Nectar is a loyalty card scheme which I recently signed up for because you can earn points at the supermarket I use. It’s a pretty large scheme, so I was surprised to discover just how poor the Nectar website’s usability is. Let’s walk through the task of signing up for a Nectar card, having heard about the scheme in store.
So, load Nectar.com and you’ll immediately notice two things that are conspicuous by their absence. First of all, only the browser’s title bar tells you what Nectar is, a place that most people won’t look to assertain the meaning of a website. It mentions points and there are some offers, but it lacks a definitive statement of intent.
Aside from assuming knowledge of the product, Nectar’s homepage also contains no obvious link to a place where you can get a card. Going from potential customer to an actual customer should be an easy process. There’s a small ‘Register’ link in the top right corner and a couple of pointers hidden in the menus, but these are probably too little, too late for less determined users.
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Published in Usability, Websites, tagged forms on 28th June 2008. No comments.
I’m a fairly frequent user of Amazon’s Wish List feature, but its usability is far from ideal. It may be okay if you don’t access it too often, but I use it to store a list of books and other items that I intend to buy sometime, but not right now. Here are two really simple ways in which they could improve the usability of Wish Lists:
Don’t make me hover over a link or click twice to access my Wish List. The site’s redesign makes you do this, even though there’s plenty of space in the interface for a simple link.
Before the redesign:
After the redesign:
Allow me to save the default sort order of the Wish List. I assign a priority to each item, but whenever I load the page, it sorts items by date.
Ideally, I should be able to click on “Wish Lists” and then see my list sorted by priority. Instead, I have to click the “Gifts & Wish Lists” drop down menu, then on “Wish Lists”, then “Sort by”, then “Priority (high to low)”, then “GO!”. Amazon make you click five times more than is necessary, but they could improve the usability of Wish Lists by altering two simple parts of their design.
Published in Usability, Websites on 16th June 2008. No comments.
There are plenty of books on typography, but few come as highly recommended as Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students. I have a growing interest in the subject, so I thought that that this would give me an grounding in typography and tie all of the bits of information that I’d picked up from elsewhere together.
The page you see when you first open the book is a perfect example of the clarity with which Lupton presents the subject. I simply reads, “Typography is what language looks like.” Crisp, concise and succinct.
Thinking with Type is divided into three sections: Letter, Text and Grid. The first introduces the context in which the rest of the book can be explained, looking at the history of typefaces and their evolution since the presses of the Middle Ages. It explores different letterforms and their anatomy, so you’ll never wonder what people mean by a ‘humanist sans serif’ ever again.
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Published in Book reviews, tagged typography on 14th June 2008. No comments.
Getting on the front page of Digg is huge achievement for many Web developers, but is it really worth it? On May 19th, one of our articles on Thunderbolt - The Top 10 Most Entertaining Speedruns - made it to the front page and it gives us a chance to analyse what really happens once your site gets ‘dugg’.
During the first hour of being on the front page, we received 6,583 unique visitors. To contrast, we usually get around 600 a day. The second and third hours were similarly strong, as we got 5,918 and 4,032 unique visitors respectively. The traffic then tapered off as we moved off of the front page and on to the second, third and so on.
Although Thunderbolt is a fairly lightweight site, we ran out of bandwidth within 10 hours of being dugg. During the first hour, our host told me that we were going through about 4GB every 15 minutes! We quickly adjusted the limit and continued to attract visitors though. The traffic boost lasted quite a few days, helped on by a sizeable number of StumbleUpon users.
Using Google Analytics, we can also see where Digg users are and what sort of habits they might have. They spent less time on the site than usual, viewing an average of 1.44 pages (41% less than usual) and spending an average of 2:12 on the site (31% less). 94% hadn’t been on the site before (11% more than usual) and 79% left without going to another page (8% more). 72% were from the US, 10% from Canada and 6% from the UK. As you might expect, Digg users are pretty tech savvy. Only 16% used Internet Explorer, with Firefox dominating as the browser of choice with a 73% share. 15% also used Macs and 5% were on Linux, significantly more than most user profiles.
In total, the number of unique visitors produced by being dugg was around 48,500. That’s not bad for free, but Digg and StumbleUpon users don’t interact with your website in the same way that others might. We didn’t get any significant boost in the number of forum users, RSS feed subscribers or repeat visitors. So aside from using up all our bandwidth, being dugg hasn’t really had any worthwhile effect on the site. That isn’t to say that it isn’t nice to see these sort of crazy traffic numbers on a site you work on, but it’s certainly not sustainable.
Published in Websites, tagged Digg, Thunderbolt on 1st June 2008. No comments.
