- less than a year ago | comments | permalink
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is watching “the best pop-up book in the world, ever”less than a year ago | comments | permalink
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is browsing “Designing Office 2007”less than a year ago | comments | permalink
Jensen Harris, the man responsible for user experience in the Microsoft Office group, delivers a near-comprehensive talk on how the Office 2007 UI was conceived. A must-see for interface designers, and highly recommended skim-viewing for anyone who’s used at least a couple of the previous versions of Office.
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is browsing “The Second Best Firefox Extension in the World”less than a year ago | comments | permalink
After the almighty Firebug, and just ahead of AdBlock Plus.
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is writing about “Splash Pages can be Good Things”less than a year ago | comments | permalink
At HP, if you’re not in the USA and you don’t think to inform them as such when you hit the homepage using the dropdown at the top (not a primary nav element by any means), you’re in for a big dose of inconvenient.
Typical usage path for HP website (at least, mine, a few minutes ago):
- Hit www.hp.com
- Select “Small & Medium Business”, “Servers”
- Happily follow the information path to find a suitable server (either by choosing a product family, or trying the product chooser)
- Arrive at a server you’re quite interested in
- Notice that the price is quoted in USD, which for someone who lives and works in the UK, is a problem
- Try and work out how to get to the UK equivalent page, and notice that the dropdown country selector that’s typical of such companies is just flat, unbudging text.
So you have to back out all the way to the homepage, switch to your country, and then navigate back down to the product you wanted.
Some companies will force you to specify your country or region through a splash page (ABit, Asus) which would have prevented this problem. A direct competitor to HP forgoes a splash, but instead makes the default country so much more obvious with a flag icon that stands out on the page.
Presumably, differences in regional catalogues make it too complicated to allow visitors to hop between regions from any page on the site, but this would clearly be the ideal. In the meantime, things like country selectors and age verification forms justify splash pages, because if you don’t ask for that information up front and your assumption turns out to be wrong, that will be a problem.
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is browsing “Absolut Quartet - Interactive Musical Robots”less than a year ago | comments | permalink
Ever dreampt of being able to play a melody and have a robot jam along with you by firing rubber balls at a giant marimba, while another blends in a haunting layer of harmonised crystal glass resonation and a third keeps the beat with an assortment of percussion?
Your day, my much disturbed friend, has finally come.
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- less than a year ago | comments | permalink
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is browsing “PR Suicide”less than a year ago | comments | permalink
A free lesson in how not to put the lid on a national PR disaster for your small business, by Mr Langsdon of Lichfield, Staffordshire.
Although he could have been quoted out of context, he seems to have implied that he and his business stand by the original statement on the bill, and that, except for the exposure of the message to the customer, this kind of thing is standard procedure.
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wants Between Earth and Heavenless than a year ago | comments | permalink
