Usability Whores

Usability Whores: Where we promote usable design, bitch about unusable design, and talk about what your mom did last night.

Your founders modbitches this evening will be lisefrac and chibaraki. (I don't care if it's not evening. Shut up.)

RULES, stolen wholesale from a very old post by captainecchi:

Usability Whores is a community for people who think that usable web design is more important than pretty web design.

We encourage you to join if:

* You've ever been made fuming angry by a website that wouldn't load or work properly in your (recent and standards compliant) browser.

* You believe that making your website usable to the broadest range of people is more important than making it look good

* You're sick of seeing all-looks-and-no-content websites.

* You believe the purpose of the web is communication, and that bad web design interferes with that.

* You know who Jakob Nielsen is. Or worship at the altar of Eric Meyer.

* You know why chibaraki thinks .nu is an insult.

However, since our moderators are a group of "scary bitches" with nothing better to do than bitch out people who should have never been allowed in front of a web editor, and since most bad web designers are very sensitive about their browser-mangling pieces of crap, this community is somewhat exclusive. This is done for the enjoyment of a few rather than the misery of many.

If you wish to join, you should meet these requirements:

* Have a website. This is a must. It's all well and good to rant about usability, but we want to know if you can put it into action.

* This website must be viewable in a modern, standards-compliant browser. Currently, this means any Geckospawn browser (Mozilla, Firefox, Galeon, Camino, NS6). As standards change rapidly, we don't ask that it be usable much farther back, because some of those older browsers are less standards-compliant than a 16 year old's .nu personal page.

* The website should be readable to an individual with normal corrected eyesight (the mods are all 20 year old bespectacled nerds, so that's who's counting) in one of the aforementioned browsers. If your page makes me squint, makes me up the font size, or causes me to erupt in Pokemon-like seizures, you're right out.

* The website must be easily navigable (in one of the aforementioned browsers). To test this, we ask that you tell us to find something on your website (not on the main page) and we should be able to find it with only 30 seconds or less of searching.

* Other random things we don't like: not making use of space on the page, iframes, doodads (sprites, overuse of Javascript, webpages that burst into song, animated gifs), messy code, non-standards compliance, sites written with (crappy) web editors. Yeah, we're elitist pigs. That's why you love us.

* You should not be a blithering idiot. This means no netspeak, for the love of all that is good and natural.

The admission process is this:

* Make a post to the community with a link to your webpage, a discussion of what you used to make it (write your own HTML? Or did you use an editor? Use PHP? Use Javascript?), and something you want us to find somewhere on your site (or, off your site, but available from your site).

* An example? "Hi, my name is Suzie Blah, and my website is www.ididyourmom.com. It's all about my adventures doing your mom. I wrote my own HTML; and I used PHP to sort the "Adventure Archives." Try to find the "Adventure Archive" labelled "Your Mom's Sex Toys."

* There will be some kind of rating system by which we decide if you are accepted. hrist does not have love for the old one right now, so there may be a new one. We'll tell you if you get in. Trust us.

Usability Whores Rules:

... or, what do I do once I've been accepted?

* It is always acceptable to post publically constructive criticism of another member's website. Please, though, let's keep it civil when we're talking about other members.

* On the other hand, criticism of any non-members MUST be made friends-only. But, this means you can be as nasty as you want! We know bad webpages make you seethe. Sure as hell makes me seethe. We understand.

* Keep it on topic. Otherwise, you're boring, and we hate that, too.

** Note: Usability Whores makes no claims about Eric Meyer's treatment of kittens. Any claims Usability Whores seems to be making about Eric Meyer and kittens are facetious and should not be taken seriously.