Design vs Art Blog

It’s good to give users a kick way of login into your website. Make your login input box or link visible, usually users look for it on the top right corner of the website. Like, for example, Photobucket.

On the other side, a bad design example could be Safari Books Online, an online book database. It’s so annoying to me that they don’t have a login box in the homepage! Instead they have a “Subscribe” link. Tricky, eh?

Today I had to look for the registration email to get the link they sent me to search books. Safari was obviously not thinking in the user but in the potential customer when they designed their homepage. Already registered users have to remember to go to the subdomain search.safaribooksonline.com in order to actually use the service they are paying for.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Predicting what users are typing is a very nice feature that is going to make your website visitors’ life easier. A typical example is the travel websites, more precisely Yahoo! Travel. As users type the departure city name the system shows possible matches.

This is a good example of how usability can have an economic impact, as predicting input will probably avoid a lot of errors. Imagine misspelled city names or unhappy users if your system does not identify a destination airport after clicking on the search button.

Other travel websites, like Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz, are not taking advantage of this easy to implement feature. Bad for them.

Popularity: 14% [?]