A beautiful idea realised in a beautiful design
Watch the new iPod Nano become a stylish and functional watch...so cool it is even making me consider whether I buy a new iPod Nano
Great interview with @rjs from 37Signals discussing design and development, app development and more
Definitely worth watching it all as some of the best stuff comes towards the end
LETTER OF THE YEAR...Now that's what I call customer service from the police!
...I hope this is a true story
Just trying Google Goggles (the ability to search by images)...Very, very cool!!!!!!
here is a little video by Google that explains it (or at least the possibilities of it) better than I ever could:
This morning's sunrise
What a great way to start the day when you walk into the kitchen and see this.
- Posted from North Shore City, New Zealand
Sometimes no matter how well you design a product or experience, customers just won't get it...one for the Welshies #funny
ps. if you are wandering the call was a prank but the customer service representative was real...didn't he do well
Our amazing brains and the pitfalls of online advertising
I have had a couple of discussions with clients recently around getting users to notice certain elements on a page particularly advertising. A lot of the designs I see either do one of 3 things:
1. they look like advertising so users filter them out and other elements in their proximity aka "banner blindness" (check out Jakob Neilsen's article).
2. advertising and messaging are not relevant to the user (this video proves just how good the human brain is at focussing on one thing at the detriment of others)
3. key messages are not visually obvious so even if the message is relevant to the user they don't notice it as their mind is looking for something else
And if you hear someone suggest using dynamic flash designs...tread carefully...you may get more eyeballs (the human eye is designed to pick up movement in its periphery) but that doesn't mean you are getting user attention; in fact you may be really pissing people off by forcing them to look at something they don't want to (as I have observed countless times in user testing).
So what is the answer? Well, each design problem really requires its own solution but a couple of general pointers are:
- Write good headlines which are front-loaded with the most important information carrying words, making it easy to quickly pick out key messages
- Avoid using all upper casing for long strings of text because it reduces readability and scanability
- Don't make page elements look like advertising... particularly those elements that are not!
- Make advertising and messaging relevant to the user...Google has obviously been really successfully with this and there is a scientific reason for this...not that I understand it all but apparently the reticular activating system has a lot to do with it.
