Results tagged “ux” from Silent11

One More way to squeze in One More ad impression

By Will on February 7, 2008 9:29 AM | Permalink

Many ad-driven sites have photo galleries. They're great because they garner easy impressions because the uses must advance (click) through to each next photo, turning one visit into 10 (or more) impressions.

I was logged into my "my.yahoo.com" home-page-portal-thing (in which I encountered another misfortune/bug I can blog about later) where I followed a link to a "Bit Kit" photo gallery showing off various cases for carrying and storing drill bits.

The slide show navigation did a wonderful job of setting the expectation that there would be 10 related photos in this gallery. I clicked and clicked my way through the gallery, each click confirmed the expectation... "Slide 1 of 10", -CLICK- , "Slide 2 of 10", ect...

For me, the final photo in a photo gallery is particularly fun to anticipate as sometimes It's the climax of the gallery and I'm often disappointed when it isn't. The concluding photo in this photo gallery was an anti-climax if anything. It was a freaking Advertisement.

IMHO, a site's objective from a usability perspective is to give the user a predictable experience. You build up expectations through consistent design and functionality and then with every new page and every user interaction the site confirms the expectation, the product being a predictable site.

It is dishonest to build that expectation that with each next click a new photo in the gallery will appear and then, on the final photo, rub the user's nose in the fact that they (the user) just put a few advertiser dollars in the site owner's pockets.

UI Blunders

By Will on January 8, 2008 8:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've made my share of design blunders and other mistakes on the web, but those are for you to blog about.

As a result of my graduating from UHD with a Bachelor of Business Administration (B.B.A.) in CIS I benefited from a few graduation presents. One in particular was a $25 gift card to Barnes & Noble. Spending it at their online store was a 2 hour ordeal. Partly due to the fact that I didn't know what I wanted and partly due to the fact that their site is a navigation nightmare. B&N's design blunders inspired this post, below are a few User Interface and/or design blunders found recently on the web.

Be Consistent

Be consistent. Either hyperlinks are underlined or they aren't. I didn't realize that there were any pages after "10". First because the "Next" button is so far away from the last page, "10", and secondly, because "Next" didn't appear to be. hyperlinked. Also, give your users a preview, show them that pages 11, 12, and 13 exist if they do, lead them on a little.

Make Sense

There aren't 10 items on *this* page.

Protection by Limitation

This is one way to thwart would-be crackers... don't allow *anyone* to use *special* characters. That's taking the easy way out and potentially restricting some to not use one of the dozen passwords they already know.

More password weirdness

Did a DBA make the decision to only allow 12 characters in my password? Again, now I've got to remember one more password to comply with another site's bizarre password criteria.

White Space

I never knew the dentist office could be so fun!!!! White space is key here. The text describes a different picture, but isn't a little too close to this picture?

link: www.whitersmiles.com/our_office.htm

The same image "zoomed out" a bit.

Bugs & More Bugs

I had to unsubscribe from Dave's feed due to this issue. The only way to mark all of Dave's feeds as read is to first read ALL my other unread feeds, click on "All Feeds", then mark my complete repository of links read. Clicking on Dave's folder, or subscription alone wouldn't do it.