S8080 Blog

I read a report on MarketingSherpa the other day which stated that 59% of consumer and 90% of business users view some or all of their emails with images turned off (due to preview panels having images turned off as default on some applications and mobile Internet users often having images turned off by default).

Therefore they recommend always making sure that before you send out your latest email campaign you’ve tested the email with images turned off, text descriptions appear when images are blocked and all of the links have good descriptions rather than ‘Click here’ – makes a lot of sense.

Source & full article here: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30751

Instapaper is a really simple way to save web pages for reading later. They give you a little bookmarklet which you can stick in your browser’s bookmarks bar. Then, if you get to an article/page online that you don’t have to time to read just now, click the bookmark and the page will be added to your Instapaper list. Instapaper stores a link to the web page and also creates an easy-to-read text-only version of the page. This is especially handy for reading on the go, with the help of their iPhone application.

I’d certainly recommend it, and it seems everyone else loves it too.

From a web usability point of view, the site is incredibly easy to use. In particular, I really like the signup form:

 
You don’t even have to set a password! (Although you can later, once you’ve made the account). The barrier-to-entry here is so low, and it’s so easy to get started. It’s a refreshing change from pages-long signup forms that want your name, address, phone number, height, shoe size, favourite flavour of crisps… and something I think more sites should try and aspire to. As Luke Wroblewski says: Signup Forms Must Die!

Dropbox describe themselves as the ‘easiest way to share and store your files online’, and they’re not far wrong.

You simply install a small Dropbox client on your computer (available for Mac, Linux, and Windows), which runs in the background. This’ll give you a Dropbox folder, which is where the magic happens. Drop any files into this folder, and they’ll be whisked across the internet and synced to Dropbox’s servers. If you make a change to any files in your Dropbox folder, the changes will be synced automatically (and just those changed bytes are transferred – which is really nice if you work with big files). And, because these changes are tracked, Dropbox does version control on your files – you have access to every version/change that you’ve uploaded! Accidentally deleted your important report? Never mind, grab yesterday’s copy! So, if nothing else, this is a nice way to seamlessly backup your files remotely. But what if you want to access them from another computer?

If you install the Dropbox client on another machine, your changes will get pulled down to that computer. Then, any changes you make on either machine will get pushed across to the other one – two folders on two different computers, both exactly in sync, without you having to do a thing!

What if you’re on a machine that doesn’t have Dropbox installed? Simple – you can use the fancy-pants web interface to access all of your files. There’s even have an iPhone-optimized version, so all your files are available on the go.

And how about sharing these files? Well, you have shared folders – you can either add other Dropbox users as collaborators (so the files will be synced to their computers) or for non-Dropbox users you can simply send them a hyperlink to a file, which they can download through their browser. If you send a link to a folder of photos, Dropbox will give it a photo gallery web interface!

It all seems very secure, too – files are AES 256 encrypted, and transferred using SSL. Dropbox opened to the public back in September 2008. You get 2GB of storage for free, and if you want more it’s around $99 a year for 50GB. For more information, take a look at a tour of Dropbox and the video on their homepage.

A gallery of creative iPhone friendly sites.

My wife had an iPhone for Christmas – I have never seen her so immersed in tech.

One of my implementation team, JSJ, proudly showed me our latest launch on his iPhone… I was pretty impressed. (More on that soon).

We often get asked the question – “how many users do we need to test our site on?“, In most cases I really believe the ideal number is 5, current thinking is that it’s better to spend the usability budget on a number of rounds of testing by 5 users rather than say 1 test with more users.

Typically the first 3 users will find nearly all the biggest usability problems with the site (see: Jakob Nielson’s March 2000 article: ‘Why you only need to test with 5 users‘) – so keep the groups small and focus on finding and fixing the key usability problems.

Google Chrome is getting extension support.

Oh yes, oh yes.

(…and a Mac and Linux version. No doubt our very own Mac guru, James will shout about this when it happens

We’ve been using eye tracking studies to improve the usability and design of our client’s websites for a few years now – eye tracking is also used for TV and print, here’s an example of eye tracking on a TV ad for Martini posted on YouTube…

Source: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=v0xG1xQTf9E&feature=related

A wonderful umbrella from Tibor Kalman, the Hungarian designer who blew my socks off with the Benetton ‘Colors’ magazine in the early 90’s.

The magazine gained notoriety for its treatment of race issues showing QEII as a black woman, Spike Lee as white and the Pope as Asian.

I still have a handful of copies of the early issues on my bookshelf.

So how would you order the buttons on a form?

(A)   OK   |  Cancel

or

(B)   Cancel  |  OK

Option A is the natural reading order in English (e.g. Yes / No), but putting ‘OK’ last as in option B is more like the Next in ‘Previous / Next’ which moves the user forward and improves flow. Which is best?

From the reading I’ve done, the order doesn’t seem to matter. What is important is that you follow these rules of thumb:

• Be 100% consistent through your whole site – this is really important
• If most of your users use Windows and you are building a web app then use the windows guidelines and put OK first
• If most of your users use MAC OS then follow Apple and put OK last
• Hey… Do you really need the Cancel / Reset button? If you don’t need a cancel / reset button then I say lose it all together and just give the user 1 button whether it is OK or Save, hitting a reset or cancel button by accident after filling in a huge form is a real pain!
• Set the most commonly selected button as the default
• Space them out! Give a good amount of white space between the buttons
• Make the most commonly selected button more visually obvious (in terms of size and colour)
• Label buttons to explain what it does, so rather than ‘Submit’ on a contact form use ‘Send email’

Here’s an example – it’s big, bright obvious button (please don’t click it, it doesn’t go anywhere!)

Imagine a world where you only had to remember one set of login details for any internet site you might want to visit. And imagine a world where you don’t have to go through a tedious signup process every time you want to use a new website. Sounds refreshing, doesn’t it? Welcome to the world of OpenID.

OpenID eliminates the need for multiple logins; no more juggling of different login details for every website you visit. Here’s how it works:

• You simply sign up to an OpenID provider who you trust, and in return they give you an OpenID URL. For instance, “http://yourname.myopenid.com”.
• Then, when you come across a website (let’s call it example.com) you want to sign up to, you just enter your OpenID address.
• Example.com then goes to your OpenID address, to check you are who you say you are (I’m leaving out some of the techy-behind-the-scenes stuff here).
• If you’re logged into your OpenID provider, you’ll be asked to confirm you want access to example.com, and if you’re not logged in, you’ll be prompted to do so and then asked to confirm.
• Control is passed back to example.com, who now know who you are. Optionally, you can get your OpenID provider to send profile data to example.com (your name, website, e-mail, etc) to save you having to enter them yourself.
• And you’re done! In future, if you want to visit example.com, you’ll be logged in automatically provided you’re logged into your OpenID provider.

OpenID is an open, free standard, which means it’s good for everyone: cheaper for businesses to implement (and less hassle managing passwords/accounts), and it means users get less frustrated and have less to remember. However, it’s still a work in progress, and still in the ‘adoption phase’ – but lots of big names are lending support, such as Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo!.

Whilst OpenID is a fantastic idea, and adoption is clearly on the rise, it’s still not quite as easy for users as it could be. Sites implement logins in different ways (sometimes the OpenID option on a login form is a somewhat hidden), and the whole process is a little bit more clunky than it could be. O’Reilly have a really interesting article on OpenID in the browser which discusses whether your browser could be the key to the whole process.

Imagine if your web browser really knew who you were on the web. Just as you login to your computer, what if when you fired up your browser, it said “Hello Dave” and asked you to “unlock it” as well … In doing so you become securely logged into your OpenID provider (or maybe more than one of them) and as you move around the web your browser takes care of automatically logging you into the sites that you want to be, asking you about others, and helping you register with new ones using your OpenID.

It’s a great idea, and I’m looking forward to seeing what develops in this area.

If you want to get your own OpenID, be sure to check out OpenID.net, who have an introduction to OpenID (the introduction to OpenID at myVidoop is good too), a guide to where to get an OpenID (including myOpenID.com and myVidoop) and a guide to the sites which currently accept OpenID.

Finally, this video from myVidoop explains OpenID in a really easy-to-understand way, and entertaining to boot – well worth viewing:
[youtube]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=xcmY8Pk-qEk[/youtube]