You’re out somewhere, maybe a coffee shop or an airport.\u00a0 Suddenly, a man falls to the floor – you need to know – what’s the antidote for tricyclic antidepressants*?\u00a0 You grab your laptop or mobile and use the local WiFi to look up the answer –<\/p>\n
Only to be annoyed and inconvenienced by the interstitial “terms and conditions” page that the coffee shop and\/or airport redirects your browser to.\u00a0 Time is of the essence!\u00a0 Why do they need a 2-minute flash animation to load an “I agree” button?<\/p>\n
Thus ends my attempt to make a relatively boring subject seem interesting.\u00a0 In any event, I can’t be the only person who’s noticed that WiFi login or “terms and conditions” pages are often way more complicated and annoying than they need to be.<\/p>\n
In the hope that someone, somewhere will do a quick search before implementing one and come across this blog, here are some guidelines.\u00a0 These all follow logically from supporting the user’s goal, which is to get info quickly, and the business’ goal, which is to attract and keep customers.<\/p>\n
Do not require Flash<\/strong>, ActiveX, or god forbid Silverlight.\u00a0 Nothing you could want to do here could possibly require it, and there are lots of WiFi-enabled mobile devices that don’t have it.\u00a0 Do you really want to poke a finger in the eye of every customer with an iPhone?\u00a0 If we’ve already bought iPhones,\u00a0 we obviously like spending money!<\/p>\n Make the checkboxes \/ buttons large<\/strong> enough to click on a small device.\u00a0 So that people with touchscreen PDAs, Blackberries, iPhones and G1’s will be able to touch it on their screens.<\/p>\n Make the page and any server-side code fast<\/strong>.\u00a0 Stay out of the user’s way as much as possible.\u00a0 If your code can’t accept a form and do some logging without dragging a user’s browsing session to a crawl, you need to go yell at your devs.<\/p>\n Once users agree to terms, save it in a cookie<\/strong> for a reasonable amount of time. Many mobile devices don’t allow programs to run in the background, which means session cookies can expire every time the device dozes off.<\/p>\n