This days I’ve been thinking about making some interview series to a group of designers that are related to the web, in total 10 designers most of them from Mallorca, right now having a board:

1. Santiago Tonelli - Mokuto Concept
2. Pancho Pérez - Diseñador freelance (Hecha)
3. Susana Gispert - Atipika
4. Waldo Verdejo - Quantum - Diseñador freelance
5. Jesuke - ex At4 ahora trabajando en BCN
6. Mariana Murabito - blondebeyond
7. Pier Bover - Jefe creativos @ BehindThePixel
8. Gabriel - Diseñador 3D madrid
9. Kique - Diseñador 3D ,Parc Bit (si quiere)
10. To be confirmed : Raquel, web: 3bajocero.com/ agency: planeta-web
11. To be confirmed : Could be Razmi Patel from conectado.biz

Well the idea is to make an interview in about 20 minutes, relaxed ambiend, some good coffees, the laptop always conected with a Vodafone USB and some parts saved in video, pictures, etc. I will take over all the post-edition job and publishing. There is no deadline or rush since I’m doing this in my free time.

First interview has been done to Pancho Pérez and it’s already online.
If you like the idea and want to be part of it put a comment in this blog entry with a link to your personal website or portfolio.
On a side comment about the web agencies and their own websites, except some good exceptions, is that they violate some basic usability guidelines systematically. One of them is NOT to use flash intro, nor to put music at the homepage. This about sounds is basic since the user can decide to use his PC to listen music or he can be talking in Skype and he must not be interrupted in any of this tasks without permission.
Like a user I feel very disturbed when some of this happens while I’m talking to a partner via Skype and usually I don’t enter in that web again.
Another thing is the navigation made totally in Flash, so any of it’s content will be indexed by Google, and some others with the same Flash but worst because the menu opens popups so you can’t view anything of their portfolio. Modern Web browsers came all with pop-up blockers. Have you noticed that ?

This kind of things, at the actual web evolution and at the end of 2007, make the overall web quality worst. And it’s sad that some recognized agencies still follow this path and don’t update their websites with content readable portfolios where you can feel their works. Not only for their client works, but also for their own webs, it would be ideal that they put hands at work to fix these basic things. If they do not that they are giving at the start, on their very own website, an erroneous idea of what’s quality content on the internet.

This are some screenshot’s of the transformation process. You can see it finished here.

Fancy Formatting, Fancy Words = Looks Like a Promotion = Ignored

That’s what Jakob Nielsen says in his alertbox about fancy formating.

The task was simple enough: To find the US population in the census.gov page.

Although the page does most of the things well, it failed miserably giving this information in the home page, mainly because of the fancy formating and for being written in big red numbers.
This resembled for me the Bingo Jackpots counter these things written in big numbers that count slowly showing a gradual increase.

Now we know people don’t really look give them to much attention. It’s normal, they resemble a marketing technique, an advert so they gather in other places even if the number they are searching is right there half a meter from their right eye.

Lesson understood: If you want that your users find your information use a clear language and don’t make it big like an add. As you can see putting the numbers in big red didn’t help that much, here we propose an updated design:

• Original:

Population Clocks
U.S. 302,789,390

• Updated

Current US Population
U.S. 302,789,390

This is the homepage of Vodafone.es:

Nice and simple right ?
They don’t even need to show mobiles or devices because almost everybody know what Vodafone is.
I just have one constructive critic about it:
Why I can just enter login password and hit Enter to submit ?
This simple and stupid thing clearly breaks the natural form usability that users expect when submiting a form. Which brings me back to the other entry about labels and forms. Even big portals have this kind of issues. And I think in the next years this is going to change, because of the high competivity of the internet, everyone will care about increasing usability and return of investment.

Unless you are Vodafone, or Apple, I strongly recommend making home pages that clearly say what do yo do, and what benefit I can get from using your product.

I will be publishing a serie of homepage examples. I want to make constructive critics about some of them.

I was thinking about this while navigating the spanish Dell online store. We all like Video, but doest it work allright in all terminals ?
I don’t think so. I use to like the Dell online store, in my opinion it’s one of the most engaging and innovative e-commerce sites online, but today I didn’t enjoyed so much the Dell experience. The reason ?
In the presentation product pages the big flash video and 3D animations made the hole store freeze making a very bad browsing experience.

The PC I’m using at home is not so old :
Intel Pentium III, 931 MHz, 384 MB RAM

This leaves me thinking:
How many people is using old and not so fast computers like this one?
How many of them choose to leave to another sites when this big Flash movies freeze all the computer ?
Is the “eye candy” experience worth the ride or it’s also reducing part of the online sales ?

Flash video and animations are great to show products if they are used with rationality. When using it improperly it just eats all CPU resources reducing the website usability and making a bad navigation experience.

All this rant made me remember the book Creating Killer Websites which advocated splash screens and other design atrocities. Soon it was proved that Killer Websites Killed Business ( And yes, I’m phrasing Jakob here )

My advice is:
Use video, but test it with slow computers, test it again with 10 windows open with less memory and make sure it streams well without freezing your browser navigation. Because this could be just the case of a potential client trying to purchase something at your online store.