My pearl of "wisdom" for today:"A slick website without useful content is like a designer chair, that cannot be sat upon. It won’t be used"Of course this is unless the site is based around a social media tool, which some what puts a spanner in the works...I suppose that's still content though; it's just user generated. Then again...what about interactive addictive gamey type stuff....arrggh my head. Time for a re-think...
...some time later...after some thought:"A slick website without useful content is like a designer chair, that cannot be sat upon. It won’t be used" (terms and conditions apply)
Maybe we should be asking content is still king when we have social media? Is UGC still content or is it a conversation? At the moment, I'm thinking conversation but, if I'm honest, I'm yet to apply any real thought to this....nope I'm already swaying back to content. What a conundrum.
P.s. I should say that apparently the above chair is apparently functional....it just doesn't look it. So that's my theory completely blown out of the water. Find more info about chair designer Osian Batyka-Williams, here.
I was being a guinea pig for some usability testing today and we noticed something very interesting. The site we were testing was a traditional 3 column design i.e. left hand nav, content and then call to actions on the right hand side. As a user I completely ignored the right hand column.
Now this could just be me; I am known to be awkward at times but it got me thinking. I'm wondering with some of the popular sites such as facebook and google using the right hand column for advertising, if users are sub-consciously ignoring it.
As users we don't like to think to much - our brain has become adept to looking for patterns and following conventions to save time and find the information we need as quickly as possible. Thanks to in page advertising, maybe the right hand column is becoming something we ignore as it takes up unnecessary thinking time.
Ok, so the other week a did have a bit of a
"rant" about web 2.0 sites. I've been feeling like a bit of a kill joy so I wanted to say when somebody gets it right, it's great - I stumbled across a site which demonstrates this perfectly.
Yong Fook's Open Source Food, which allows people to upload and share recipes, takes a large scoop of usability, a generous spoonful of glorious design and carefully blends in social media to create an all round satisfying experience. The site does nothing revolutionary but what it does, it does very very well.
Everything is simple and beautiful. Some nice features include auto tagging UGC content, the banner ad being made up of UGC images and the search is lovely. I like the fact you become a pro through votes from fellow members, not payment and that each individual user has their own RSS feed. It's extremely easy to share content, post content and contribute content. Plus the process of building up an online community has really been considered.
Although I'm not one of those lucky iphone owners, the site is apparently nicely optimised for said phone. You can read more about that at
appleiphoneschool.com.
So there it is, a whole blog post without a moan in sight! Although saying that some of the google ads could have been better placed. Ho hum.