It’s been a common (and growing) convention for several years now that the site logo (typically in the top left corner) also acts as a link back to the site’s home page. But you’d be surprised how many people don’t know this. I always find one or two each time I do user evaluations.
Amazon’s recent redesign helped make this convention more findable, by “buttoning-up” the their logo on mouse over. (If you are reading this in email form, click into the blog to see the screenshot.)
Related to this comes to general guidelines:
On the home page itself, the logo shouldn’t be link, ‘cause it would be linking back to itself Always provide an alternative, more obvious link back to the home page, somewhere on the page, even if it’s in the footer.
Yet again Amazon leads the way in presenting user-generate content in ways that work for consumers, even if on the surface it presents its products (and their makers) in a bad light.
As the volume of consumer reviews grows on their site, it was becoming a challenge for people to make sense of it all. To solve this, Amazon now highlights the most useful positive and negative review, allowing you to quickly form your own opinion and judge both sides of the feedback. (see attached screenshot)
They also helpfully show the distribution of star ratings so you can tell if, for example, an average rated product is universally thought to be average, or just strongly polarises opinion.
Bravo to Amazon for grounding their design in what is really going to be helpful, and not just appeasing their product makers and ultimately affecting their own audience share and commercial value.
Ever noticed how rude and dumb some of the machines around us are?
There are 2 cases in point:
Recently on my trip to Auckland, I was using a vending machine to get a ticket to go up the big tower there. Using the machine I had to navigate through a series of inane questions, along the lines of: Do you want to buy a ticket? Yes. How do you want to pay for that? Cash. Do you want to use notes or coins? Coins. I was over it before I’d started. Why couldn’t it just response to whether I swiped my card, feed notes into the slot or inserted coins? I think it could have answered its own questions. To make matters worse, when it finally spat out the ticket, it literally did just that – the ticket came out of a low positioned slot and dropped to the ground. You’d sack such a dumb and rude kiosk operator after a day.
95% of the time I go to my Westpac ATM I get out either $80 or $130. It’s actually all about getting enough $20 notes so I don’t have to manage $50 notes. But every time I use the machine, it offers me the standard “shortcuts” to the standard withdrawal amounts – $20, $50, $100, etc. If I was going into a branch and dealing with the same teller day after day, pretty soon they would say “Hey Brett – what’s it going to be today? $80 or $130? or something else?”. And to cap it off, when it is pushing out the money, “Michelle”, the humanising woman on the screen cheerily says “Here’s your money and receipt if you asked for one”. Poor Michelle with the short-term memory problem – just moments before I’d told her I didn’t want a receipt.
Why do we accept behaviour from machines that we won’t from people?
To put it another way: As we are designing interfaces, it’s a great test to ask “If this was a person, it is being smart, friendly and polite?”.
It’s one thing to define your brand personality and voice, it’s another to have the discipline and process (and creativity) to execute it in all the little places – to make the most of every opportunity.
Virgin Blue’s brand personality gives them lots of scope to have fun, and I loved this sign in their Melbourne terminals.
And what’s great about their brand personality is that it speaks of humanness – it closes the gap between them and you/me/us.
Here’s an interesting article comparing Braun’s product design in the 60s with Apple’s design now. There’s a follow-up article along similar lines.
Whilst I’m sure there’s been some direct “inspiration” happening (see the calculator in the second link), I think it also highlights working to a common set of principles for what good design is – something just as relevant to us today as it was then.
When you look at the Braun products by Dieter Rams—many of them at New York’s MoMA—and compare them to Jonathan Ive’s work at Apple, you can clearly see the similarities in their philosophies way beyond the sparse use of color, the selection of materials and how the products are shaped around the function with no artificial design, keeping the design “honest.” [BC: One of my personal favourites.]
This passion for “simplicity” and “honest design” that is always declared by Ive whenever he’s interviewed or appears in a promo video, is at the core of Dieter Rams’ 10 principles for good design:
Good design:
- is innovative
- makes a product useful
- is unobtrusive
- is honest
- is durable
- is consequent to the last detail
- is concerned with the environment
- is as little design as possible
Here’s a nice little piece of design by Apple. If you are browsing their site, you can be asked to complete a site satisfaction survey – pretty standard stuff.
But instead of popping up the survey and interrupting what you are doing, this one displays a message on your page firstly inviting you to complete the survey and then, if you accept, letting you know that “The survey is available under your current browser window. Please wait until after you have completed your visit to take the survey.”
A tweak to this may be to add an option such as: “Having trouble doing what you came to the site for? Tell us by taking the survey now”, which brings the survey to the front. (As former Sensis web analytics expert Jenni Lock points out,) Sometimes we are particularly keen on capturing in-the-moment difficulty and how that affects satisfaction.
For the last few months I’ve been enjoying getting to know my iPhone. It’s been a joy. Actually, the getting to know you process happened pretty quickly. And that’s one of the great benefits of simplicity – you quickly understand the scope of the thing you are getting used to.
My experience with my iPhone contrasts nicely with my previous smartphone – the Palm Treo 750 running Windows Mobile. I’d been a Windows Mobile user for years – I remember stalking stores in late 2000 to get one of the first Compaq iPaqs when they hit Australia. But I never really felt I fully understood Windows Mobile. It always seemed a big thing squished into a little box. This was especially true of all the settings and preferences.
In contrast I’d got to the end of all the applications and settings of my iPhone in the first 15 minutes. I knew everything I could do with it and what I couldn’t. I’d found the edges. I felt in control.
And that’s one of the great upsides of simplicity. When we encounter and use simple things, we quickly discovered where the edges are. And once we know the edges, we can confidently build a picture or story in our head about how this new thing works. We feel in control. There’s not that lurking (demeaning) doubt that there may be a better way of doing something or that we are missing a feature that would be really useful. We can explain it to other people – and probably recommend it too. It truly becomes our tool, rather than feeling partially at the mercy of this piece of technology.
Simplicity is hard, especially as we add functionality. But it’s always worth the effort.
Website log-in and sign-up have become so standard for so many people that WordPress have some fun with theirs – admittedly targeted at quite a web-savvy audience.
2 screenshots:
- Their login box on their homepage is titled “Already Hip?”
- Their legal acceptable checkbox is labelled tongue-in-check “Legal flotsam: I have read and agree to the fascinating terms of service.”
I’ve been thinking about the advances in search technology. Some of the capability that’s now possible with FAST is very inspiring, particularly in vertical domain search. It conjured up this food service analogy in my mind to understand the way we experience search now compared to what is possible either now or very soon…
OLD SEARCH = Fast Food Operator
You go to McDonalds. A good experience is determined by 1) your ability to precisely ask for what you want, and 2) how quickly the person serving you can assemble and serve your request.
Just like in current search. If you want a good experience, best to phrase your request in terms well understood by the site and hope they have done a good job organising things behind the scenes to serve it up fast.
NEW SEARCH = Silver Service Waiter
You’re at Vue du Monde. Your waiter already starts to suss you out and adapt the experience the moment you walk in the door. Initially this is just superficially based on her knowledge of what she thinks people like you prefer. But you chat and soon she’s adapting the service with what she’s explicitly learnt about your food preferences. Some of what she’s doing you don’t even realise, but you’re having a wonderful time. The wine’s perfectly complimenting each course. The little pile of discarded and disdained cucumber from the second course results in a cucumber-free fourth course – not that you even realised you were in for cucumber parfait. Having overheard you’re plan to walk home afterwards, she’s she offered to get you a taxi instead because rain is forecast. Your whole experience is smooth, effortless and deeply satisfying.
So it will be with new search. The system is attentive to anything it can use from your behaviour and other external clues about you to adapt the experience and make it effortless. You want to come back again and again because the more you use the search, the better it gets at adapting and anticipating your needs. It’s genuinely helpful.
Remember your first experience of using Google. Remember how it spread through word of mouth. “You’ve got to use Google! It’s a new search site. Yeah, it’s a funny name, but it’s amazing. You type something in and it just seems to know the site you’re was thinking.”
That was then. Our expectations are moving on. But interestingly we’ll talk about the winner of new search in a similar way. We’ll love it because we are wowed by its smarts and the way it almost instinctively knows what we want. We’ll love it because it makes our task and our lives that much easier.
Great quote from Cordell Ratzlaff, Director of User Experience at Cisco (ex-Apple and frog design, and speaking at the upcoming MX conference in San Francisco):
“One of my pet peeves is with the specialized labels that have evolved within our profession. We have user interface designers, usability engineers, user experience specialists, visual designers, interaction designers, etc. The distinction between these many roles is fuzzy and confusing to those both inside and outside the design profession…I encourage designers to get as broad a range of experience as possible. Design products for as many markets, demographics, product types, and technology platforms as you can. Don’t be afraid to take on tasks outside your traditional role. The best designers I know are good at many facets of design. It certainly doesn’t hurt to know about branding, marketing, business models, and technology as well.”
http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/archives/000926.php
