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So the other day I went over to the local BofA to deposit some checks and I saw that they had some brand new ATMs.  Now, with the really old ATMs, you would put your checks in an envelope and type in the total amount of the deposit. And with the successors to those ATMs, you would insert your checks one at a time, sans envelope, and you would then verify the amount that the ATM automatically read off those checks with its internal scanner.

With these new ATMs, however, you can insert all your checks at once, again without an envelope, and the scanner will deal with them all for you.  Reduces paper waste; cuts out a few steps; sounds good, right?

It would be good if the brand new ATM that I used didn’t have problems scanning the amounts off every one of my checks.  Every single one.  And I would have just corrected the amounts at the verification stage, but the on-screen images of the checks were too small for me to read.

The only thing I could do was cancel the entire transaction, get my checks back, try to remember the amount on each one, and start over.  These weren’t big checks, maybe totaling a few thousand dollars, but trying to remember four several-digit numbers is surprisingly hard to do!

Fortunately — or perhaps not — it didn’t matter.  When I inserted the checks again, the ATM seemingly scanned them all without problem — and then showed me the calculated total: $82,550.25.

As nice as that would have been were it true, I cancelled the transaction yet again.  It’s then that I noticed the logo on the machine: Diebold, it said.

Want to learn how jQuery can help you build smarter, more dynamic user interfaces — in particular, within Drupal?  I’m presenting an intro session at this weekend’s Bay Area Drupal Camp (BADCamp) gathering in Berkeley.

The session is on Saturday at 11am.  Drop by and check it out if you’re attending.  For those who can’t make it or didn’t register before alll the spots were gone, I’ll post my notes here.

Sometimes, I just want to take a quick look at the upcoming year and see how busy I’m going to be. I don’t need to know the details of all my appointments, but I’d like to know where certain holidays fall, when I’m going to be traveling, how that matches up with big deadlines, and so on.

Unfortunately, most digital calendars don’t provide a year view.  For instance, Google Calendar lets you look at a day, a week, four days (why?), and a month — but not an entire year.  The last I checked, Outlook does the same (although with a more helpful five-day view, rather than four.)

When calendars do provide a year view, it’s usually just the “month view” for each of the 12 months, compressed onto a single page.  For example, here’s the year view for Yahoo Calendar:

Oddly, Yahoo Calendar doesn’t seem to show events on this view — it’s simply a selector that takes you to the “week view” that you click on.

But even if you did see some sort of indication of booked events on this view, it wouldn’t be so easy to read.  Events spanning multiple weeks or months would wrap too many times. And you’d have to look pretty hard to figure out which weekends were booked and which were open.

It’s not a terrible sin, but it’s not the most usable way to visualize a year’s events.

So what’s better?  I’ve been searching for a couple years and the only really good visualization I’ve found so far is in an Outlook plugin from an Australian company called Planet Software.  Their Outlook Year View plugin adds an option to a standard Outlook calendar that lets you see all your events in the following style.

I can’t speak for the plugin because I don’t use Outlook, but I love the way this visualization maps out each month’s events linearly.  Stacking the months lets you take in the entire year in a comfortable left-to-right, top-to-bottom format.  And staggering the months aligns all the weekends, so you can quickly see what’s still free.

The moral here is that even something so familiar as a calendar can be improved upon.  Tufte would be proud.

I was going through some articles I had written a while back and came across this one on Web accessibility.  Though I wrote it in 2006 while I was at TechSoup, it’s surprising to see these myths persist.  In particular, myths #1 through #3 pop up over and over again on projects I work on.  And though #4 (JavaScript use) isn’t much a problem for “Web 2.0″ sites, it’s shocking that JavaScript is still off limits in many enterprise and instiutional situations.

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Do the links on your Web site need to be colored differently depending on whether a visitor has already clicked on them?  If you read a lot of Jakob Nielsen, you’re probably tempted to say yes. Indeed, in Nielsen’s 2007 update to Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design, “not changing the color of visited links” is sin number three.

But the problem with one-size-fits-all usability guidelines like these is that they tend to overlook the fact that not all Web sites are created equal — or, in this case, that not all hyperlinks are equal.

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