A colleague shared an article on the excellent boxes and arrows site which I had not been on in years, and I then discovered another excellent article. Written by Stephen Turbek, he points out some obvious, but oh so easily missed key design items that all site and app designers need to remember.
Good point on the Apple iPhone ads that of course, also trained generations whilst it played, and gave the perception it was easy to use. A huge factor in the iPhones success.
Most of those involved in the customer experience of their web site or product will understand this stuff as basics, but rarely has this been presented so well, and articulated so clearly.
Giles Colborne explains his views on three types of users; Experts, Willing Adopters, and 'mainstreamers', and why you should ignore your expert customers for the most part.
I loved the way this is presented and spelled out in such an accessible way for all, and this just found it's way straight in to my amazon.com basket 8D
At the movies the other night and treated with this pretty cheese-tasticly awful ad:
Yep, someone, somewhere, got paid for that. Anyway, lured by a glimmer of hope that someone had actually tried to do a hulu.com for Australia I headed over to www.fixplay.com.au Sadly I was disappointed immediately. Each and every programme is fairly old, but some good new-ish shows are there, so some kudos to them. I tried to watch and was greeted by, on every single video;
We're sorry, this video is not available at this time.
I changed browsers and tried again, same thing. Refreshed, nothing. Every single video, all=FAIL! At this point a massive amount of traffic would leave, wouldn't you? I nearly did, but then in frustration at this failure, I eventually noticed a small link way below underneath...
Well that's clear then, eh?
What fixplay have disastrously done wrong, is not put the users experience of the site first. Kinda shocking really, but then most sites don't. And especially after paying for an ad, and the cost of cinema advertising. If me, and in charge? I'd be kicking some bum riiiight about now.
In a world where the flash player for video rules, and is cross platform, and where YouTube is king, Queen and the royal family of online video. Even with HTML 5 video steaming ahead, fixplay have bet badly on the bespoke browser plugin horse.The plugin at fault? Namely, Silverlight. Microsoft's waste of time and not very cross platform answer to the Adobe flash player. Then again fixplay has investment by Microsoft , who also have stakes in channel seven and nine who supply the content. Poor buggers have no choice but to try to flog the plugin.
(Silverlight is frankly, more crap you and your browser do not need.)
So ironically given it's called fixplay, and it doesn't play for many of us, someone does need to 'fix' it. Even updating the message to 'You need to install Silverlight' would be the lazy but more workable option. Although for many, too late, and I for one wont be back. So before you can make an ad and spend money and state your product is 'exciting' and 'change peoples life's', make sure a little ten minute basic user experience testing outside of the office or online with some geeks or beta testers gets done? Please?
It might not change your life, but will change your customers first basic expectations of your site.
A great quote above from web veteran Jeffery Zeldman, who along with Whitney Hess, discuss (amongst others things) user experience & web design. The quote is so typical of the challenges we face online in meeting often unreachable goals...
This really is an excellently articulated video which covers issues I face every day, so to me this is just gold! The statement from Whitney that:
"The (web) sites that win awards are the ones that are used the least".
So, so true, and as these two web heads discuss, it's all about the user. (Duh!) However, often we nursemaid and become a psychologist in your role these days on web sites with clients and employers as you deal with all these variety of issues, trying to improve the users experience but can easily get stuck trying to please everyone.
I'm jealous. There I've said it. Jealous of this insightful and amazing post that I didn't articulate this myself!
I kinda get so excited by the web sometimes and it's possibilities, there is just so many web sites to fix, and good things to share with others, it's hard to get to cover even a small portion of good info out there. It's especially hard to get the time to articulate out as well as Aarron Walter's post does here. The chart above is just part of a post that if you work on the web YOU SHOULD READ.
p.s Thanks to the very talented web head Julia Snip for sharing. You should follow her on twitter @jsnip
Nice post about the totally not accessible, and quite annoying habit to many of filing up every inch of the screen on twitter backgrounds with inaccessible links! All the examples here could really do with simplifying the message and cutting the crap out, or to steal Domino's marketing tagline; 'Stop The Puffery'.
I pity the fool who thinks web site 'bling' will equate to 'ka-ching'...Clicking the title of this post reveals an old article from Gerry McGovern that’s still incredibly valid, and apart from changing the word 'ugly' to 'plain' I have to agree with him wholeheartedly.Of all the sites I visit in a day, that I see, hear about or are in the most popular web wise, the truly very pretty sites, ain't high on the list for most users. Instead Google, Gmail, Ebay, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Craigs list, and Delicious are all some of the worlds busiest sites, and all are incredibly functional and useful, and that’s exactly why they have been a huge success. These sites have understood who the web is for, and have remained at their core, minimal, simple, and plain in design.Why? Because yet again its not about your designer, it's about your user, that little person who y'know pays the bills? Function, usability, content, and then by all means some eye candy, but truly less is more on the web. Even less on Mobile.I'd say the sites I mention, are all actually very pretty on the eye, but then I've been told in the past that the perspective and focus on end users and simplifying pages, equates to somehow "dumbing them down."I'll stick with my perspective and the sites that seem to be getting the traffic, and the point of who the web is for.
The title above is probably clear to many, and yet I often read about, and meet many people involved in the web who often always seem to forget what we are here to do in web land. Many get bogged down in "but that's they way we've always done it" (as if were destined for some eternal 1995 design groundhog day for the rest of our lives), to those who clearly just have their own personal vision or end game on the radar, and cant. seem.to.break.free. from their background, baggage and reality that what they are driving is all about them, and not the user of your web site...
From the always insightful Gerry McGovern:
I believe I am part of a new generation of consumers. Think of us as intelligent strangers. We no longer trust most brands anymore because they don’t deserve our trust. We are the ‘search, compare and verify’ crowd, and our numbers are growing. We are the reason the Web is such a success.The Web is the customer
Enough said. (click the titles post to read his full article)
An RSS addict for many years, I have a ton of feeds, and since around late 2002 I carted around these feeds from app to app. It's always been key to my research, work, updates, and connection points with friends around the world. I was a faithful Bloglines boy for many years as Google had no entry in this reader space. And when they finally did join, it was quite unusable. Earlier this year I had seen the writing on the wall (read stagnation) with Bloglines refusal to do any innovation or bug fixes, and jumped ship despite Google reader still not progressing.
I truly settled in in March, ported across all my several hundred feeds, and began to appreciate reader. It was good timing. And in the last three months alone, Google readers team have been innovating like madmen on speed, and adding some intelligent and long overdue social aspects to the tool almost daily it seems. In essence, if you don't innovate in web land, you die in web land. I've seen 14 new friends also share and join in the last month alone, and pass on and comment on what they like and are reading. If your not on-board yet...do it! It'll save you time, simplify and prioritise your surfing, and allow you to connect and share much more with others good links and information. It's also pretty addictive and has become one of my most used daily sites. I'm hungry to read what your reading and share more of what I'm reading, so click on the posts title to join in, or if you don't yet have an account a link on the right hand side of that same page to Get started with Google Reader will get you going. Despite some really, really poor estimation that RSS is dead from TechCrunch earlier this year, and that we shoudl all just use Twitter...( Personally I believe many like me are beginning to get a little tired of Twitters deluge of updates, spam, and Ashton Kutcher/Opera geek wannabes.) RSS it's very much just getting started for the mainstream public, more so now that it comes with facebook like sharing capabilities. Sharing is not dead, is not a fickle 'trend' and is always a good thing in my book. Go get your feed on.
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