Suprisingly forward, suprisingly backward
Posted: December 1, 2006 Filed under: Economics, marketing Comments OffI don’t normally talk about commercial stuff here but I went to a very odd conference this week. I can’t say exactly what it was but it was a large UK communications group talking about how the current generation of internet trends were being reflected in their business.
Of course, the “2.0″ thing was mentioned excesively but in the same breath we also heard about a “viral” campaign for a mortgage advice company, we heard about amazon-style profiling of user’s needs on a 10k website, and we heard about how CD-Roms are still viable before being showing us a CD-Rom interface with web style navigation.
It was like a hideous 1999 flash back. There’s a lot of clever people making clever observations about the way our world is changing, but our industry has its own very long tail!!
Let us not forget that it was the crap me-too agencies that really helped the bubble burst last time round. Let’s crack down on terrible, ill-informed copyists in our industry just as they would be in any other.
Buttons you just don’t want to press
Posted: December 1, 2006 Filed under: usability Comments OffWhen we did a big re-pitch recently, we knew we’d have to know as much about why our site wasn’t working as all the people pitching against us. (There’s lots of complicated reasons why we hadn’t just fixed these problems in advance! Honest).
Well the great thing about usability research is you always find out something which you would NEVER have worked out, but once you know it, it seems blindingly obvious. What did we find? In an effort to make users more able to click on things and engage with them, we’d made the links big, flasher, more graphical and more funky. Each time round the client was screaming “bigger”, “shinier”.
And what did the users see? They saw nothing at all. I’ve got three videos on my hard drive of users trying to complete the simplest task “buy tickets” and they can’t do it. They’re looking at a screen on which about 1/8 of the real estate is a “buy now” button, and they can’t see it. It’s massive; it’s flashy and brash. It should be really obvious, but it looks like an ad, and users screen it out. It might as well be invisible.
Today, even more bizarrely, we were trying out a big “contact us” button. Same background with Verdana and the client’s corporate font. the corporate font looks better of course but it doesn’t work. Verdana works. Tell that to your creative director who wants “brand consistency”!
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