After taking a couple of weeks off from publishing our weekly UXMonday post I find myself heading in the direction of a rant yet again. Based upon the title you know where I’m going with this already. Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing and JQuery for JQuery sake is really quite annoying.

If you recall from a post we wrote back in October of last year we hammered Oracle for creating a user portal in Flash and the end product was a user hostile interface that didn’t meet the basic needs of finding and sharing information. Well today its Mashable’s turn.

First the caveats- we like Mashable’s content and check their site daily for Social Media news and general tech info but recently (within the past quarter) they’ve rolled out these fading images. Go to Mashable’s homepage. Start scrolling down the page slowly, look at the bottom of your screen as you scroll, see those images on the left fade-in?

OK, it’s a cool effect but does it offer anything to the user? Nope- not a thing. You can make the argument that it keeps the page interesting as the user scrolls, or hints at Mashable’s masterful web design skills however at the end of the day it adds weight to the page and distracts the user.

Remember the “yellow fade technique” also known as YFT? It was a great piece of JavaScript that faded into or out of view a particular page element that had been updated. It was a signal to the user that something happened because a traditional page refresh did not occur. See, there was a reason AND it was a cool effect.

Now there a lot of blogs doing this post fade-in technique and its annoying. There is no reason for it other than a signal that you too can make a post fade into view. Look, we love JQuery here at Modal. We use it most often on web app interfaces for messaging. But using the library just because you want things to entertain is not a good reason.

Remember, it’s best to understand the rule of usage first than to break it without understanding why the rule exists in the first place. All these JQuery tutorials on the Web are going to do more harm than good. So before you drop in another animation effect pause for a moment and question WHY first. Don’t make JQuery another silly, little animation creator.

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