CollectiveLab

The Lowest Below-the-Fold Links in the History of eCommerce

 

I have to say I'm extremely proud of today's creative on BrooksBrothers.com.  It represents, as far as I am aware, the lowest below-the-fold links in the history of eCommerce.  As a User Experience professional that is quite a feat.

Where the fold actually is obviously depends on your browser and your monitor resolution, but if, for the sake of argument, we place the fold at around 600 pixels, then the shopping links for the only creative on this page are 7,193 pixels further below.

The creative will stay up on the site for 3 days, and I am obviously looking forward to the click through rates, the heat-maps we'll get from CrazyEgg, and all of the analytics surrounding each element of the experience.  At this point we're already seeing a lot of Social Media buzz around this promotion - as the emails (which are as long as the homepage) just went out.

Needless to say we do not expect to sell many $2,000 Polo Box Sets - it's just a hook - but clearly I think it's a damn clever one.

 

 

Fantastic Flickr Future Functionality (Preview)

So when I head over to Flickr this morning I get this tantalizing message in a little pink window, "We're introducing a new photo page, and you can check it out early. Take Me to the Future!"  For it's frustratingly slow pace of functional enhancements Flickr sure does try to make up for it with entertaining copy: 

Diving in I'm faced with two elements I didn't expect, both of which make me real happy.  First, I'm given a very clear (and huge) tour-widget.  I don't need to click on anything - simply rolling over these buttons (and huge means easy to target) reveals floating tooltips that point out new pieces of functionality:

Now that's rather nifty on it's own.  But better yet I can close the tour-widget window and I'm left with the page in its future-functionality state.  Furthermore I can browse the rest of my images in this mode and even interact with the new functionality (adding the photo to a map, etc). 

Besides how easy to use and entertaining this Functionality Preview was, it points to a bigger fact: for websites with a high degree of customization and functionality (and arguably most sites fall into this camp), gone are the days of top-down redesigns that the user has to learn and contend with. Carefully eeked-out iterative redesign of key functional pages through clear AJAXY-widgets is the way to go.

Stop Pretending Content Is Somebody Else's Problem

This is a heckuva quote that had me, embarrassingly enough, fist-pump the air when I read it recently.  It's from the Inspire UX blog which I need to remind myself to check in with more often, and pulls from Kristina Halverson's article.

I'm often asked to improve the UI of an already-designed interface for a locked-in marketing campaign based on content that, frankly, aint all that compelling.  By establishing an internal IA/UX practice (for the retail e-commerce group I work for) I hope to differentiate between the marketing fig-leaf of "adding sharing links" and creating content that is actually worthwhile to our customer.  

We're all familiar with the many customer-focused mantras that brands and marketers like to espouse.  And "social media" has given us the tools to connect with our fans and have our fans connect with each other.  But customer centricity does not mean adding sharing-links to lame content. And if other people in our organization don't get that our content is not compelling it becomes the responsibility and the opportunity for the UX professional to lead the way.

(Not Quite) Unboxing Porn

 It appears that I'm the only one who was super curious when the Tuna Salad Kit showed up in our vending machine.  Co-workers were surprised at how thrilled I was.  I gathered together $2.00 in mixed change and went to town. 

I liked the cross branding, that Hellmann's was in the box along with Bumble Bee.  I liked my little plastic mini spoon, a real "kit" indeed.  I had hoped that I could mix the mayo into the can, but no, it's a regular can of tunafish, filled to the brim, so basically you're only option is to spread the mayo onto a cracker and pile tunafish onto that.

Which means that sometimes it falls off and goes onto your desk, and the spoon-device is useless in picking that up, so your fingers have to get involved.  I was very careful, but one cracker broker in half.  If you don't eat them quickly they get soggy.  That's gnarly.

Office smelled bonkers when I was done.  My hands too. Food advertised as a "kit" (that includes canned fish) served out of a box from a vending machine is ultimately a pretty wretched experience.  As if you didn't already know. 

iPad: Content Creation vs. Content Consumption

I wanted to raise one simple point that I haven't seen mentioned out there in all the iPad chatter.  There has been some clamor over the fact that the iPad seems to favor the consumption of content, rather than coming out of the box with content-creation tools (outside of the iWork suite).  Hence the perception that the iPad doesn't favor the content producers out there.

In fact, I'd say the opposite is the case.

iTunes represents the best marketplace for Apps that we've seen thus far.  The iPad is being poised as the ultimate tool to access this marketplace.  That is great news for content creators.  According to AdMob, 50% of iPhone users download at least one paid application per month, compared to 35% of iPod users, and 20-25% of Android and webOS users.

Although I'm excited about the concept of free applications being built for Google and Microsoft's emerging Cloud initiatives, the iTunes store is a thriving, massive real-deal commercial environment (2 billion downloads, 35% of which are paid apps at an average of $1.56 per app, 70% of which goes to the developers, you do the math).  Content creators should applaud the iPad as a device that further exposes their products to an established, paying, content-hungry community.

Sizing Up

Like many web designers who came up in the early 90s I've always felt the allure of making fonts tiny and more-or-less illegible (remember all those pixel-fonts, like FFF Harmony?).  It may have been because we wanted to celebrate all the OTHER stuff on the page -- the gorgeous image, the slick navigation.  We wanted our sites to be a bright-and-shiny object and have what a Creative Director of mine would call "The Wow Effect."  It may have been because we came up in the Age of Flash where making things jiggle was the name of the game.

I've often argued (though not here, but in bars, often to people who don't care) that the current age of interface aesthetics belongs to the UI designer who focuses on end-user-needs rather than creative-presentation.  One could argue (though you may need a couple beers) that the entire bruhaha over social media is largely thanks to nifty little presentation-layer gizmos

So, part of hero-ing the functional over the balls-out flash-intensive micro-sites of yore requires re-addressing font size -- perhaps one of the hardest things for me, personally, to let go of.

I recently came across Wilson Miner's Blog, interface designer behind Apple and Django, and read his argument for the 16 point font.  In the above image he illustrates a point made to him by Oliver Reichenstein of Information Architects Japan:

Physically 16pt is as big as 11pt in print. Huh? Yes, the screen is usually further away, which at such small distances, has a huge impact.

So Wilson took the above photo, and added:

On the left, a post on this site with 16px body text. On the right, an article from a recent issue of Dwell, with what looks like 11pt body text.

That image represents the sort of simple truth that makes me stop and reassess some of the design standards that I love to hold onto (read Oliver's full post on typographic rules in interface design, The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard).  And the 16pt argument immediately reminded of another site that we were celebrating not too long ago for allowing itself to have big, easy-to-read type ...

Making form fields easy to use -- especially for those demographics whose eyesight may be not as keen as that of the online generation -- seemed to mirror the "inclusiveness" of the campaign itself.  Big buttons and 16pt font made filling out this contribution form a breeze -- and that's the whole point. 

I'm glad we've entered this functional-phase of interface design, it fits in perfectly with the mantra behind social media: that as designers, and as brands, we need to put the customer first.

Trendrr Trend

RIPPED FROM TECHCRUNCH / ACTIVE BOOKMARK:

The popularity of Google Trends, which lets users compare the relative popularity of words and phrases based on the quantity of search queries on Google over time, is starting to spawn similar services based on different data sets. Facebook now has Lexicon , which shows trends based on Wall posts.

Twitter doesn’t have an official in house trends product of their own, but Flaptor just released one called Twist. Like the related Google and Facebook services, Twist looks at mentions of the queried terms in messages and graphs them over time. Users can also click on any of the terms and go directly to the recent Twitter messages containing that term.

Flaptor also has a good Twitter search tool, as well as a number of other projects.

Brand owners, researchers and others are always looking for more data, and these tools are very useful for that. Startups like Scout Labs are also emerging to help aggregate and make sense of as much of this data as possible. My guess is we’ll see them integrate as much of it as possible.