Jakob Nielsen has a great new article up called Bridging the Designer–User Gap. I highly recommend this for anyone involved in product design or web development. Consider these observations from the first paragraph:
Designers are not users. Vice-presidents are not users. Users are not designers.
In other words, designers (and v-p’s) should not assume they know anything about what the user needs. Simultaneously, don’t assume that the user knows how to solve his/her own problem, either. Nielsen goes off to explain varying levels of designer/user overlap, and how this can or should impact the design process. Really thought-provoking.
Now, I’m not a designer, so I leave the aesthetic rating of logos to other more qualified eyes. Instead, I take a very practical approach to evaluating logos (and some of the logos in that linked post fall down on some of my rules):
It has to look good very big as well as very small. Otherwise, you’re just setting yourself up for headaches down the road.
It should look good in color as well as grayscale (ideally B&W as well). You don’t always have the color option, and you also might not always want to pay for it.
It should be reasonably memorable (ie. it shouldn’t look like 20,000 other logos we’ve already seen).
It should, on some level, tie in with what your business is all about. If you’re an aluminum smelter, your logo shouldn’t be all girlie.
All other things being equal, it’s best to keep it as simple as possible. K.I.S.S. is always the best policy.
Here’s a new web design tool I learned about through Digg which seems like it could be useful. Check out Sprout. It’s a web-based WYSIWYG Flash app creator. Now you don’t have to bother buying Flash (and learning how to use it). Sprout purports to guide you through what you need to do, much like many of the other web-based tools out there. This is in beta right now, but it’s a good one to keep an eye on. Could be a good way to toss together mash-ups.
Another one I think I’ve previously pointed towards is Animoto, which is another cool web design app - this one lets you quickly generate your own MTV-style videos with still photos. Kind of a mash up between Ken Burns style documentary techniques and Yo MTV Raps.
Everybody complains about Google’s PageRank. It’s obtuse (how’s it calculated?), it’s somewhat capricious (wild swings in rank from week to week), and yet, aggravatingly, it’s the most common tool used to evaluate a website’s ‘importance’. It’s the most common because, in the view of most observers, it’s the best method, as flawed as it is.
But now there’s a new kid in town in the world of ‘how important is your site’. IZEA Ranks has created a new metric it calls ‘Real Rank’ which is oriented towards blogs. You install some code on your site, and they track the amount of traffic you get. Then they rank all of the participating blogs. That’s your rank (duh).
The idea behind this is that the most important metric in a blog’s importance is the amount of traffic it gets. Now you can shoot all kinds of holes in that presumption, but if you compare it to Google’s PageRank, where you don’t know quite what they’re measuring, you can see where it makes sense. At least you know what the metric is based on.
In case you’re wondering, Ponder Marketing is currently ranked 2,814. I’ve been slacking on posts so far this year, and my traffic has suffered as a result. But I’m sure I’ll be in the top ten any day now that I’m back on the wagon.
In his most recent Alertbox post, Jakob Nielsen talks about how the ROI of ‘usability’ improvements to websites is declining (although with an average ROI of 83%, still quite worthwhile).
What I found interesting was his formula for website success, which he states as:
B = V x C x L
B = business generated by the site
V = # of site visitors
C = your site conversion rate
L = ‘loyalty’, ie. rate of returning visitors
I don’t know why, but I’m fond of attempts to reduce complexity to simple formulas or graphs. You don’t necessarily capture reality perfectly, but you usually generate some thought-provoking insights. This one is good, since it really narrows down the elements you need to focus on in running a web business. You need traffic, since more traffic means more potential buyers. You need to convert the traffic. And, if you can get your traffic to come back, you get another opportunity to sell.
Actually, there’s not really any reason this same formula couldn’t be applied to most any business. If you are B-2-B, just substitute ‘opportunities’ or ’sales leads’ for V and you’re good to go.
Strangely enough, fancy yet pointless homepage flash intros appear not to factor into success, at least if this formula is to be believed.
I’m a fan of the Jakob Nielsen’s web usability reports - he tends to reveal useful insights and guidance for web design, based not on opinion but on research and scientific studies.
Now he’s just made available for free a 148-page pdf report for which he normally charges $124. Good deal, you can’t go wrong with free. Check out Beyond ALT Text: Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilities (75 Best Practices for Design of Websites and Intranets, Based on Usability Studies with People Who Use Assistive Technology ).
When you download the pdf, be sure to take note of this best practice– he doesn’t require you to register, or provide an email, or provide a credit card number, or any other sleazy ruse which always tends to result in tons of unwanted cold calls. Good deal, I hate when whitepaper and pdf offers make you run a gauntlet. I have enough people cold-calling me every day, I don’t need more.
I downloaded the pdf; haven’t read it yet, but plan to do it on a flight after the holidays.
Any discussion of design which attempts to rank a ‘top 10′ is by nature subjective, but it’s still fun to make a list and state an opinion. Here is a post on 10 great Web site designs/redesigns of 2007 which works as a nice state-of-the-web circa 2007.
And the state of the web circa 2007?
clean, (deceptively) simple designs
rounded corners, rounded corners, rounded corners
big chunks of simple Fisher-Price colors
social elements everywhere (let the readers participate)
I’m always a sucker for lists of web design tips and mistakes. With that in mind, check out this one, which is pretty comprehensive: 43 Web Design Mistakes You Should Avoid. Hopefully, it’s not the first time you’ve heard many of these, but it’s good to check Do/Don’t lists once in a while just to be sure you haven’t fallen into any bad habits. I know I’ve been guilty of some of these in the past on my sites, and may still have a few problems here and there with a few things hanging around. Eventually, we’ll weed them all out. No one is perfect, but at least you can strive for perfection and keep getting better.
Anyone who has ever worked in graphic design will surely appreciate this video. Those of us who have worked with designers may recognize a bit of ourselves in this video. I was laughing at it until they got to the ’starburst generator’, at which point I realized they were tooling on me too.
Doh!
I do have a few suggestions for new ‘products’ they can add– how about an animated graphic creator (because nothing is as cool as filling your homepage with animated gifs!), and an easy to use ‘marquee’ creator. Everyone at the nursing home loves those.
Share this vid with the designers in your life, they’ll love it…
Here’s a great post for anyone who runs an ecommerce site: 13 Bad Habits of eCommerce Stores. This covers many of the big no-no’s of trying to do business online. Some of those listed include:
making people login to buy
asking for waaay to much information (back in the pre-internet days, Radio Shack was notorious for giving the inquisition to anyone who wanted to buy something).
making people dig for shipping costs
no (or bad) customer service.
It’s a good list, make sure none of these apply to your site.
