Usability/Usability humor
Friday, February 8, 2002[1:39:15 PM]
The hundred millionth monkey. This is a parable, a fable, a legend, and a true story (honest), about the way behavior changes and spreads, and when it reaches some critical mass, the entire population changes.
Once upon a time all the web monkeys used tiny type on their web pages. Most used font size=2. The artistic and the long-winded used font size=1. The forward-thinking, standards-compliant web monkeys used stylesheets: text-size: 11px.
But one day a web monkey said, "the users spent thousands of dollars on their computers, why not let the *users* decide how big the text is?" That monkey was ostracized and ridiculed.
But on another day, a different web monkey was tired of having to redesign the website whenever the big-boss monkey got a new computer or a different browser. The little-boss monkey was tired of spending half his time adjusting the big-boss's settings so the website would look good, and the other half lobbying IT to force all employees to use the same browser and browser settings.
They made a website that looked good in any browser, even if the user had their fonts set to a readable size.
Sure enough, the whole idea spread.
The important thing is that at one point -- we don't really know if it was exactly the 100 millionth web monkey, or maybe already the 97 millionth monkey -- all the rest of the monkeys decided to let the user choose the font size... even the monkeys that weren't reading the same weblogs.
And that's the true story of how we got to where we are today.
© Copyright 2002 john robert boynton.
Last update: 9/8/02; 11:28:04 AM.