Posted 5:21 PM by Floyd

We just got back from taking my nephews to the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose. This is less a museum than a giant play area with a thin veneer of science and history education. My older nephew Scott (aged 7) played with a fire engine and pretended to cook some pizza. His younger brother Robbie (aged 3) ran a model railroad, and played with a Rube Goldberg machine that rolled tennis balls through tubes. They both had a lot of fun; I highly recommend the Discovery Museum to anyone who needs to entertain young children.

The Museum's web page is a another matter. It is filled with detailed graphics and menus, yet contains numerous design flaws:

• The home page contains an amusing little animated vehicle that makes little puttering sounds as it flies across the screen. After about ten seconds, this is no longer amusing.
  
  Design Principle Violated: Do not drive the user out of his Christforsaken mind.
  
  
• The Directions and Parking page provides driving directions. These directions -- which contain a few kilobytes' worth of line drawings and text -- are served via a browser-choking 163K of Postscript.
  
  Design Principle Violated: Do not sodomize the browser with bloatware.