Design vs Art Blog

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: 8% [?]

It seems that lately internet telephone services have been out of the news, not many exciting new features, but recently I have learned about the new Jajah Buttons.

The configuration process could be a little bit confusing at the beginning with the system requiring a Screenname that can not be changed once you set it up (plus, FAQ section does not have a search feature!).

But the service seems to be interesting: it is a button you can paste in your blog, website, eBay auction and email signature. Then, when somebody sees that button and fills it with his or her telephone number Jajah connects that person with you. The owner of the button is the one paying for the phone call.

This could be a good idea for people interested in being contacted. It also allows you to change your phone number, block certain ones and reject calls.

eBay has recently deleted all listings containing the Jajah Button. The is that eBay owns Skype, a direct competitor. Too bad, eBay.

In my opinion, the button’s design is very smart, giving the possibility to choose different colors and sizes. At the beginning I thought that users would not click there, but Jajah guys were smart and placed an “information icon”, when clicked it tells you what is that Jajah Button about and makes clear that the call is free of charge.

This is the Jajah Button:

Popularity: 7% [?]