1. Packaging Design at Its Worst

Treehugger has a gallery of packaging designs that are wasteful and, in one case, downright dangerous.

2. What Street Vendors Can Teach Businesses About Twitter

One of the better articles I've read on making effective use of Twitter. I appreciate the fact that the authors use real tweets as examples instead of simply making broad, unsupported generalizations.

3. Want more sign-ups? Don't lead with "Free" offers

In user testing, 37signals found that a call-to-action button with the copy "See Plans and Pricing" resulted in a 200% increase in sign-ups over variations on "Sign-up for a Free Trial".

It seems that people are weary of "free" things online as they are often a gateway to unwanted subscriptions and opt-out schemes.

4. How to Monetize a Free Service

Okay, that title's a bit misleading.

But we could learn something from the actions of Pandora CEO Tim Founder on how to make the move from free to freemium. Founder broke the news to his customers in a sensitive and well-reasoned letter that's worth reading.

Make a great service and treat your customers like intelligent people. That's something we can all subscribe to.

1. The 50 dollar logo experiment

Should professional designers be worried about crowdsourced spec design sites? Jim Walls spent $50 to find out.

His verdict: professionals have nothing to fear.

The "designers" he hired a.) failed to take into account his obvious pun (or perhaps did not speak English), and b.) never finished the job. You get what you pay for, I guess.

2. Pointing fingers at Wired

If for some reason you have not caught wind of this article on the possible demise of Wired magazine, you might want to check it out. The irony is thick: how could a magazine about the future fail to predict or respond to the impact of the Internet on its business?

The comments are the real meat of the piece. Past and present Wired editors, bloggers, print writers, ad buyers, and lookers-on debate what went wrong and what might save the day. Highly recommended if you're interested in the future of journalism and hearing the many, many sides of the story from informed parties.

3. "Apple is creating an ecosystem of the kind of customers I don’t want"

Garrett Murray believes that Apple's long and opaque approval process for iPhone application support hurts both users and developers. The ratings interface makes it difficult for developers to respond directly to complaints through the Apps Store. Furthermore, they have no idea when or if fixes will be approved. Murray says angry users are more likely to rate software than satisfied ones, resulting in lower overall ratings which can hurt sales.

As a user, I have found it hard to shop the Apps Store for this very reason. It's interesting to consider whether Apple's attempts to control quality may have in fact broken the user experience on another level.

4. Changing search trends say: invest in brands

Chas Edwards, chief revenue officer at Digg, offers this analysis of recent marketing data:

What's happening? "Total traffic going to websites via paid search ads is decreasing relative to traffic via unpaid, organic search listings."

The explanation? As users have gained experience searching, queries are getting longer, thus undermining the effectiveness of most ad buys which use only a few words.

What to do? “As we claw our way up from the bottom, expect that the recovery in online advertising will be driven by faster growth in brand-building activities over cost-per-click and other direct-response programs.”

There's a great deal of talk these days about a desire for transparency --transparency in our software, our banking system, our government, etc.-- but transparency itself may not be enough.

Case in point: your standard legal contract is transparent. The complete documentation is made available to all parties involved. The dilemma is that the average person can't understand it as it is full of complex legal language and procedure. Granted, contracts are constructed this way to hold up to scrutiny, but I think it begs the question: if only lawyers can understand the document, can we really call that transparent?

Aviary, a collection of browser-based design tools, summarizes its Terms of Service in plain English. In doing so, I'll bet more users will actually read them (I did).

It's a lesson, I think, that transparency alone doesn't always fulfill its intended function. While policies are important, we should be careful not to forget the role of user experience.

Transparency must be designed.

On Monday, Paul wrote about the common nuisance of a missing bolt in a piece of self-assembled furniture. He argued that to cut costs, companies often give their customers only the minimal amount of fasteners needed to do the job. If there is any screw-up (no pun intended) and a piece gets left out, there is no room for error. Paul suggested that an ethical and cost-effective solution would be to just add a few extra pieces in the bag, as the cost of a few bolts would more than outweigh the cost of customer frustration and the resources spent correcting the error.

It seems to me that another reason why companies make mistakes like this is not merely because of cost, but simply because they don’t care that much about little things like nuts and bolts. A cracked or missing shelf gets most of the attention because it is easy to spot and expensive to replace, but a cheap bit of metal in a bag goes unnoticed.

Doing the right thing starts with the smallest thing. It doesn’t take much to ruin an experience. It’s happened to all of us, at one time or another: an expensive stereo with a remote that doesn’t come with batteries; a fancy bed-and-breakfast with no shampoo in the shower; no pickle with your sandwich. If that little thing was there as it should be, you’d probably never notice, but when it’s missing, the whole design gestalt can be compromised.

Step one, then, is not to overlook the nuts and bolts. No hardware, no bookshelf.

Step two is to ask: what’s your system for making sure the nuts and bolts are always there? And, if they’re missing, how quickly can that mistake be fixed?

I like Paul’s simple solution of adding more hardware, but for something that critical, there has to be a backup plan. Are there clear instructions on what to do if pieces go missing? Is it easy for the customer to ask for them? How quickly can they be replaced? Make it right; get the user experience back on track.

We can take a lesson from the Simpsons. When Lisa and Marge discover their Vincent Price’s Egg Magic is missing vital egg feet, they call the number on the box and Price’s grandson Jody promptly hand-delivers them. Now that’s design ethics in action!

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Do Nothing

When we last left off, I suggested that the solution was to do nothing. What does that mean, exactly?

What I’m saying is, forget about copy protection entirely.

DRM costs far more than it protects. It doesn’t prevent piracy—pirates are going to break it anyway. What it does is hurt paying customers, who should be cherished at all costs. After all, these are the people who are actually giving publishers money when they can get something for free. Why make things hard on the good guys? All it does is make them into the bad guys.

Yeah, sure, you say. No copy protection is just asking for people to pirate my game. How will I make any money?

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We just finished up writing a longish RFP for a client. This client, quite understandably, wanted to make sure to take advantage of all the best new social networking technologies and the hottest trends of Web 2.0.

One point that we regularly insist on instilling in our clients in an engagement like this is that, while all these technologies are great in theory, the key to their success is that they are well integrated into organizational culture, and that the organization can manage and support them well.

We learned this lesson the hard way: The last firm Nick and I worked for had a client for whom we designed a social networking strategy that was, while great in theory, never maintained. Their organization just couldn't support it. Recently, they brought it offline, sinking a significant amount of work. This reflects badly on us and on them, and we're not apt to make the mistake again.

Apropos of a lesson learned, and in an ongoing attempt to maintain the precarious balance in "experience design" between branding and visual design cohesion and business process design, let me refer you to Advertising Week's Benjamin Palmer, who recently wanted to rethink the user experience, and to Ron Shevlin, who immediately wanted to re-rethink it.

Palmer:

What if we added more to the UX designer's plate? What if we not only charged them with thinking about the interface, but also how that interface reflected upon the brand?

Shevlin:

Too often — and this might sound heretical — site designers (oops, I mean user experience engineers) focus too narrowly on the customer or site user. What they fail to recognize is that what they’re "designing" isn’t just a Web site, but a business process. A business process that often exists in the offline world. And a business process that, even though much of it occurs online, still interacts with the offline world and the people (often known as “employees”) who execute that business process offline.

Hence, your weekend ponderable: How can you better design your next website or corporate online strategy to improve the lives of both a business' customers and its employees?

How do we read online? It’s a good question for designers to ask when blogging or creating content for a website. Since a monitor is obviously not like the printed page, we need to be careful not to make assumptions based on former reading (and writing) habits and figure out how best to take advantage of the medium.

Over the summer, Michael Agger wrote a tidy little piece about the topic, paraphrasing the work of usability specialist Jakob Nielsen, who used eye-tracking studies and other experiments to determine how we read online.

Nielsen says that users are “selfish, lazy, and ruthless.” When they arrive at a page, they are not prepared to read it. They scan it for information and if they don’t see what they need, they leave.

To summarize his suggestions, writing online should address:

Scannability

Make it easy for users to get into the piece and get out if they need to.

• One idea per paragraph (users skip large blocks of text)
• Highlighted keywords (prevents skimming)
• Meaningful sub-headings
• Bulleted lists
• The inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion
• Use half the word count of conventional writing

To this, I would add: Graphics are another good way to help users scan. Consider having at least one image to anchor every piece. I don’t have any data to back this up, but pages without pictures are extremely boring.

This image makes it easier to see what Nielsen is talking about.
Ironically, he is famous for having very few graphics on his site.

Credibility

Writing that contains hyperlinks carries greater authority. Users consider this when judging whether to stick with a site or move on to another.

Don’t use links in lieu of explanations. Do use them to verify claims.

Simplicity

“Promotional language imposes a cognitive burden on users who have to spend resources on filtering out the hyperbole to get at the facts.”

More simply: Readers prefer facts, not filtering through market-speak.

Conclusion

These lessons may seem obvious, but I don’t think anyone begins writing this way naturally, so it’s a helpful list to have. Content is king, but we can all stand to make our writing a little more usable.

We talk a good game about restraint around here, often with regards to features or aesthetics. Restraint means to hold something back, to hold in those impulses for more, and eliminate excesses that might get in the way of user experience. But what about excessive customers?

It’s a problem we’d all like to have, right? But today, I’m going to pose a serious question: Are less customers better than more?

What started me thinking about this was my experience with the Dungeons & Dragons Facebook application. The game was minimalist, but addictive. So addictive, in fact, that the servers were slammed almost immediately.

Everything was going great. Then the server failed its saving roll...

All weekend long, my page requests kept coming back lost, but I persisted. It was annoying, but it didn’t keep me from leveling up my character. By Monday, the application had so much traffic that it was completely unresponsive and was taken offline.

When the servers recovered, the news came that the databases had crashed and everyone’s characters were lost. My halfling rogue was dead and no Resurrection spell could bring him back.

Now, I’ll put up with a lot for something that is free and fun, but after losing all my progress I decided I just didn’t want to play anymore. The spell was broken. They’d lost me for good.

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