It’s the weekend and all I can think is at long last! So my apologies, no in depth posting today, but I will leave you with something to think about.
In terms of design and layout, how far should we go with consistency? Is it just the navigational elements and terminology or should we be looking at much more?
Have a good weekend!
I recently visited Honest Eds in Toronto while I was on holiday.
‘We feel shopping should be an entertaining experience’
An entertaining experience it was and somewhere to get you thinking about Information Architecture.
As soon as I entered the shop I felt lost, which I guess is there intention – get lost amongst all the bargains and buy. The sign up to the next level said something like ‘this way for more great bargains you lucky people!’ I was curious, so I went up to the next level. It worked well in this type of shop as you kind of knew what to expect and I was on holiday so browsing for the sake of it was not a problem. However, if my local supermarket adopted this approach I would definitely go somewhere else. In my local supermarket I like to know where to find things as I want to get it over and done with as quick as possible. I find it annoying when they change the order of things to get you to notice different things and so you buy more. This is the same for the web. Tell me the train times now, whereas I don’t mind clicking for the sake of it on my favourite comedy site. I guess the information architecture should suit the purpose of the site – not just follow conventions for the sake of following conventions.
Here I go… My first moan is going to be about WordPress itself. When I registered for my blog yesterday I entered a username etc, clicked next… nothing happened. Ok so I thought the service may have been down or something, I’ll give it a go in a few minutes. Tried it again – nothing happened. Experience told me that something else was wrong – I don’t know what it was, it must have been a mix of instinct and experience of using bad websites for a long time. So I added a 1 at the end of my username – sure enough the next button now worked and took me onto the next process.
So where was the error message telling that my chosen username was already in use? It certainly was not on the WordPress web page!
Hello there,
This is my first post and yes this is just another wordpress blog!
I seem to come across at least one frustrating website per day, with nowhere to vent my frustration, because of course finding how to feedback on most of the offending websites takes longer than figuring out how to use it. So this will be my space for regular rantings about websites with poor usability. But, don’t expect all doom and gloom, I will comment on things that are good as well 
I also see this as an opportunity to discuss and get feedback on my ideas about usability, information architecture, interface design, etc.
