I had the luck to attend the Adobe Max conference this year. They started these after I left Adobe and are now a quintessential example of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle; the world is taken to be that which Adobe creates and no other. Or that which recently absorbed Macromedians seem to have very quickly carved out inside Adobe.

The mornings were dominated by main stage presentations where Kevin Lynch introduces a spokesperson or two for each highlighted product. The one that I want to talk about in particular was presented by Scott Fegatte and Ben Forta as an example of the magic of ColdFusion. The conceit of this task was that Lynch challenged them to do something “radical” for the United Way website in a week. This is undoubtedly a laudable cause, but what they did was a classic example of widget tossing that can be experienced here.

The original survey was a 4 page long scroll which lacked clear definition between what was required and what was not. These are obviously boring and this one lacked any indication of commitment, a crucial inducement to getting me to fill one of these out. Just how many questions are there? Given that they are numbered this shouldn’t be too tough to figure out. Whoa, pushing the envelope of logical thinking here. Call me a philosopher.

An Accordion Too Far

The redesign was hardly a cure however. The widget tossed was the newly popular accordion. This divided the content into two parts; perhaps the intended benefit was to make it seem shorter? However, it is now locked inside a fixed window which ends below the fold, so you have to scroll to see it, then scroll inside the window to access the questions.



Additionally, we were told during the presentation that the accordion folds delineate the required and optional groups of questions, but there is no indication made on the actual form as to which is which! Or if anything or everything is required.

This makes the distinction feel capricious. In fact that these are even accordions is not especially clear. Without any cues how to manipulate them they become a control accessible only by people who already know how to use them - the common term is geeks.

While I am sure that ColdFusion has come a long way since we all use to make fun of it in the Nineties, this was a very unfortunate example of how to use it. But a perfect example of grabbing some widget with flashy interactivity and not really thinking if it is going to help the user. [Am I sounding like Jacob Nielsen on a Flash rant here? So be it.] Designing a durable solution means looking critically at the problem and finding a specific answer. I don’t mind if it is clever, great, but the priority is that it improve rather than annoy.