WhatwasIthinking.co.uk

Over the last couple of months I have been working on a great number of design, usability and accessibility reports for clients of mine. Some of the sites I worked on are pretty good, and all you can recommend is maybe tightening up their call-to-actions or look at a couple of points of Section 508 to validate properly. Then there are some that need a bit more help than that. That is natural, some of the sites have been up for years and could do with a new design or will need some more development work.

But what gets me going of late is the inability of some websites to display their PDFs properly…

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The problem with PDF links

I was reviewing a website a few days ago using my usual set of browsers (IE 5.5 - IE7, FF2 FF3, Opera 8 - 9.5, Safari) then I was going through a product page and clicked on a link to read more about a link called “Course documents”. This was when my old test machine’s fans started spinning up and the task manager showed a significant increase of Memory and CPU usage. Acrobat was loading up while IE6 and IE5.5 came to a grinding halt. After about a minute of nothingness the browsers displayed a 3 page PDF with a 1 page full-size image and 2 pages of information about the course.

Now in that time I, the average user, could have been under the impression that the site is crashing my browser, so I would have tried to close the browser forcefully. Or I could have been saying “F*** this, I’ll go elsewhere”.

Not showing your users what link opens a PDF is one of the most annoying things you can do to your users! Not only that, it is a usability and accessibility issue!!!

So I wrote my report to the client, asking them to indicate their PDFs properly. This is what they came back with:

Well done, at least you have the word “Download” appearing within the link. Still not best practice, but at least something - if you are f***ing lazy. So I sat down with the client again and suggested a couple of ideas to his development team:

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Best practice for PDF links

1. Link location: think about moving PDF downloads either into another location entirely, or - if that is not possible or not wanted due to the design and layout - distance the PDF link from other links.
2. Show a file size: here in the EU we still have quite a number of users with dial-up or very slow connections, so it is best practice to show your users what they can expect and how long it may take them.
3. Display a PDF icon: the best visual reference that the link you will be clicking on will be a PDF

In the end the problem was finally solved:

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Conclusion

This was an interesting exercise with that client. And I really wished everyone would do this. Displaying PDF links properly isn’t difficult, it makes you look a lot more professional and you make your site a hell of a lot more usable and accessible. Come on, do your part!