScript to generate the tags; then the Click to Activate problem doesn’t happen.
The lack of volume control is also laziness or oversight. The same goes for relying so much on Flash for navigation.
Re the XSLT processing: they use this extensively on the World of Warcraft website. They seem to have put their Starcraft 2 site into the same content management system they use for WoW. Test out the WoW site and see if you have problems. If so, it’s broken across the board, not just on the SC2 site.
You should send your comments to blizzsite@blizzard.com and wowguide@blizzard.com, the first because it’s the webmaster address for the non-WoW sites, and the latter because they’re using the same WoW system for SC2.
May 31st, 2007 at 2:04 am
Jordan: Actually, Internet Explorer was not one of the browsers I tested it with. Nor did I use any other Trident powered browser. I tested it using Opera 9.50 (you’ll see a preview release when Kestrel has reached alpha stage, currently it’s tester only) and Firefox 2.0.
As for the WoW sites, they are very unreliable for another reason. The Europe site has a tendency to be unavailable when the servers go down for maintainance, just for example.
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