Archive for the ‘Information Architecture’ Category
Sunday, March 16th, 2008 |
There are a few reasons why a site does age verification:
- Due to the nature of content, the law requires is
- Marketing / demographic purposes
- both
This tip doesn’t refer to porn sites. Over there is a simple 2 buttons solution: Are you 18+? YES / NO
This tip is useful for sites that fall under the 3rd category, sites that require age verification for both legal and marketing purposes (ex: game websites)
There are 2 ways you can do this:
- Dropdown boxes
- Text boxes
The correct answer in this case is to use text boxes. This is so because by using dropdowns your demographic data will be false. This happens because in general users are too lazy to go through a scrolling list and identify the correct values. They will just scroll enough to be the legal age and that’s it. If you use dropdowns, don’t be surprised if the web marketing department will say that your latest gory shooter is played by persons aged 50+.
By using text boxes, users are forced to input some data and in this case they just too lazy to lie about it and they’ll input the correct values.
Posted in Information Architecture | 1 Comment »
Monday, February 11th, 2008 |
Tonight I was playing with some YouTube features that I need for a web project. Those features are not very common for the vast majority of the users. I am talking here about playlists and custom players.
If you describe to a technical person those features, or even if you only name them, instantly they’ll understand what are they about and they’ll see great use in them. Unfortunately we, technical people, tend to forget that our frame of mind has nothing to do with the regular user. The regular user that comes in huge numbers and it’s our main revenue source. And by forgetting that, we overdevelop things that we like and by doing that we overdelay the launch of the product or we ignore the common features considering them insignificant.
The YouTube features I mentioned above work like total crap. The playlists never display the correct number of videos and the custom players never display all the videos and more than that, this morning were displaying other people playlists. Who the hell cares beside me and maybe a dozen other people. Youtube works well on what is suppsoed to do. Upload and play videos.
If you are in a control position, try explaining to the top management or your client that the fancy crap he needs are not worth any delay. Time is money and the markets are crowded. Release in small chunks and release often. Keep in mind that your products has a final target in the masses not in the elites. Screw the early adopters. Let them complain. If your unique, fancy (and useless most of the cases) features are so important, the early adopters will wait for them.
Posted in Information Architecture, Usability, Web 2.0 | 4 Comments »
Thursday, January 17th, 2008 |
One of the most important mistakes that affects the bouncing rate of users for new services is not to send them a confirmation email.
First of all you need to validate any email address that your users use for registering an account. This is important for 2 reasons:
- Helps those users that misspell their address
- Prevents bot attacks (on one of my sites I had a bot that created 10k accounts in 2h)
Emailing your users, gives them a reminder of your service. I consider myself an early adopter and I create accounts on various services and than I tend to forget them. If I don’t have an email from you in the first 5min, your chances to be forgotten are very high.
Also, periodically email your users, especially those with none to less activity to remind them how useful your service is and if you had added new features. There is no golden rule on how often you have to email them but from a few tests you will be able to figure it out.
Posted in Information Architecture | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 |
When the new Gmail version was made available, lots of new features were announced and than people started to point to new ones. But behind the great fireworks some other small changes with deep impact were made.
Here is an example on how some small changes can lead to feature awarness.
A few nights ago, my girlfriend called me that she saw that Google added, to the compose screen, the option to create invites for Gcal. While I knew that this was an pretty old feature, I knew that something has changed but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Happily, you can switch between the old and new interface and than I saw it:
Gmail old interface:
Gmail new interface:
(click on thumbnails for the bigger pictures)
What really changed so that feature become more vizible to the “regular” user:
- In the old version, the link to create new event was placed on the far right of the screen. Most people don’t move their eyes so far so is practically invisible even though it’s in front of your eyes.
- Labeling. In the original version, the feature was labeled “” Add event info”. That basically doesn’t say anything to “regular” users. What event? It’s an freakin email. What info should I add?(those questions appeared in the rare case they spotted it). In the new version, the label says “Add event invitation”. This label is more clear and in plain view.
Those 2 small changes might appear as insignificant to most of the people. But I am willing to bet a lot that the spike in usage after the roll out was pretty huge.
So, summing it up. Just because you use the internet on a daily basis and develop web apps that doesn’t mean that those are going to be user friendly. Not even if you are a huge, popular company. Hiring a team or an usability company, might not also guarantee your success but at least you have more chances than your competitors
Posted in Google, Information Architecture, Usability, Web 2.0 | No Comments »
Thursday, October 5th, 2006 |
Experiments led by Piotr Winkielman, of the University of California, San Diego, and published in the current issue of Psychological Science, suggest that judgments of attractiveness depend on mental processing ease, or being “easy on the mind.” “What you like is a function of what your mind has been trained on,” Winkielman said. “A stimulus becomes attractive if it falls into the average of what you’ve seen and is therefore simple for your brain to process. In our experiments, we show that we can make an arbitrary pattern likeable just by preparing the mind to recognize it quickly.
…
Fastness of recognition: The faster we recognise something (heuristically) the more attractive we judge it to be and if the image match prototypes the faster the processing.
How this translates to user interface design? Simple. When you design a UI pay close attention to your maket segment and demographics. Try to find out what your users are using on a daily basis and have a close look to your most successful competitors. Try to mimic them without being a clone and you’ll have instant satisfaction.
Posted in Information Architecture | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 14th, 2006 |
Yahoo just made public a set of Ajax Libraries and Design Patterns under very friendly licenses. From the first look I had they worth having a look at them.
More details:
Posted in General, Information Architecture, Yahoo | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 20th, 2005 |
What is contingency design?
Contingency design is design for when things go wrong. It’s the error messaging, graphic design, instructive text, information architecture, backend system, and customer service that helps visitors get back on track after a problem occurs.
Get the full report here. A white paper be 37 Signals
Posted in Information Architecture | 1 Comment »
Friday, March 25th, 2005 |
Finally the presentations are online 
Enjoy
IA Summit Presentations
Tags:information architecture
Sponsored links :
Posted in Information Architecture | No Comments »
