There’s something that’s been bugging me for the last few months and I think I understand it now.
Resistance to disruptive technologies is common. But why can’t we see progress more clearly? Paraphrasing a million conversations going on in 2011:
“Kindles are nice, but I’d never get one as I like the feel of a book in my hand.”
Then 6 months later:
“Kindles are so easy. I can’t believe I used to carry a heavy book to work every day.”
Something I’ve been doing more recently is modelling user journeys as a conversation between the website and the user. I’m not sure if anyone else uses this technique, but I find it useful—it involves simple imagining the website can talk to the user:
“Hi”“Hi, I’d like to buy doodad”“Great, here are the doodads we stock, we think this one is especially good.”“Thanks, I’d like more details on that one”…. etc.
Recently I was asked to redesign the order journey where a customer had come to the site to make a specific change to their current service. The requirement was to up-sell the customer some additional services while they were making the change to their existing service. This has obvious potential to irritate the customer when all they want to do is what they came to the site to do.
I looked for it but couldn’t find it so I made it. Here’s an Axure library of callout widgets:
It’s not exactly rocket science but hopefully someone might find it useful. Callouts are probably an oddity in the Axure world, as Axure is more based on prototypes rather than wireframes. But at work we use Axure more for traditional wireframes than prototypes so need callouts for on-page documentation. In this environment Axure’s killer feature is it’s SVN based system for collaborating on a shared file. (Try getting three people to successfully update a 100+ page Visio document at the same time without errors…)
Everyone else is doing it, but I’ve only got the one. Well, one and a wish.
In 2011 websites will become more produced. By ‘produced’ I mean something like ‘using time based effects to engage the user’.
Two powerful and extreme examples of this trend are:
If you’re not amazed and entertained by the first and moved by the later, then you’re a cold hearted cynic. Both these websites show how strong the effects of using time based effects to engage the user can be.
In a vain attempt to try to get myself writing on this blog more regularly, I’m going to start a weekly series about interfaces that have caught my eye. It’ll be originally titled ‘Interface of the week’. I’m not going to look at things too deeply, but rather just point out the interesting, inspiring, or possibly, interestingly improvable bits.
This week’s interface of the week is the interface of a new mobile phone : First Else. (No, I’d not heard of it either—and don’t visit that link—they have a hugely long and dull Flash intro that proclaims, apparently without irony, “Technology was supposed to make our lives easier”, ho hum…) Do look here, on Behance.
So it looks like Facebook is going to launch an email service soon. This makes a lot of sense to me—email and social networking sites are how people keep up to date with each other, so combining the two seems like common sense. It’s always amazed me why any self respecting social networking site doesn’t already have email built in. All social sites have some sort of private messaging function, and it ought to be relatively easy, from a user experience point of view, to expand this functionality to incorporate a fully fledged mail client.