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.”
The new look BBC website homepage has it’s links as just gray text. Not blue, not underlined and with only the faintest of hover effects. As a result, tired and at the end of the day, I found myself reading the headlines as absurdist poetry:
Sarkozy warns of disintegration,
Inquiry into unfair exam advice,
Child killer Black gets 25 years,
Lodger quizzed on double killing,
Dying woman calls for law change,
Double decker destroyed by fire,
Twitter did not incite rioting.
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…)
It’s time for another Interface of the Week (actually it’s well overdue). This is a simple one, but it’s a solution that I think creates ate a nice user experience.
Thisismykea.com is a nice website that sells designs on sticky-back plastic that you can add to your plain Ikea furniture. It’s a good idea, and the website is well designed but this article is not really interested in most of it.
The part that has the earned the accolade of IotW is the product listing images that, when moused over, changes to show the design on different Ikea products. Moving the mouse from left to right scans through the images, here’s a quick video to illustrate:
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.
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.
I’ve noticed a trend of HUGE adverts being placed on the top of Finnish news news sites. These are not just big banners, but vast 980 pixel by 400 pixel billboards of adverts—so big that the site’s own heading hardly fits on the page.
When I first say them my initial reaction was something along the lines of: “Really, really intrusive! How could a site treat their users like this? Those banners must be worth huge money to justify the reduction of user experience.” But now I think I was wrong.
There’s a recent trend that’s started really bugging me. Infographics. Not all infographics: I love websites like Infosthetics.com that show case some inspiring and beautiful ways of visually presenting data. What I’m hating is cheap blog infographics like this example on Mashable. It’s a time line; is the best way to present a list of events on the web a 700kb image? Really? There have been web development wars over using tables for layout vs nice clean semantic HTML and we’re now using fucking images to store information? Stop it. Now. It’s not big, it’s not clever, accessible, indexable or anything but shit. Calling it an infographic does not make it OK to through all web standards out the window. The web design and development community needs to make it clear that this is not acceptable.
This is an update on my project to style WYSIWYG interfaces to help the users get an understanding of the HTML they are creating. Read the original post here.
First of all, here’s the new demo page.