Archive: Posts about Web Design
January 8th, 2009, 10 Comments »
I’ve been meaning to mention a recent web design trend: the side-mounted feedback link. I think I first spotted the link on BrightKit’s site:
Now that I dig into the links, I see that they’re all powered by and link to two customer services websites: Get Satisfaction and User Voice.
The link is ‘affixed’ to the right or left edge of the browser window and usually rendered in a contrasting colour. It floats above the page–that is, it doesn’t move when you scroll the page up or down.
This lends the link considerable prominence, and I’m interested to see if this eagerness for customer feedback spreads beyond sites using Get Satisfaction and User Voice. I’m also interested to observe whether there’s any consensus on the placement of the link–right or left side? How high in the browser pane?
I’ve collected a little list of sites with side-mounted feedback links on Magnolia. I’m up to eight at the moment. Here they are:
Thus far, there isn’t much consensus. Obviously the high on the left side is going to get more attention than low down on the right, but there’s no standard thus far.
Improved User Experience?
I’m no user experience expert, so I’m interested in opinions of this little innovation. I’m encouraged by this apparent trend toward a more prominent call for interaction.
Of course, the feedback link is analogous to the company’s phone number. It’s how a company responds to the feedback that makes all the difference. If a company representative never replies to your concerns, it doesn’t matter how big or visible your feedback link is.
I’d also be curious about other sites that have added the side-mounted feedback link. Write a comment if you know of any.
UPDATE: I just noticed that the Book Cover Archive has a similar floating link on the left side. It’s not flush with the browser edge, though, and is a link to the site’s home page as opposed to a feedback form.
10 Comments »
August 12th, 2008, 9 Comments »
When you spend as much time as I do exploring the shiny and the brand new in the technology world, it’s easy to forget that the middle of the bell curve is receding into the distance. I sometimes get frustrated when Normal Humans, who (quite legitimately) don’t know any better, make poor decisions about their web presence.
Take, for example, the Victoria Fringe’s website. It’s nicely-designed, and accommodates almost all of my Fringe-going needs. There’s one glaring exception: the online schedule. They appear to have just converted the offline, hard copy schedule into HTML and dumped it on the site.
As you can see, it’s sorted by venue. There’s one page for each location where shows are running. That’s possibly a reasonable option for the printed schedule. On the other hand, it may be evidence of a classic information design mistake, where the designer chooses a structure that fits their needs instead of their users’. After all, the Fringe sorts its volunteers, technicians and shows by venue. You’d expect Fringe organizers to think of the schedule in those terms, too.
However, users may want to browse or search the show listings in different ways:
- They may only be in town for a couple of days, so they only want to see shows for a particular date range.
- They may only want to see comedies.
- They may only want to see shows from out of town. All things being equal, traveling performers tend to produce better shows.
- They may want to search for performers they’ve seen in previous years (either by the performer’s name or, for bonus points, by the titles of old shows).
Happily, this is a problem that the geeks have already solved. We can think of each show listing as ’structured data’–each listing (or database record, if you like) has an expected series of values–show title, performers’ names, venue, dates, times and so forth. It’s really easy to host this information in a database and display it so that it’s easy to browse, sort and search.
I’m not sure about front-ends for these, but free database services like Google Base or Dabble DB would be a natural place to start. Even if the user interface was a little clunky in the first year, or a little messy to look at, I’m betting it would be an improvement on the current approach.
The problem, of course, is that this looks like a hard problem for a Normal Human. We need more Common Crafts, who are expert explainers of the new.
9 Comments »
March 27th, 2008, 11 Comments »
Two weeks ago I stayed at the Sheraton Wall Centre for a few days. I made liberal use of their Internet access (priced at about CAN $12 a day, which is a deal at a four-star hotel). As usual, to sign up for their service, you had to complete an online form that popped up when you opened your browser. Here’s what it looked like (as always, click for a larger version):
Hilariously, the bottom half of the form is labeled “Ignore the Following Fields and Click Submit”. Then there are three fields, each labeled ‘Ignore This Field’.
Obviously this is a UI disaster. I’m sure there’s some peculiar explanation why the developer could edit field labels but not actually the form itself, but that’s not really satisfactory, is it?
There are actually two separate design disasters here. The less obvious one is the use of the software design term ‘field’. I don’t think the average hotel internet user understands that those blank areas are called ‘fields’. Most people just call them ‘boxes’.
11 Comments »
March 25th, 2008, 2 Comments »
Via Amber, I discovered the unusual design for Washlet.com, a site promoting a, uh, toilet. The site is more or less entirely comprised of little bits of video (note to designers: fix your title tags), discussing the pros and…well, just the pros, of their fancy new toilet.
The toilet-promoting monologues are hilarious because they’re so carefully worded. They never say the word ‘toilet’, and are constantly dancing around the actual nuts and bolts of our bodies and the device’s operations. I kind of feel for the poor actors–they seem so darned convinced of the Washlet’s awesomeness.
I’ve been watching the slow but steady rise of video-centric websites over the past few years. I actually don’t mind this approach at all. However, all of the information should be conveyed and easily available (and linkable) in text form. Why? Arguments for SEO aside, maybe I’m a verbal learner. Maybe I want to cut and paste a chunk to send to my bidet-obsessed friend. Maybe I want to blog about a particular product.
I actually prefer a hybrid model,with video naturally integrated into a text-based site. Coast Capital Savings and Steady Hand do this well.
I was reminded of an amusing Phillips campaign that I blogged about a while back, called Shave Everywhere. They’ve changed the content on that site, but the new stuff looks as good or better than the old.
2 Comments »
March 25th, 2008, 6 Comments »
Last month we ran a (quite unscientific) survey about web design and development for our client, Nitobi. For those webby types among you, we’ve just published the results. Here’s a pretty pie chart for one of the questions:
6 Comments »
January 18th, 2008, 5 Comments »
I’m pretty sure that everybody in the mainstream media now appreciates that the web is a pretty big deal. Newspapers and TV stations have finally accepted that future corporate health and wealth depends significantly on their web strategy.
Why, then, do I constantly find broken links and unhelpful 404 error pages on mainstream media sites? Here are two recent examples that I know about because I had blog posts linking to them.
- The Kansas City Star is a biggish paper, with a quarter of a million readers. You’d think they could maintain links to articles (broken link, just redirects to their home page) that are less than two years old. In SEO terms, their article on horse soccer would have easily beaten out my blog post about their article. They could have had the 2000-odd visitors who have hit my site searching for that term in the last 20 months. Given that one example, how many thousands of visitors are they leaving on the table because of broken links?
- Here’s a more heinous example. TSN used to have a whole section of their website at http://magazine.tsn.ca. My post linking to their article about CFL salaries has gotten about 25,000 visitors in the past two years or so. Those visitors should have belonged to TSN. As far as I can tell, that whole TSN Magazine section is gone, and there’s no redirects or 404-handling in place. 25,000 doesn’t sound so bad, but that’s just one article. Imagine that there are 100 articles missing, each which could have drawn roughly that many visitors. Two more zeros gets you 2.5 million visitors–a non-trivial number.
It’s possible that there are some wacky IntarWeb things going on between Morocco and these sites (Islamists don’t want me to read about horse soccer and CFL salaries!), but I don’t think so.
Broken Links Like It’s 1998
Given how desperate mainstream media companies are for web revenues, it’s shocking how often I spot broken links on their sites. I have no idea how widespread the issue is. It’s easy to imagine that TSN or the Star is missing at least 2% of potential visitors (and thus advertising revenue). If I’m running their website, that 2% matters. A lot.
Everybody has broken links. It’s a boring problem, and hardly rocket science, but corporations should know better. Their websites need to handle the error gracefully. Why, in 2008, is that still thwarting media companies?
There’s also a kind of social responsibility angle here. Every time somebody breaks a link, it has implications beyond their own site. Now I have to go chase down new articles on horse soccer and CFL salaries. In the meantime, searchers are being disappointed. That reflects poorly on me and the destination site.
5 Comments »
January 15th, 2008, 4 Comments »
Over at my day job, we’re running a little web design and development survey for Nitobi. I know some designer and developer types read my blog, so I’m hoping a few of you will take five minutes to complete the survey. It’s only 14 questions, and most of them are multiple choice.
As an enticement, we’re giving away an iPod Nano to one luck participant.
4 Comments »
October 9th, 2007, 10 Comments »
I’ve been doing some reading about ebooks recently, and enjoyed a Copyblogger post about creating ebooks that sell. Brian references an ebook site featuring a book on, uh, writing ebooks.
When I visited the site, I was reminded of a phenomenon I’ve observed in recent years around ebooks and similar digital offerings. You can also see it on GoogleAdSecrets.com and the prolix URL SearchEngineOptimizationStrategies.com.
It’s a particular (and peculiar) kind of website. Really just one very long page, it features a single, centered column, few images, and many bold offers, claims and testimonials. It pretty much defies every major web design trend of this millennium. To the sophisticated web surfer, it looks profoundly tacky.
Clearly it must sell ebooks, though, or people wouldn’t use it. Did one person prove this was the optimal selling strategy, and everybody emulated them? I’d imagine so. The pages certainly don’t inspire confidence in me, but I guess they’re not selling to me.
10 Comments »
July 18th, 2007, 7 Comments »
I’m running our little Bar Camp Malta survey on Zoomerang. This is the first time I’ve used that service. The setup was a little clunky, but the price–free like the wind and the sea–was right.
Every time I log in to Zoomerang, to tweak the survey or check the results, I’m presented with this message:
There are so many things wrong with that error message. First, it shouldn’t exist at all. How come every other Web app I use can either auto-magically save my work, or prevent me from logging out without saving?
Second, the language is incredibly waffly. “It does not appear” that I logged out? This implies that the developers can’t really tell for sure if I logged out or not. And then the real problem–I “could” have lost changes? Even if I don’t, surely Zoomerang ought to know whether I lost changes.
Finally, I’m given no recourse but to not log in (’Cancel’) or proceed in shame (’Ok’). They don’t even bother to say “to avoid losing your work in the future, be sure to log out”.
It’s classic old-school UI design thinking. Instead of building better software, they just uselessly berate the user.
7 Comments »
July 15th, 2007, 11 Comments »
Here’s a little thought experiment for you. What if, in the early days of the Web, it became a uniform, standard practice for websites to include metadata about their designers? Here’s one way it might have looked:
The designer’s name wouldn’t be visible on the site, but would be accessible to anybody who knew how to click ‘View Source’ in their browser. The most natural analogy that I can think of is tags on clothing. You can always ‘view source’ by flipping up someone’s tag to see if their shirt came from Mexx or Tommy Hilfiger.
I still occasionally see a design credit in the footer of a site, or in the CSS file, but it’s the exception, not the rule.
How would the world of web design be different? Here are my initial thoughts:
- It would be incredibly useful for web designers for word of mouth promotion. If I see a site I like, I can find out who built it, and contact them to build my site.
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- There would be a greater general awareness of boutique designers, much the way there are boutique ad agencies today. There would be a certain cache for a company to be able to publicly advertise that their site was by, I don’t know, Jeffrey Zeldman. In short, more people might know who Jeffrey Zeldman is.
- It might change the business of web design a little. Companies might hire more designers in-house, because they’re reluctant to admit that they outsourced the work. Or it might have made outsourcing the work all the more common.
- The average web design would be a little better, and less cookie-cutter. If a designer puts their name on every site, they might be reluctant to use the same wire frames over and over again.
- People could build cool tools and browser plug-ins to, for example, generate an ad hoc portfolio of all the sites by a particular designer.
I’m a mere hack of a web designer, and I only built my first site back in 1999. I wonder if this practice was more common in the early days of the web, and went the way of all time?
How do you think designer labels would impact the world of web design?
11 Comments »
