Using Slide Me’s for what Slide Me’s were intended

One of the great things about working in Web Services is the calibre of our clients. Often, when we introduce a new functionality or feature of our service we find our clients have thought of a new and extended use for it before we have even finished our sentence. This is always awesome.

Or almost always. Occasionally the dynamic nature of our clientele and their ability to use and adapt the tools we give them pushes the envelope until the envelope is not very happy. This is the case with the Slide Me function.

Slide Me’s were introduced to enable Frequently Asked Question to appear beautifully, fluidly and seamlessly on CCMS pages. They are designed to take one or perhaps two sentences of text. No additional formatting, or bullet points, or tables (either inside the Slide Me’s or containing them), videos, forms, iframe includes, nested Slide Me’s (!) Flash animations, photo galleries or online shopping carts. And yet we are finding more and more that Slide Me’s are being required to take all these items. One or two lines of text have, in some cases, been expanded to several hundred.

So we have made a decision around Slide Me’s: we are not going to take them away, but we are going to deprecate support for Slide Me’s which contain anything more than two sentences of plain text. We are very happy that some of our clients get so excited by the opportunity to use these features; but realistically we are spending a lot of time trying to fix unsolvable issues because they are being filled to bursting with which is too complex or too voluminous. Remember also that the point of Slide Me’s is to hide content – if what you have put into the Slide Me is such crucial information then break it out into its own page – make every Slide Me into its own page and then the content is so much easier for our users to find!