Keep The Noise Down

Capture those loving ‘ecommerce’ moments

Everyone knows Flickr is a great community platform for sharing digital photos with friends and family. However, Flickr is also a great tool for capturing, organising and sharing Design Patterns or collections of Interface Designs. 

Here are a few examples of people doing this...

• DragonVista’s collection of 500+ ecommerce home pages

• Peter Morville’s (findability.org) Search Patterns

• Factoryjoe’s Design Patterns

 

It's easy to capture screen designs and create your own Flickr collection with Snagit, although there are plenty of other tools which do this including freebies such as TechSmith's Jing. Snagit works for me as it has a ‘scrolling window’ capture profile to capture all the content of a scrolling web page.

 
You can install accessories to extend Snagit further.  There are a number of accessories to take your Snagit screen capture and send directly to a 3rd party service, such as Flickr.

 

 

 

This accessory adds a Flickr button to the Snagit preview window toolbar. 

 

 

 
You can configure your Flickr output options to add default tags to the screengrab being sent to Flickr and specify what collection to add it to.

 

 

With just two clicks I can capture a screen design and upload it to my Flickr account. Easy. 

 

If you're interested in seeing a comprehensive set of Product Details pages then bookmark Wandy's Collection as I'll be adding to this collection daily.

 

 

 

 

P.S. Conchango are recruiting! If any of my ramblings interest you and you are passionate about User Experience the  we'd like to hear from you.  Why not contact me and let's have a chat?
 

Listening to: Let the blind lead those who can see but cannot feel by Atlas Sound

Not everyone needs to be an innovator

Am I one of the rare breed of eBay virgins who has resisted the allure of this auction site for over a decade?  If so, the clan is one man less as I was deflowered this weekend after years of resistance.  I finally succumbed to the charm of eBay as a seller tempted me with a delicious and extremely rare compilation CD (limited to 100 copies) that I had been hunting for a while.

Calling me an eBay virgin is somewhat misleading as I have purchased plenty of items from eBay at a fixed price (using the Buy It Now button).  But until now I had not purchased a listing at a bid price and taken part in the auction side of eBay.

This auction took me on the emotional journey that an eBay shopper experiences.  I was soon caught up in the ecommerce site that trumps all the other online retailers when it comes to pathological shopping compulsions.

Within 24 hours I had grown from an eBay virgin to serial bidder.  Within 24 hours I had won my 3rd auction.  And a few days later I joined the army of sellers desperate to make a quick buck by listing some guilty pleasures from my record collection.

As someone who is often regarded as the grumpy old man of site critiques I thought I would be generous and open my 2008 account with a positive review.  Some may see it as slightly perverse that I am about to give praise to a company that many regard as having a lackluster attitude to their users experience!

After my graduation from eBay virgin to experienced bidder a co-worker quizzed me as to what I thought of the user experience. He expected me to launch in to a tirade of usability flaws but I had to be honest and respond "I don't know".  Perhaps I was overcome by the sudden rush of adrenaline as I joined the bidding war and therefore somewhat blind to the user experience.  However, my rule of thumb is that if you can't remember the site experience then either it's not very memorable or it was a fairly good experience. A user remembers experiences that delight or disappoint.

I'll give eBay the benefit of doubt and say it was a fairly OK experience even though this doesn't support the endless threads I read from frustrated eBay users moaning about the experience. 

So my praise comes in the humble and faint praise of "I don't know".  Maybe I've still got some Christmas spirit left in me after all.

eBay has not been pimped up with web 2.0 controls or communities but not every site needs to match Amazons appetite for innovation. Site improvements are high on eBay's agenda and their conservative design strategy is as valid as Amazon's design strategy.  Maybe people should cut eBay some slack.

So I've been happy with my experience and eBay's conservative approach to design improvements.  But for those critics who want enhanced feature filtering, are craving for improvements to the search algorithm to address exorbitant shipping costs or feel the site organization is in need of some loving, the good news from eBay is that in 2008 they plan a generous helping of user experience changes.

If you don't think eBay have shown their commitment to users then take a peep at the improvements that evolved http://www.motors.ebay.com/ to http://motors.ebay.com/

And what about http://playground.ebay.com/ .This is a play area where eBay experiments with new features before they are introduced to the site.  This shows eBay’s cautious but real intent to improve the user experience.

And don't overlook the latest shop from eBay - eBay express, http://www.express.ebay.co.uk/ which showcases improved ways to search and browse.

I'll leave you to judge eBay but maybe it's not as bad an experience as many think.  But for those millions of loyal eBay users who have waited patiently you should be rewarded in 2008.

P.S. Conchango are recruiting! If any of my ramblings interest you and you are passionate about User Experience the  we'd like to hear from you.  Why not contact me and let's have a chat?

 

Listening to: Distortion by the Magnetic Fields

The reading level of the Conchango blog is Junior High School

It is official - the reading level of the Conchango blog is Junior High School.  There may be sniggers from the academics among us but this readability rating should be applauded. 

 

For a fun tool with an important message head over to the Blog Readability Test to find out “what level of education is required to read your blog?” 

 

Readability is defined as ‘reading ease’ - a measure of how easy it is to read and comprehend a passage of text.  Readability tests are mathematical formulas, most commonly based on word length, number of syllables in a word, and the number of words in a sentence.

 

The more readable a blog is, the easier it is for people to comprehend, remember and be engaged. 

 

Readability tests have been around for nearly 90 years.  There are dozens of them.  The more commonly used ones include Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, FOG, and the wonderfully titled SMOG (Simple Measure of Gobbledygook).

 

Most folk are not aware that Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level are included with Microsoft Word.  To enable them in MS Word select Spelling and Grammar, click ‘options’, and select the checkbox  ‘show usability statistics’.

 

The different tests do give varying results and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Levels can give flattering levels by showing a grade 2 to 3 levels below that of other readability formulas. I am not sure what algorithm the Blog Readability Test uses.

 

These readability formulas act as a predictor of difficulty and supporters of such algorithms say they give a reasonable indication of how readable your post is.  These are not precise diagnostic tools and a nonsensical paragraph of gobbledygook could achieve a misleading score.  The results from these algorithms make interesting reading but understandably they do have their critics (me included).  

 

“Nearly all of today's blockbuster writers write at the 7th-grade level, including John Grisham, Stephen King, J. K. Rowling, and Dan Brown”.  Authors of children’s books take readability very seriously and they repeatedly run their scripts through readability programs to check suitability for their audience.
 

As bloggers we should all be taking readability seriously.  In my opinion these readability algorithms should be taken with a pinch of salt as they do not take format, punctuation, spelling or content in to account, but if this tool simply makes us bloggers think about the readability of our posts then this can only be a good thing.

 
This fun tool serves as a reminder that typical readers might find your writings hard to comprehend.  An important rule of thumb is to write your post at a readability level pitched below that of your target audience.  This tool is light-hearted and not to be taken too seriously but it does raise some very important considerations about how you write your posts to make them more readable and accessible. 

 

A co-worker recently fired this readability test at our Conchango blog and it returned the grade Genius.  After my flurry of recent posts the reading level for the Conchango blog is Junior High School.  Should I be concerned?  :)

P.S. Conchango are recruiting! If any of my ramblings interest you and you are passionate about User Experience the  we'd like to hear from you.  Why not contact me and let's have a chat?

 

Listening to: Untrue by Burial

Product reviews by Dilbert?!

Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) won't be breaking in to a sweat quite yet but a new web site, toonlet, offers non-designer folk the tools to create comic strips in a matter of minutes. 

 

This fun flash site has some interesting features such as  creating your own custom cartoon characters from a large range of exaggerated body parts and the ability to create & save a character with multiple moods (happy, mad, disgusted...).   But the killer feature is creating comic strips as comments in response to other persons comic strips.

 

Is there potential for comic strips to become a valuable addition to the existing user generated content players?  Could comic strips be a serious challenger to existing technologies for posting comments or product reviews?

   

What would express the pitiful customer service I received from Empire Direct or celebrate the pleasures of my new Panasonic flatscreen than a short succinct comic strip?

To test this out I set out to see how quickly I could create two new characters and a four panel comic strip in response to an article I read on ROI of User Research? 

I clocked in at an impressive 1min 47s.   OK,  I’m not the next Robert Crumb but I’ve taken less than two minutes to create my comic strip below. 

 

In response to the article my comic strip communicates a common frustration faced by user experience consultants. The post didn’t support comic strips comments but if it had then this would have been a fun, alternative and effective way to have my say.

Are comic strips the future of UGC? :)

P.S. Conchango are recruiting! If any of my ramblings interest you and you are passionate about User Experience the  we'd like to hear from you.  Why not contact me and let's have a chat?

 

Listening to: Comicopera by Robert Wyatt