Eat your own dog food.
Some days ago, I posted a review for Steve Krug’s “Don’t make me think”, a brilliant and funny book on website usability and recommended that everyone designing things for the web heed it. Since I am one of them, and design has been a slow learning process for me, I paid special attention to what the book said.
Some of the advice really hit home:
With these changes, hopefully we have a more intuitive and informative home page which will allow reader to “get it” and use the site more effectively.
I have, however, not followed the biggest, most important bit of advice in the book. No user testing was conducted to see if the readers react as expected to the changes. This is where you, my loyal readers, come in. Give the new version a spin, and let me know how you like it.
After all, giving you what you need is what this is all about.
Cheers,
Kislay
Some days ago, I posted a review for Steve Krug’s “Don’t make me think”, a brilliant and funny book on website usability and recommended that everyone designing things for the web heed it. Since I am one of them, and design has been a slow learning process for me, I paid special attention to what the book said.
Some of the advice really hit home:
- Navigation should be obvious and intuitive.
- What the website is about should be clear.
- The home page is a whole other beast.
- Minimize text.
- Optimize workflows where there is a chance of user error.
- A tagline right below the logo on left top corner stating exactly what Solomon Says is.
- The “whys” and “hows” of Solomon Says are laid out first thing on the homepage. It breaks Steve’s “minimize text” rule, but will have to for now in favour of mission clarity.
- A new display for new reviews, which scrolls through them instead of the previous static six-tiled display.
- A blog feed is added to the main page to provide easy access to discussions and any ideas/upcoming features I am mulling over.
- No need to explicitly type your email id when requesting reviews or providing feedback. Just log in via the super handy Janrain login widget – we’ll handle the rest.
- Tools for following Solomon Says on social media have been moved to top right corner for easy access and to reduce clutter in the right panel.
With these changes, hopefully we have a more intuitive and informative home page which will allow reader to “get it” and use the site more effectively.
I have, however, not followed the biggest, most important bit of advice in the book. No user testing was conducted to see if the readers react as expected to the changes. This is where you, my loyal readers, come in. Give the new version a spin, and let me know how you like it.
After all, giving you what you need is what this is all about.
Cheers,
Kislay
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