EvoBloggito

Video: Ever Wonder How Those Little Images Appear Next to Comments?

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Jul 28, 2009; Category: Communication, Marketing, Usability; Tags: Communication, Usability; No Comments

Make your comments on blogs and community websites more personal with your Globally Recognized Avatar: GRAVATAR. Many sites enable gravatars, which means yours will automatically appear next to your comment when you use the email address to which it’s attached. You will rarely have to even think about it. When you want to change it, just upload a new image: it replaces the one you were using everywhere it appears.

To get a gravatar, visit www.gravatar.com.

Microsoft's 2019 Future Vision

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Apr 23, 2009; Category: Communication, Video, Zeitgeist; Tags: Future, Usability; No Comments

While I’m highly skeptical that Microsoft will play a key role in bringing them into existence (they haven’t really been about innovation for more than a decade), this 5-minute video shows some intriguing possibilities for making digital information part of our everyday lives. Some of it is science fiction at this point, but a lot of science fiction has become reality.

Redesigning the Stop Sign: Unfortunately, Not Unusual

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Mar 27, 2009; Category: Communication, Design/Development, Marketing, Video; Tags: Design/Development, Humor, Usability; No Comments

This short video is a wonderful parody about how the design process too often works; or doesn’t work. It demonstrates what happens when design is not valued or recognized as a means of clearly communicating the central or primary message.

If you’ve been a designer for any length of time, you’ve found yourself in a similar situation. If you work with or manage designers, you may have been part of this scenario, too.

Key in this video: note the role played by the ineffectual "designer," who does not participate in the discussion, but only takes notes about the design "requirements." Designers have a responsibility to "cut through the crap" and make communication of the primary message the focus of the process. Designers who don’t do that are production artists (they might even be very good production artists), but they’re not designers.

Why Bad Websites Happen to Good Companies, Part 8: Creating Barriers to Downloading Free Information

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Mar 26, 2009; Category: Accessibility, Bad Websites/Good Companies, Design/Development, Marketing; Tags: Information Architecture, Marketing, Usability; No Comments

Giving away stuff on your website is a really smart thing to do. It’s an opportunity to spread your ideas or information about your products and services, sometimes in exchange for a little bit of information that could be helpful in your marketing. It’s a very simple process, but companies screw it up all the time, usually by one of the following two methods.

Screw-up Number One

Too often, companies undermine their attempts to offer free information (whitepapers, product info, sample book chapters, etc.) by requiring onerous amounts of personal or contact information in return. You’ve probably seen this, and maybe even been guilty yourself (I confess, I’ve done it). In exchange for a lousy whitepaper, I have seen people asked for ALL of their contact info (including their work phone, home phone, cell phone, and Twitter ID), their job title, their preferred salutation (Mr., Mrs., Miss, Dr., Professor) and their underwear size. OK, I made up the last one, but it does get intrusive after the third piece of info. By the time people finish and submit the form (IF they finish), that whitepaper had better be damned good.

Screw-up Number Two

Another way to blow it is with poor execution. I recently got an offer in an email newsletter I’m subscribed to for a free chapter download for a just-published book. I need another web design book like a hole in the head, but I was game to find out if there might be a reason to spend almost $30 on this one, so I clicked on the download button. That did not start a download. Instead, it took me to a page that asked for my email so they could email me the download info. While I didn’t consider their request for my email address to be too much to ask, the button had said "download," and I found it a little disturbing that it wasn’t what happened. I also wondered why, if they had my email address to send me the newsletter, they needed it again to send me the download info. Why didn’t they just send me the download info to begin with?

I dutifully typed in my email address and clicked "submit." That took me to a page where they offered me several newsletter subscriptions, all preselected as "yes," including the one I already had. I clicked on the link that said "No thanks, I’m just here for the free book chapter." That took me to a page that promised to send me a download link. Two days later, I’m still waiting for that download information. I don’t think I’ll go back and make the request again: I just saved nearly $30.

Giving stuff away is not rocket science, and unless you’re a government supplier, your customers are probably not rocket scientists. So don’t make it difficult. And keep the information you ask for to a bare minimum. Your visitors will never hold it against you if you ask for too little information.

Outside-In Design for More Usable, User-focused Websites

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Feb 8, 2009; Category: Design/Development, Marketing, Usability; Tags: Design/Development, Information Architecture, Usability; No Comments

There are few things more difficult than setting aside your own knowledge and assumptions to look at things from someone else’s perspective. (If that were not the case, political "discussion" would be far more productive…but I digress.) It’s critical to the success of a website that it serve the needs of its audiences, but too often website information architecture (IA) is approached from an inside-out perspective (what we want to tell people), rather than from an outside-in perspective (what people want to find on our website).

It’s human nature to assume our own point-of-view is shared by most people, especially if they are smart (like us). But it’s a poor framework from which to design a usable website that engages site visitors. Who among us has not heard a business owner proclaim that he is the best representative of his website’s audience? If he likes it and gets it, he insists, his site visitors will like it and get it. However, people outside a company do not view the company’s information or message in the same way as people inside the company. They don’t know what company insiders know, and often they’re encountering the information for the first time.

Consulting web/IA designers may have an advantage over in-house designers in incorporating the outside-in perspective, because as outsiders, they carry fewer assumptions about a company’s message and information into the design/IA process. However, few designers are completely immune to making assumptions that don’t serve a particular audience’s needs.

So how do you ensure outside-in design and information architecture? Talk to people in the website’s audience: by formal interview, by online discussion, by engaging them in blog posts, by twittering, however you have to do it. Listen carefully. Be open to what they say about your website and messages, especially when it makes you uncomfortable. Compliments are nice to hear, but complaints will help you make your website better, if you take them seriously.

Find enough complaints from people outside the company, and you’ll find the keys to making a more usable, visitor-focused website.