David Wiesner
Usability Report
Components used
- XHTML 1.0 transitional with CSS.
- Javascript popups on "click" illustrations.
- Javascript browser identifier under "Etc."
- Javascript roll-over on header.
- Two quiz forms... one checkbox and one radio button.
Testing results
window size
- 1024x800: On this size my background image repeats itself on the right hand side of the screen. I figured how to put the image on an inner box so the site could be centered, but this time I couldn't figure it out. Back to the drawing board.
- 800x600: This is the native width. Looking good.
- 640x480: Due to the planned width of the page, the right sidebar is kicked off and ends up 250pixels below the center column. You don't notice it until you scroll down a ways.
Color depth
- Millions of colors: Looks fine.
- Thousands: The images were from David Wiesner's website and they looked fine. For simple illustrations I never notice much difference between thousands and millions of colors. Photos on the other hand also I know some subtle colors may shift.
- 256 colors: Ugly. Ugly. Ugly. Actually my computer interface (Mac OS X) scrambled at 256.
Different browsers/systems
- Firefox on Mac: This is what I design to so it looked as I expected. Firefox handles images larger than the pop-up window by shrinking the image to fit, then allows you to zoom the image.
- Safari on Mac: Even though this is a different browsing engine, it follows the standards so it looked exactly as I expected.
- Firefox on PC: The header image shifted maybe two pixels to the right.
- MS Internet Exploder on PC: My header image shifted maybe 10 pixels to the right. I'm still trying to work out the difference, but I understand that IE uses a different "box model" of applying CSS margins and padding. As a result my impression is the only way to get it to look right on all systems is to use a number of CSS hacks. I dislike how you have to find the magic zoom botton on the bottom right of the images to zoom to full-size. Actually on the whole I just about hate MSIE. Can I toss it into the Ohio?