…a study by Paul van Schaik at the University of Teesside, UK, has found that the golden ratio does not benefit all designs. Websites with golden proportions can be harder to extract information from, he says.
Van Schaik put 98 students into five groups and asked them all to answer questions using information on five separate websites. He recorded the time it took participants to answer each question, together with the number of web pages they looked at to do so.
All the sites had a navigation bar with links to other sections of the site on the left of the page and a frame for content on the right, but the sizes of these two sections differed for each group. The pages of one group were divided according to the golden ratio, while the websites of the other four groups gave over less space to the navigation bar.
Those in the golden group answered the questions slowest, taking an average of 15.8 seconds to answer each question – 3.5 seconds longer than the fastest group. The golden ratio group also took 2 seconds longer than the next slowest group and had to visit more pages to find the information required.
“It has been suggested since antiquity that the ratio is aesthetically pleasing,” says Van Schaik. “But we found that not only is it not liked in web pages, it is also less efficient in terms of accuracy and speed.”
Tag Archives: JavaScript
Please help me test a CSS menu
I’m testing a css drop down menu for use here and for use at Philly Future. Can you help me by letting me know if this works for you and what browser/browser version/OS you are running?
The menu appears as a bar just beneath this page’s header for now. Don’t sweat the colors – they are temporary.
Quote viewer in AJAX…
I switched the implementation of my quote viewer from Flash to Javascript last night for fun and education. If you view source, it’s there for you to find in gory detail, but here it goes for the lazy…
In the header of this page you will find tag that loads the script that enables the quote viewer:
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="/widgets/quoteview/quoteview.js"></script>
At the top of the script you will notice two variables, one sets the number of seconds I want this quote to auto-refresh (set to -1 to disable) and the the next indicates where to find the XML document that contains the quotes I want to display.
Methods in the script will load a random quote and refresh a div element on the page:
<div id="quoteview"></div>
To kick it off, I call a method from the script:
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="/widgets/quoteview/quoteview.js">quoteViewXmlRequest();</script>
And that’s it 🙂 I’m a server-side developer by trade so if you care to take a look at this and critique, it could be helpful.
Flash vs Ajax
I am working on a module I can use at sites like Philly Future, or here, that displays a random quote from an XML document.
Admittedly I am not an expert at either Flash or Ajax, but I figure this basic module can be built quickly in both for comparison. I’m just about finished with the Flash version and will use it here at my home page and will release its source code. I’ll do the same with Ajax shortly.
After getting either of these online, it should be fun to add behavior to them. After all, using Flash for simple text based output is overkill. One thing to note is how this module can be deployed in any web environment without touching server side code. No PHP. No JSP. No Python. No Perl. Gotta love that.
We’ll see where it goes. Tinkering is fun 🙂