Design vs Art Blog

Using descriptive link names will make your website interface easy to understand and more predictable to users. If users go to your site just for fun or if your site is for kids, hidden surprises could be OK. But if users want to find useful information in your site you should avoid the unexpected.

Verizon FiOS Internet site provides a lot of text information but they also have a link called “Experience FiOs”, which is a pop-up with video and sound. That’s annoying for some users. But others could be interested in watching that video but they miss it because there is no “video” link. This is an example of bad link naming:

Another example of bad link naming could be found at VCarious, a kind of social network for travelers. They give users the possibility to upload pictures of their trips but the link to the pictures is called “Visuals”. Why not using the hyper-standard word “picture”? Someone wants to confuse users…

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Disclaimer: with this kind of article I want to point out usability and interface problems some sites could have. Please do not take this as an attack, take it as a free advice. I would like to make clear that this design problems could happen for many reasons, including lack of time or money.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Your website looses users if your design doesn’t tell them straight away what they can do with it. This applies specially for new sites and services.

Let’s check Rondee, a website to make free conference calls. In one hand, they offer a great service and the site is, in general, easy to use. On the other hand, I can imagine that a lot of users reach their homepage and left without knowing how the system works.

The logo tag, gives users an idea of what they can do but it doesn’t tell anything about conferences.

They waist precious homepage real estate with cheap advertisement: “Rondee is the fast, easy and free way to hold a conference call”. Of course, most users would be skeptical about this and would like to know how the whole thing works.

Then, if you click on Learn More you get to 1,2,3 instructions: 1. Schedule, 2. Invite people, 3. Send!. Finishing the process with a “Send!” didn’t give me the impression that this website is actually to make conferences.

Only if the user click on Rondee Now gets an explanation about how the whole thing works. A good interface design is self explanatory and it’s successful if users don’t have to use FAQ’s. I would have written a short explanation in the homepage.

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Disclaimer: with this kind of article I want to point out usability and interface problems some sites could have. Please do not take this as an attack, take it as a free advice. I would like to make clear that this design problems could happen for many reasons, including lack of time or money.

Popularity: 14% [?]