Website Review: Don't Click it (it's long, sorry)

Review on www.dontclick.it

While I was trying to find a completely new and innovative website on the Internet to do my website review on, I stumbled upon a sight not coincidentally called, www.stumbleupon.com and looked under websites only to find the dontclick.it site. I’m not going to lie, I didn’t go to the dontclick.it site right away, and decided to see what was so great about this other websites. What I found was they had no cool flash intro that I had never see before, just good ideas or sites with crazy and cool information with only a mediocre site. It wasn’t until then, that I decided to click on the dontclick.it sight. I mean it had to be interesting considering it isn’t even a .com…right?

Wrong. It was beyond what I expected! At first it was a little confusing so I started shaking the mouse, which is what I would assume would be the normal reaction for anyone. Then I realized it, this website doesn’t require you click ANYTHING! You just slide the mouse over the webpage to find out information and navigate. It was fantastic. And although you would think it would be hard to get used to, I didn’t once hit a false click. It seemed so natural to me (which I think I’m going to give the dock on my Mac credit for that).

So how different is this website? Well besides the fact that you don’t have to click and wait anywhere from 3-30 seconds for a page to load, this page uses an entirely new type of graphical user interface (GUI). And because it is a website (and I am fortunate enough to be in a computer science class with web design) I also know that the page is made entirely out of Flash which is similar to AJAX (which is what is used for Google maps). These 2 technologies combined allow for a 98% seamless interaction and at most 5 seconds wait time for a page to load. The idea that www.dontclick.it is exemplifying reduces anticipation of the user, boredom from waiting, and no stress (the site tells you in its Body Ergonomy section that studies show that bad user interfaces, ie: run of the mill websites, cause stress because of boredom, and having to wait).

Although I was a little confused upon entering the sight, it didn’t take long for me to figure out how to navigate around it. After figuring out what the idea was behind this whole site being unclickable, it made me want to explore the entire site just to see how it worked and figure know where the idea came from and how it was achieved. The website provided me with more information than I expected and answered all my questions. It even entertained me with statistics that it provided and a 3 level game it has to test the user’s ability in just dragging the mouse as opposed to having to normally drag and click. I’m happy to brag that my first time doing the game I score on an ‘Intermediate’ level.

There was a plethora of information on the site that went along with promoting the non-clicking idea of a website that I didn’t even think of. It has a section that says how it is positive for your body; it has a history of computers and the idea of the mouse; there’s a page that has an idea for a product that will stop the user from clicking if necessary; there’s even a page that explains the number of ways a user can advance with obtaining new information from the flash rollover idea and actual “mouse recordings” of how random users interacted with the website on their first try! Talk about informative.
One of my favorite screens of information (besides the game) was the experiment screen. In this one, it has 4 different scenarios that load when you rollover a test tube and an illustration of a random scene will pop up. Once this happens, it is up to the user on how to navigate throughout the area to explore what will happen. For example, in the 4th experiment test tube, there is an area of a parking garage that loads and as you move the mouse arrow throughout the space, a new interactive and different animation occurs in the certain section you just passed through. I liked this one the best because there were certain areas where you could continue to change the picture and others where once it reached a certain point, it couldn’t change anymore. It really pushed the idea of the limits you can do with have an entire flash based website.
After further exploration of the site and realizing that there was no separate pages that went along with the main one, I needed to view the source of this page to see what kind of code went into making this. When I did this, I think realized a main global attribute was used. In computer science terms, this means that the site is linked to a separate one in order for it to work the way it does. So then is it technically a website? No. It isn’t. However, I was able to go through the couple lines of code and find the global attribute (real website) that dontclick.it was connected to. So then in a sense dontclick.it is not a sight, but rather an entity that was created through, http://dcit.lxfx.org. Once I went to the real website, I looked at the sources for a couple of the screens that would appear once you “moused” over them. When I did this, I realized that the whole site was written in a simple code, that I didn’t understand so I assumed it was flash, and I haven’t learned that yet.

After all my detective work on this simple yet amazing idea behind not having to click, and using nothing but flash to create a website, I realized that soon this will be the reality of all websites. Sure, you cannot get away with totally eliminating having to click buttons or links, but I feel that applying the rollover technique to the design of websites will be eminent because face it, the computer makes people lazy and the more we use it, the more we get annoyed with aspects of it that so long ago seemed to be so cutting edge. For example, wait time. We’re an impatient bunch of humans in the new technological world and have a ‘Nothing- but- rollover” website design would eliminate the most impatient of the crew. This would then make these impatient people extremely happy and we can move forward to an even faster type of navigating through a website, if it’s even possible.

With all my detective work on just how dontclick.it worked, I dug even further and decided it would be useful to read the copyright. I found out something even cooler once I read this! Even though this idea of having the entire site be rollovers was created in 2005, it was created by a student named Alex Frank for his senior project at the University of Essen- Duisburg in Germany. To find this out was pretty inspiring for me because I really enjoy web design and the work that goes into creating a new and cutting edge website. Plus, the man is German and he’s able to create a website that can be read across the Atlantic Ocean and still be able to understand the content and idea behind it. That’s talent and success in design if I’ve ever experienced it. If a student could think of this 2 years ago, imagine the possibilities that await with Flash. Not only that, but it also gives me incentive because this kid was able to do this for a senior project. He must have gotten a job right away just because of this project. I want to do that when the time comes. Hell, I want to be able to create a website that is just as amazing by the time I need to apply for an internship. I’m sure that will land me a pretty solid one.

-shannon