The customer reviews and Q&A sections of Amazon’s product listing are among its best features, yet both are way, way, way below the fold for them to impact the customer experience enough. … Yet both features have a serious flaw on most all listings where different styles can be selected with a tile button or drop-down list, because each of these selections is a different product!
Category: Usability
Be Lighter Than Air
I strive to be fair and kind in my coverage of technology, and so worry this post will come across as a bit of a rant, but my entire point is that the focus on […]
Design Rule #003—Go With the Flow
Whenever you start designing something interactive (and by my definition, a ball is interactive), you should start by designing a flowchart. Especially if you’re building an IVR system. I just spent a frustrating 12 minutes […]
Stealth Trade Shows
Whateverwhenever. (This was going to be the title for this post, but then I realized that topic deserves its own story. Maybe later this weekend…) How much do you care about your customers’ or prospective […]
How to make scheduling an appointment confusing
I needed to make an appointment with a government agency that gives me a choice of three different days and locations. The process seemed more straight-forward and much simpler than I expected, until I realized […]
The profit in designing great
I’ve been tinkering with a Ramsey 555 timer kit, refreshing my long-dormant soldering skills (not bad; first attempt passed our lab guy’s inspection) as a practice project before embarking on something more sophisticated at work. […]
Aesthetics over Information = Confusion
Last night a buddy texted an invite to dinner, but because I had been in the library earlier, I had silenced my iPhone, and didn’t notice for a while. Just how long a while was […]
Simplicity Through Obscurity is Bad
Making things easy is hard; it can never be said enough. However, there is a tendency by many technology developers to attempt at solving this difficult problem by hiding things. In my humble opinion, this […]
When Good Enough is not Good Enough
There is a concept held by many engineers and analysts that products competing for market share generally have to be good enough—not perfect; perhaps not even optimal. This concept does indeed work in some situations, […]
Road-Trip Results in Retro UI
Preparing for an unplanned road trip tomorrow, I pulled my old GPS out of mothballs, and was instantly transported back to 2003. The Garmin StreetPilot 2650 may be old, but will continue to work for […]