While I was writing this chapter, Productopia redesigned their Home page, improving it substantially.
They eliminated the stray tagline on the right, and put a much better tagline ("We Help You Find the Products You’ll Love") at the top of the area on the left.
And they shortened the crucial explanation ("Our experts offer unbiased advice to help you choose the product that’s right for you") so that it now stands a chance of being read. But it’s still buried at the bottom of what still looks like the featured products section.
And they moved the Utility links (Editorial Policy, User Reviews, and so on) into a new area at the bottom of the page, but they lumped them together with promos like
"Women’s Spring Fashion" and "Do You Cook?" It took me a while to figure out that the two columns were different.
t h e h o m e pa g e i s b e y o n d y o u r c o n t r o l
MY VERSION
I’d start by moving the tagline to the top of the page with the Site ID, making it clear that it’s a descriptor for the entire site.
I’d also move the Welcome blurb above the promos, and make it more prominent.
I’d separate the Utility links and the promos at the bottom of the page, grouping the promos with the "featured products" above them on the left side.
And I’d reformat the awards icons. Unlike most Web awards, these four are actually meaningful.(The Digital Time award puts Productopia on a short list of e-commerce sites with Amazon and eBay.) But lining them up across the bottom of the page makes them look like they’re "Bob’s Cool Site of the Day" icons. This is a case where you want to be sure you don’tfollow a convention.
“The Farmer
and the Cowman Should Be
Friends”
why most web design team arguments about usability are a wa ste of time, and how to avoid them
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e f t t o t h e i r ow n d ev i c e s , w e b d ev e l o p m e n t t e a m s aren’t notoriously successful at making decisions about usability questions.Most teams end up spending a lot of precious time rehashing the same issues over and over.
Consider this scene:
One man likes to push a plough The other likes to chase a cow But that’s no reason why they can't be friends
—oklahoma! , o scar hammerstein ii
Rick from Marketing
Bob the Developer
Caroline the Designer
People don’t like pulldowns. My father
won’t even go near a site if it uses
pulldowns.
Kim the Project Manager
featuring…
continued…
Caroline makes a suggestion…
We could use a pulldown menu for
the product list.
Well, I don’t think most people mind them.
And they’d save us a lot of space.
I hate pulldowns.
Besides, have you got a better idea?
WEB DESIGN FUNNIES
Today’s episode: “Religious Debates”I usually call these endless discussions “religious debates,” because they have a lot in common with most discussions of religion and politics: They consist largely of people expressing strongly held personal beliefs about things that can’t be proven—supposedly in the interest of agreeing on the best way to do something c h a p t e r 8
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…but Bob plays his developer’s trump card Do we know if there’s
any research data on pulldowns?
Did we ever make a decision about
pulldowns?
I think there might be a problem using pulldowns on the ASP pages from our
remote servers.
Rick attempts an appeal to a higher authority…
I hate my life.
So, what does everybody think?
Should we try using pulldowns?
Two weeks later…
important (whether it’s attaining eternal peace, governing effectively, or just designing Web pages). And, like most religious debates, they rarely result in anyone involved changing his or her point of view.
Besides wasting time, these arguments create tension and erode respect among team members, and can often prevent the team from making critical decisions.
Unfortunately, there are several forces at work in most Web teams that make these debates almost inevitable. In this chapter, I’ll describe these forces, and explain what I think is the best antidote.
Everybody likes ________.”
All of us who work on Web sites have one thing in common—we’re also Web users. And like all Web users, we tend to have strong feelings about what we like and don’t like about Web sites.
As individuals, we love Flash animations because they’re cool; or we hate them because they take a long time to download. We love menus down the left side of each page because they’re familiar and easy to use, or we hate them because they’re so boring. We really enjoy using sites with ______, or we find ______ to be a royal pain.
And when we’re working on a Web team, it turns out to be very hard to check those feelings at the door.
The result is usually a room full of individuals with strong personal convictions about what makes for a good Web site.
And given the strength of these convictions—and human nature—there’s a natural tendency to project these likes and dislikes onto Web users in general: to think that most Web users like the same things we like. We tend to think that most Web users are like us.
t h e f a r m e r a n d t h e c o w m a n
“
He’s right.
They stink.
What’s so bad about them?
People don’t like pulldowns.
I like pull- downs. What’s
his problem?
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It’s not that we think that everyoneis like us. We know there are somepeople out there who hate the things we love—after all, there are even some of them on our own Web team. But not sensiblepeople. And there aren’t many of them.