on Open!
Posted: December 18, 2006 Filed under: skipintro, usability, web2.0 Comments OffI think it says something about where we’re going that I feel peculiarly famous to be mentioned on Antony’s fantastic blog Open. If by some miracle you’ve seen my blog but not his, Open is the single most useful and thoughtful commentary on social media that I have found. Enthuiastic but not over-hyped! It’s a rare balance.
Antony also posts a very interesting article right before his lovely mention of “Usable interfaces”. Google has published a 2006 zeitgeist. They’ve picked out the ten most common search phrases of the year:
- bebo
- myspace
- world cup
- metacafe
- radioblog
- wikipedia
- video
- rebelde
- mininova
- wiki
Antony takes from this the fact that 8 of them are social media related. True and entirely relevant. More interesting for me, over half of them are people trying to get to a website they *know* the URL for, but they no longer make a distinction between typing in the URL itself and typing a bit of it into Google.
Do people understand the distinction? Maybe some of them do. But if they won’t type in “.com” to get to myspace; how much time do you think they’ll be wanting to spend on your “skip intro”
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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