Ideas and thoughts on the web

I am going to start writing some random thoughts on these blogs, so a) I get more clarity of my thoughts within myself, which in turn helps me communicate ideas better to others, b)I can read them later and others can read them and point out flaws in my what I am trying to convey (user testing in practice :).

People spend most of their online time on "other sites", not on your site, so you can't be so self centered as an organization to create things so unique that people are ready to blow their brains out trying to figure out what it is exactly that you are saying. I don't think people at my company, especially marketing guys/gals get it. Some other people get part of it (including myself), but not enough to convince others or take on the task to start the conversation with people so they can change their old way of thinking and doing things.

One of the most interesting thing in the web-revamp/refresh presentation was the graph of customer satisfaction. It went up whenever there was a design revamp and went down again after a while. The conclusion that was drawn was that we should do web redesign/refresh every couple of years. Well, that may be good for people to keep their jobs. I though that graph indicated something quite different, that we are doing the same thing over and over again and expect a different result each time or are satisfied with the bump we got in the ratings (from a survey) and that becomes are target. I thought the real progress meant that with each redesign the graph always went up higher a little, maybe come down slightly- stress slightly, as people caught up with whats going on the web on "other sites" and thought were getting bored/or not used to anymore of the way we did things. So that misses me.

In my view there should never be a reason to "revamp/overhaul" a website completely unless its to get a fresh start with new philosophy about way of doing stuff. If we started out on the right track then we should make incremental improvements/tweaks, additions/removals, but never really an overhaul, so much so that people think after a website launch that they came to the wrong site (if they had previously been to the site before).

People seem to judge design by how cool it looks. Essentially I think they are just expressing a human emotion when they see something fresh/new, just in the way we like to get new clothes, or a new furniture replacing the old one. That is fine, but it should never be the primary way we judge it. The main question to ask is "does it work?"... even for one person? If it doesn't then all the "coolness" is useless.

Surveys:

Relying on surveys primarily as your feedback mechanism is also not very helpful. I think surveys are helpful but should never be the only means of collecting feedback on a website. Surveys by nature rely on a person's memory however recently they have completed a task and the usefulness of their response also depends on what questions we are asking. User testing on the other hand lets you actually "see" if something is working for a real live human. It lets you gain knowledge about things that would be very difficult to solicit from an actual user by asking them a question.

Fitt's law:

We violate is so badly on our site, I don't even want to talk about it. Maybe later.

Again, this field of "Human computer interaction" which I think includes usability, user experience, interaction design, information architecture etc. has become a pretty advanced and specialized field. Its not my area of expertise, but they seem be saying things that make sense. Why not try and be professional and take these concepts and ideas from these other professionals rather than thinking thats our job and then do it so very unprofessionally (I don't think I want to use that word, but can't think of another term, I mean where we do things using our whims, emotions, projecting stuff from other fields that we may specialise in...).

Anyhow, so last rant on user testing is this quote from Jakob Nielson:

"User testing does not result in brilliant design. That requires brilliant design. User testing guarantees that whatever level of design a company has been able to achieve will actually work".