The Front Yard

Progress…

…so sometimes getting together with family is a little weird. i certainly love my parents, and all my extended family. i enjoy every moment of the times i get to spend with them. i just feel a little weird and isolated with the knowledge that i’m not really the same person, and it’s probably best to just not talk about it.

I decided to try to transfer my money by wire. The copy on the page indicated that there will be a “small fee” (the word fee was hyper-linked) for the wire transfer. I clicked on the “fee” hyperlink to see what the fee is for wire transfers. The hyperlink went to a fees page that had a fee listed for every possible interaction with e-trade! Wow this is really targeted useful info e-trade. Thanks so much for making me wade through mounds of irrelevant information to find my fee for the wire transfer. Not my idea of good times…

So I went forward with the wire transfer. On the form I had to specify the amount I want to transfer. I would suggest that providing the amount of funds available for transfer somewhere on the page might be useful. Ok, so I leave the page, go find the balance on another page, and come back. Apparently it’s unreasonable that I didn’t have the amount memorized. Ok fine. So I specified the full amount, along with the rest of the information on the form and submitted it. The result…

ERROR: you don’t have that much available blah blah blah. I finally figured out that I needed to subtract the wire transfer fee from what I had available to transfer to get the true amount of available funds. Would it be too hard to put that on the form. Something like     Wire Amount : ________ . ____ You have $xxx.xx available after applicable fees.

After filling out the necessary form (with appropriate amount information), the website informs me that for my security it can’t process the wire because I had recently changed some information in my profile. That’s all wonderful. I’m all for e-trade trying to protect my security. That’s peachy. So the page tells me that I can request some sort of security token and complete the transaction. Just click the “send a security token” (or something along those lines) button below, and we’ll send you an email, and you can click on the link in the email and complete the transaction. Great! I’ll do that. Only one problem. There is no “send me a security token” button anywhere of the page! I promise, I looked over the page for a solid 5 minutes. Oh, and “for my information”, it had “The email address listed for this account is:”, and the space to the right was completely blank! WTF? I have a valid email address associated with the account, and it’s even shown on one of the profile pages. At this point, I’m beginning to suspect that the site has some serious problems/usability issues. The takeaway is this — think about your user’s task when designing your interface. Collect all the information he or she might need to complete the task and put it at intuitive places on the UI.

So I call the 1-800 number, navigate through all the menus, and after waiting several minutes, I’m told that e-trade is closed and that I should call back during business hours. Gee, thanks. At least your phone system matches your website in usability and user friendliness. Thanks for the frustrating evening.

I had some interesting findings while trying to figure out why mouse-event-based hover behaviors were so slow in IE7 for a DHTML web application on a major website that uses mouseover/mouseout events to change the background color of a table row. All other browsers (including IE6) did this lightning fast, even with very large tables. However, IE7 sucked major ass, even when tables were only 20 to 30 rows. (also note that for optimal performance in IE do this by changing the inline style backgroundColor property explicitly vs. swapping out style classes. That was another lesson learned on another day) …anyway

So one of the first things I tried was to remove all javascript and CSS payload from the page (stripped down to bare markup), and added just enough javascript back in to handle the row highlighting on mouseover/mouseout. When I did this suddenly the row highlighting was rocket fast again! So I added the CSS back into the payload. Slow. Aha!! Frak!! Now what? Then I started a process of pulling the CSS back-in in bite-size chunks to see what CSS might be causing the slow down. This took several hours as the site has a very large CSS payload, but once I figured out the pattern this started to go much faster. Turns out any selectors in the payload that had “:hover” psuedo-classes that weren’t specifically targeting anchor tags, slowed down mouse events for IE7 (in standards mode only). This was even for selectors that would end up not selecting anything in the DOM because they were scoped in such a way as to only be pertinent to non-IE browsers. And it only took 1 selector to slow down the page. Every single one had to be removed before it sped back up to normal performance.

So in summary, when pushing alot of CSS payload into a document, and you see sucky performance in IE7 mouseover/mouseout event speed, make sure your CSS payload
is GOOD, and not BAD . . .

BAD BAD BAD (not explicitly targeted to anchor)

    :hover { . . . }
    .foo:hover { . . . }
    #foo:hover { . . . }
    div.foo:hover { . . . }

GOOD (explicitly targeted to anchor)

    A:hover { . . . }
    A.foo:hover { . . . }
    A#foo:hover { . . . }

Good luck, hope this helps someone. God I hate IE.

I think this might hurt my head. A blog entry from flickr containing a photo of my blog, that has a flickr badge that has photos from my photostream. Reminds me of a scene from spaceballs
[Dark Helmet and Sandurz come across an image of themselves viewing the screen. As they react, the screen mimics what they are doing]
Dark Helmet: What the hell am I looking at? When does this happen in the movie?
Colonel Sandurz: Now, you’re looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now is happening now.
Dark Helmet: What happend to then?
Colonel Sandurz: We passed then.
Dark Helmet: When?
Colonel Sandurz: Just now. Were at now, now.
Dark Helmet: Go back to then!
Colonel Sandurz: When?
Dark Helmet: Now.
Colonel Sandurz: Now?
Dark Helmet: Now!
Colonel Sandurz: I can’t.
Dark Helmet: Why?
Colonel Sandurz: We missed it.
Dark Helmet: When?
Colonel Sandurz: Just now.
Dark Helmet: When will then be now?
Colonel Sandurz: Soon.

I like the colors but need to figure out how to effectively make use of color without going too crazy. I need a good visual designer to do this stuff for me, but i like a good challenge, so I’m going to tough it out and come up with something on my own.