So tell me, how many times do you look at the URL for the pages you are visiting while you are browsing? Once, twice… every time you visit a new link??
I’ve come to notice that when people visit a website, all he needed the address bar is just once, the first time he types in (or ctrl+v in) the main URL to which page he is visiting. After that, he keep following the links in the page and hardly ever needed to see which URL he’s visiting. Or, to do more justice, think of yourself, are you interested in looking at all the random URLs generated or those real long URLs of every page you visit? Do you ever keep track of them?? Of course, for security purpose, you may perhaps want to make it sure that you are still in the particular domain you intend to visit!!
[Pics]
Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer: Notice how many screen real estate does the address bar occupy.
So, the conclusion is, we don’t need the address bar to occupy so much screen real estate.
I’ve come across this a lot of time myself and it made me realise that there is a need to ‘think’ on this issue. To get to the point, just look at the image below and see what has been typed in the text-box.
I’m guessing, your answer probably might be ”yes.. il” or “yes.. ll” or ”yes..tl” or ”yes..H” and it keeps on going!
What I’m trying to point out is that, the text pointer there shades the text typed which created an usability issue. Usually, since the text-box may not be active at the time the user wants to type something, the user brings the pointer right where he wants to type and then click inside the text-box area. This usually leaves the ‘text pointer’ few chars away from the starting point and as the user types on, the characters itself got covered up as can be seen on the image above.
Google has done a lot to improve its emailing features and User interaction through the Labs module. However, I strongly felt that the gmail labs lack one ‘mundane’ feature which everyone needs and would be happy to include with; and that is - an urgency rating system.
If you are one person who uses the email service frequently to communicate, you perhaps must have come to notice that the rating system is extremely essential.
What Google can add to its labs feature is a 5 options rating module, say something like the one shown on the right. The module is suppose to rate the urgency of the email.
What one usually does is read the email he or she receives first, and so the last email you sent, even though it is urgent, could be read last. It’s kind of a FIFO arrangement. You can mention in the subject line, the degree of urgency but there is a better way to do that.
