Design vs Art Blog

Making websites easy to use is something desired and appreciated by users. No wonder why. Computers are becoming more and more powerful but humans not. Accepted or not, human processing power has not been growing as fast as technology -we suppose we improved, at least a little bit, right? right??- For this reason, as designers we should try to keep websites as simple as possible.

Many companies have build successful empires thanks to simplicity of their products: Microsoft in the 90’s, Apple and Google in this decade. Making simple products is a totally viable business model, you don’t have to add more features to improve the value of a product.

Sometimes we have the problem that a feature is not really necessary for all our targeted users but it has to be there for some of them. One of the rules to make websites simple or to make websites look simple is to hide features.

Hiding features is a trick used by many successful companies. Here I show you some example tricks:

 These were only a few design example from some mayor websites. I hope you enjoyed!

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I got excited when I received an email from Nokia announcing the new Nokia Music Store. OK, I didn’t get excited at all, Nokia has been sending me promises of good service for a long time. Without success.

I have been an unhappy Nokia E61 user for a year or so (they are still selling that model). The interface is horrible and the whole telephone is very slow. I managed to load music into my phone only once, I never did it again. OK, OK, Nokia is the number one phone maker but that might be because they are making a good business in the third world selling cheap phones.

The new Music Store

Designing with standards and for everybody should be something that customers and designers themselves should fight for. When I tried to see the new Nokia Music Store a beautiful "Unsupported Browser" message was displayed. GREAT. The only system combination that works with it is the Windows-Internet Explorer one.    

My point

This is not what customers want, specially here in Europe where Firefox has a 30% market share, in some EU countries with market share higher then 40% (as reported by Ars Technica in January 2008). In a perfect world we would design for standard browsers, but the world is not perfect. Making a service available for different browsers is something that it’s going to affect the usability of it.

We are not talking about a startup, we are talking a huge company. So why not spending some more money to make products available for all?

Popularity: 54% [?]