Comments on: What is this site for?

By: Monday February 9th Roundup | Webbyn.com

Monday February 9th Roundup | Webbyn.com — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 03:38:08 +0000

[...] Usability has some good advice for all you webdev’s out there: tell your visitors what your website does. This should really be a no-brainer. However, I do think its worth noting that telling someone != [...]

By: David Hamill

David Hamill — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:58:08 +0000

Hi John, consider the user who has clicked one of your Adwords links. They may have run a search on a particular service and landed at your homepage. They will arrive with questions that need to be answered pretty quickly. The first is likely to be “OK, what do these guys do?”. That’s your proposition.

The fact that you’ve listed your services from your homepage explains your proposition.

You could apply a little more visual focus to this list and make them links to more information.

I would also recommend saying “you” more than “we”. Focus on the benefit you can give to the reader. That’s what they’re interested in.

By: John Clark

John Clark — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 07:20:42 +0000

Interesting stuff. The point I’d like to make here is that the websites you mention are very specific in their intention. Take iPlayer – it is there for catching up on broadcast TV using your computer. Very clear objective, from a user’s perspective. However, many sites may offer multiple services, or even exist for purely informational purposes. My company’s site is one – http://www.reynardthomson.com – no tag-line (but maybe this would help – food for thought?) but a more complex proposition which isn’t really intended for the casual browser. If you’re coming to my company’s site, you’re visiting because you probably have an interest in some of the services, or perhaps you’ve just chanced across it via an AdWords link or somesuch.

So, tag-line’s aside, it’s our duty as developers to make sites intuitively easy to navigate, exploiting good design, avoiding padding and technological lock-in* and trying to get the message across in the best way possible…

* one trick I like is to see how easy it is to navigate my site using a text-only browser – Lynx springs to mind. If you’ve avoided ‘lock-in’ AJAX and flash and so on, you ought to be ok, but it’s surprising how many sites just won’t work. And if they won’t work for Lynx, they likely won’t work for Jaws or other assistive web readers, and may even (heaven forbid) get the Googlebot in a fangle…

By: Phil Thompson

Phil Thompson — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 10:15:01 +0000

It would seem that far too few people are experimental in nature and consequently the first reaction when coming across a new website that they don’t ‘get’ is to leave it straightaway and not to click around thus finding out what it’s all about.

This is pretty much common sense, as it happens in shops/restaurants and probably elsewhere too.

Take for instance, the restaurant Nando’s; this place has waiting staff but bucks trend by expecting you to order at the bar and grab your own plates/cutlery/drinks. This works out well because they explain it to you when you first come in. However, last week I was there and the waiting staff didn’t explain it to us – no problem for us as I’ve been there before, but the couple next to us sat there looking perplexed for ten minutes and eventually left because they had no idea what to do. They clearly didn’t ask for fear of looking stupid.

The morale to the story: a little explanation goes a long way.