Note from the author: apologies if this post sounds like a Microsoft marketing campaign, but I am really excited about this technology!
Let’s say you have a website and you want to give your visitors the experience edge.
The media experience can be improved by using Microsoft Silverlight on your website. Some of the features include:
- Vector graphics with light, degrade and other effects
- Overlaying your HTML with Silverlight content
- React to keyboard input
- Video overlay
- Real-time data
- AJAX
Some impressive examples can be found on the Silverlight website. Here’s a few from the top of my head:
- Single coloured backgrounds? Forget about them! Create amazing forms, patterns, shades and colour rich backgrounds
- Animation effects, including menu transition, drag and drop, zoom, pop-ups, animated drop down, 3D wheel and “page turning”
- Better user experience patterns
Read more…
Telmo wrote this on 18.03.08 – 33 comments
It's filed in the Design, Development, Marketing, User experience box
In 2008 the quality of your product design has never been more important. Never.
This networked world permits and powers word of mouth on steroids. We know this: Landrover showed us (see result no. 2); Dell showed us; HSBC reminded us.
As if you didn’t already know, we usually share recommendations and warnings with a small circle of human beings we see or communicate with regularly, in small groups, usually through voice, each recommendation or warning of the chitter chatter tailored to that audience. (For more on the dynamics of word of mouth you *must* read Gladwell’s Tipping Point.)
Read more…
Will McInnes wrote this on 04.01.08 – 3 comments
It's filed in the Business, Design, Marketing, NixonMcInnes, Social media box
The BBC have published a beta release of their newly redesigned homepage.
The new design has clearly been influenced by personal start pages like NetVibes, iGoogle and PageFlakes. You can select from a pre-defined list of BBC widgets to include on your homepage - the stuff you’d expect: News, Sport, Weather etc. Read more…
Tom wrote this on 16.12.07 – 5 comments
It's filed in the Design, Strategy, Widgets box
I’ve recently traded in the job title ‘Producer’ for a shiny new model - ‘Experience Designer’. I’m still not entirely comfortable with it and have found myself mumbling and stumbling over it when I introduce myself. I don’t think ‘Producer’ was all that explanatory but at least it didn’t sound wanky.
I think part of the problem is that experience design isn’t a phrase in common usage as yet, so it’s something that has to be explained and expanded on.
My favourite way of explaining anything is to think of an example - so what’s the best example of the process and output of experience design?
Read more…
Jenni wrote this on 20.11.07 – 8 comments
It's filed in the Design, User experience box
What an intense labour of love it’s been rolling out the Nixon McInnes brand. My baby is born. For me, it was essential for this design to go live ASAP. The personality of NM was there from the offset but it was not being communicated in our marketing materials.
The success of this project lies in the research phase - so often this is skipped, but with this project there was a chance to embed this important phase of work. And to be honest this is the real success of the project - once the personality was defined, the rest just flowed. Read more…
Joshua wrote this on 14.11.07 – 4 comments
It's filed in the Design box
Today the new website that our strategic partner 48 Fitzroy (who are also based in Sussex) commissioned us to design went live:
http://www.48fitzroy.co.uk/
The website is very different from many in our portfolio, being the first that we have ever produced solely in Macromedia Flash, the well-known ‘animation’ software package. As a technology-neutral web agency, that’s a really important and positive step for us.
Using Flash as a technology for website design has some real strengths.
Our colleagues at 48 Fitzroy - being superb designers - like the very specific controls that Flash gives them over the look of the website that appears on the user’s screen.
The guys at 48 Fitzroy also had a clear vision for the animated ‘transition’ between screens: you can see that the website picks out key words from client testimonials as you navigate around the website.
As with all technologies Flash does have some fairly major weaknesses too. But we won’t take the sheen off today’s good news by dwelling on those just now!
So check out 48 Fitzroy - they do some great design and branding work.
Will McInnes wrote this on 24.01.06 – 2 comments
It's filed in the Design, NixonMcInnes, Our sites box
The new website for Finsbury Orthopaedics, a recognised world leader in their field, is generating impressive marketing results immediately having been launched only a few weeks ago.
The newly designed website is generating a stream of tangible results including many interactions with new patients and surgeons – two key audiences for the organisation.
Mark Smallcorn from Finsbury said: “We needed to find a web solution that not only help us to compete in our market but also meet the needs of our customers. We identified that patients more than ever were taking a higher interest in the treatment and products available to them and using the web’s wealth of information to help them. This is one of the areas where we are already seeing the greatest response to the new website”.
Finsbury’s new website includes a number of innovative new features including a Blog to allow Finsbury’s visionary founder to communicate with the company’s customers, suppliers and peers.
Finsbury invents and manufactures a range of products that can change its customer’s lives such as replacement hips and knees. Through our extensive audience analysis at the beginning of the project we identified that the heaviest users of the websites was most likely to be the end users of its products – the patients and often their family members conducting research online for them. To cater for these information-hungry user’s needs the website includes a number of user-friendly features:
- Product specific contact forms – to encourage users to request information on specific products without needing to navigate to a separate Contact page
- Virtual tour – to give visitors to the website a feel for the real company behind the website
- Text resize buttons – to allow those with impaired vision to easily increase text size on the website
- Share page with a friend function – to allow advisors and family members to easily share information with one another
If you can see the potential to generate better business results from your organisation’s website, you need to be talking to Nixon McInnes – a truly marketing-led agency.
To arrange an initial discussion call today on 0845 345 3462 and ask for Will or Tom.
Will McInnes wrote this on 16.11.05 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Design, NixonMcInnes, Our sites box
Rule No. 1 - “All content on a website should be accessible within three clicks from the homepage”
This is a popular myth that we often see in requests for proposals from new clients. I’m not sure where it originated, but it crops up all over the place, including several academic websites. At first glance it seems to make sense - you’re trying to make it easy for your users to get to the content they need, but if you think about it, the rule misses the point. It’s not the number of clicks that’s important, it’s simply how easy it is to get to the content that really makes the difference.
At NixonMcInnes, we regularly carry out usability tests on websites. In these tests, we observe people using a website and find out where they get stuck. On many occasions, we’ve seen users stare at a homepage for several minutes, unable to find the link they need because it’s not got an obvious label, it’s too small, or sometimes it doesn’t even look like a link at all. It doesn’t matter to the user that they’re only one click away from what they need, if that click is not obvious.
We would re-write this rule as:
When you’re designing a website, make sure that the navigation is easy for users to understand so their next click is always obvious. And to prove you’ve got it right, test the site on real people.
It’s not as catchy, but if you follow this one, you’ll end up with a better website.
Rule No. 2 - “Get as many other websites linking to your site as possible. The more you get, the better your positioning on Google will be!”
This one really makes Search Engine Marketers cringe. ‘It’s not the quantity, it’s the quality’ they’ll cry, and they’re right.
Incoming links are a vital part of success on Google and if you’re serious about search engines, you should absolutely have a programme of link building in place. But the thing you need to focus on is not simply the number of links, but the relevance and importance of the sites linking to you.
To successfully build your Google positions, look for other sites about related subjects and ask them to link to you. This helps Google build up an overall picture of what your site is about, and therefore which keywords to give you the best results for. If you have all kinds of sites about a range of subjects linking to you, this dilutes the keywords and you won’t fare as well. It’s also important to get your keywords into the link text (the underlined words that a user actually clicks on).
Finally, look for sites which themselves have lots of quality incoming links. Google will judge your site to be important if the sites linking to you are themselves important. This is where the ‘quality, not quantity’ mantra really comes into effect. It’s better to have 10 important sites linking to you than 100 sites which don’t have any incoming links themselves.
So how do you find out if a site is ‘important’? Easy - just download the Google toolbar from http://toolbar.google.com and it will tell you the PageRank (Google’s measure of importance) for every page you look at. Only bother with links from pages with a PageRank of 3 out of 10 and above, but the higher, the better.
Rule No. 3 - “Pages that require users to scroll down are bad. All of your pages should fit onto one screen.”
The problem with this one is that it’s a sweeping generalisation. Websites contain such a wide variety of content, serving so many different purposes to many different types of user, that when it comes to scrolling, the rule is ‘it depends’.
You should certainly make conscious decisions about what the important information on a page is, and which elements should be visible without scrolling down the page, but scrolling isn’t always bad.
In her book ‘Information Architecture: Blueprints for the web’, Christina Wodtke talks about a phenomenon she has observed in usability testing sessions which she has dubbed the ‘land-and-dip’. She has observed users landing on a page, where they notice from the scrollbar that there’s content lower down. They sometimes quickly scroll down to see what’s further down before returning to the top. This can be perceived by the user as being less of an effort than clicking through to further content on a different page, and it helps the user to scan the entire page to decide if they want to read it.
Conclusion
Rules of thumb can be dangerous as they over-simplify the process of building effective websites. Every website is different and presents its own challenges. Rather than blindly following rules of thumb from ‘web gurus’, just remember to focus your attention on the users of the website, and their needs.
If you would like some help maximising the potential of the web for your business, give NixonMcInnes a call for a friendly chat. Speak to Will McInnes on 0845 345 3462.
Will McInnes wrote this on 12.08.05 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Design, Development, Interesting, Internet, Mistakes, seo box
