we are: London

Love him or hate him.

It all comes down to one single, tangible factor, which marks out the good from the bad; soul.

The reason for the Clarkson tribute on the left is this weeks Sunday Times Motoring article on an Aston Martin which sees Clarkson pitting it against design perfection in the shape of an Audi R8 V10.

And to save you the read, the Audi is just too perfect, where as the Aston has soul, something that can’t be created by following set rules, but comes from the heart of those involved and is a direct result of the creator’s passion.

All of which brings us nicely to the argument that has raged on since the start of website design; who is best placed to create the perfect site?

The Good, the bad and the ugly.

Let’s go back to basics and look at who the usual suspects are, in the red corner we have “visual designers” (brand and marketing) and in the blue corner we have “interaction designers” (user centred).

Whilst visual designers have a wealth of ability and passion, it is often focused to heavily on making something look good and the risk of making the same, beautiful creation completely unusable.

Now wheel in the interaction designers, who’s passions lie in the creation of the perfect experience, through usability testing, prototyping and more testing. However, there is a strong argument against all of this testing and refining as it can just blunt a sharp, creative idea, making the end result more function than form.

Experience is all, or read Experiential

For years I thought experiential was about experiencing a design, but it’s not it’s about experience, and this where soul comes from.

An experienced designer is passionate about the look and the effectiveness of a design and ensures their soul is applied to everything they do.

An excellent example of what not to do is a site we reviewed a while back that seemingly missed both design and ease of use steps during it’s development and almost certainly skipped public testing.

Help me help you

If you want to avoid the common pitfalls of digital procurement, ensuring your acgency has suol, then follow these easy steps:

• Check potential agencies have a proven user centred design methodology as well as a creative portfolio
• Ask for CVs of key staff and make sure they are guaranteed to be on the project
• Meet the team and chat to them about what they think is good and bad
• Don’t ever feel that it’s not your right to ask questions
• Ask for clarification on every point until it’s clear
• Remember you’re the client and paying the bills

If you would like to know more then give me a call or drop me a note and we’ll take you through our experiences and see how we can help.

global usability testing, information architecture, interface design, internet research, market research, usability design, user centred design, user interface Design, e-commerce, Internet, Mobile, research, usability

Only a week has passed since one of the most significant design faux pars of recent times launched.

In that time a wide range of press and interested parties have slated the website www.bethere.co.uk as an horrendous example of design gone bad.

In our usual pragmatic style we have decided to review it from a customer point of view rather than cast our critical design eye on it.

Q. So what do the general public think?

A. Not good, in fact with the odd exception the site has been universally criticised as being the worst redesign of the year.

Many a true word Twittered in haste.

Our favourite quote on Twitter is:

“If I didn’t know that the new website was for real I’d think it had been hacked to be honest!“

That’s pretty damming and more recent quotes are questioning Be’s ability to provide a good broadband service based on how poor their site is.

So how did the Be brand become such an anchor?

Only Be’s marketing team can answer that one and I guess the agency who created the site, which offers a number of very similar designs for other clients, only not quite so 80’s.

Pointless dynamic help

However all of these negative, and no doubt expensive, reactions and customer feedback could have been spotted, corrected and mitigated by simply asking their customers during the design phase.

Customer’s views count, get them before they get you!

As a user centred design champion, we are always looking for good and bad examples of sites that either choose to embrace or reject their customer’s views during the initial design phases.

Again I can not know if the site was tested prior to launch, but I have a hunch that it wasn’t otherwise it would not end up looking like this.

Brand and usability go hand in hand

Finally, an even bigger problem is that the site just does not work very well. There are prompts in forms that aren’t needed, readability is a strain thanks to over saturated colours and the accessibility is so bad I don’t know where to start.

The bottom line makes good reading for agencies like us, who are here to help businesses meet their customers needs, whilst working with big, brash design companies, creating brilliantly branded, usable and accessible websites, first time, every time.

If you want to Be better than your competition and avoid upsetting your customers then contact us to see how our research and user centred design services can work for you.

Be*en There Before, in the 80's

accessibility, information architecture, interface design, market research, usability design, user centred design, user interface Design, Internet, research, Twitter, usability

We are:London has been lucky enough to have recently been involved in some exciting form design and research. From our recently conducted research some interesting design considerations have come to light. One of the main areas is user handholding.

User handholding is a double edged sword. A fine balance must be struck between useful support and wrapping the user up in cotton wool. Our recent testing revealed some interesting user attitudes towards the support of both inline validation and automatic inline help. Providing the user with inline validation gave the user a sense of achievement. It helped them feel they were walking the correct path, reassuring them.

When creating a password for a Google account the user is provided with reassurance of its security level.

Automatic inline help however had an adverse affect. While on first appearances help of this nature supports the user, holds their hand and aids the smooth completion of the form the user’s impressions however were not of this nature. The user felt this patronised them, that providing automatic help for every field treated them as if they were incompetent and unable to complete the form.

Do users of the British Gas site need prompting to enter their first name in the ‘First name’ field?

These attitudes develop into interesting design challenges. A form must provide a supportive environment for the user. It must help them when they need help and reassure them that they are on the right path. A form must also not patronise the user. It must not try to support when support is not needed. Inline validation helps to reassure the user while trusting the user that they are intelligent and aware enough to complete the form fields without support. Automatic inline help can be used sparingly but overuse makes the user feel they are being patronised. Users do not need help on how to fill out their name. Offering user activated help allows users easy access to support when needed but allows them to choose when they require it.

Blog, information architecture, usability research, user interface Internet, research, usability

 I don’t ordinarily consider gossip-blogger Perez Hilton a source of social marketing insight but on this occasion he twittered a report by Sysomos - a US based organisation specialising in media monitoring - and its actually quite interesting.

 

Sysomos analysed more than 11.5 million Twitter accounts, indexing user profiles and looking at the frequency of status updates and behaviours over a period of time. There is plenty of data to mine through but some key findings of note include:

 

• 21% of all registered users have never even posted a Tweet;
• More than 50% of all updates are publishing using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com;
• 65% of Twitter users are under the age of 25 ; and
• Just 5% of users - or Power-Tweeters as we shall call them - account for a massive 75% of all activity.

Twitter has experienced explosive growth in recent months and this report is essential reading in helping to understand why.

 

Read the report here

 

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