141–150 of 152 posts
It's funny how these trends change. Once upon a time, a one column layout would have been boring, and we all ran to frames to give us columns. I guess I'm just old-timer enough now to start seeing the changes.
Boring is good in some contexts. In this case conversion rate optimisation. No distractions allowing you to focus on the call to action.
And that anoying footer that covers 1/3 of my netbook screen?
Good advice (heavier on presentation and marketing than true UI), but that footer bar is godawful and terribly intrusive IMHO.
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A decision than increases metric X is not necessarily a good decision. Consider companies that jack up prices of gasoline and chainsaws after natural disasters. They make a boatload of money doing it, but they also accrue customer bad will. I'm sure he gets a great sign-up rate from that highly-visible form, but if readers are irritated by it, what negative impact is it having for him?
If his goal is sign-ups, why does it matter how irritated those who don't sign up may be?
Focusing on metrics and simple minute behaviours while disregarding the big picture lead to evil user interfaces.
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Lots of actions are destructive and can't work with an "undo" quite so well as in that example. I would prefer to see a confirm diglogue for deleting an account, changing a password, that sort of thing. I would tend to avoid it anyway, as an undo button isn't something users are going to be looking out for in a web context.
What about this- clicking "delete account" loads a screen where the account is removed from the frontend, along with an undo button. When the user leaves the page, the account is really deleted. Can you see any problems with this?
I guess if it immediately gets soft deleted and in a maintainance batch gets purged. Until maint runs the undo link could still work (although it would still only display until they left the page).
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It's not just people's desire to shit on something in order to feel superior (although that's likely quite a bit of it). It's the fact that if you have a website dedicated to good user interface, and you want to be known as an authority on good user interfaces, and the site on which you intend to launch or grow this authority has a completely FUBARed user interface... I think it's fair to point that out. Orange text…
I agree with everything you said, but would like to add that apart from having very poor contrast, which does affect readability, orange text on a dark background is also quite tacky. Halloween colors.
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Have you seen his conversion statistics? Good ideas often seem bad. You can't know until you've tried it and measured it. At least he's trying it.
A decision than increases metric X is not necessarily a good decision. Consider companies that jack up prices of gasoline and chainsaws after natural disasters. They make a boatload of money doing it, but they also accrue customer bad will. I'm sure he gets a great sign-up rate from that highly-visible form, but if readers are irritated by it, what negative impact is it having for him?
No one says you don't have to be smart in picking the metrics you measure.
Dear HN, just because someone makes a blog post about good UI elements, doesn't mean you need to shit on details big or small about the specific site (e.g. the big footer). For most people, this is a great way to understand the possibilities for different UIs to test. Instead of just copying others, you can think more abstractly about the UI ideas.
It's not just people's desire to shit on something in order to feel superior (although that's likely quite a bit of it). It's the fact that if you have a website dedicated to good user interface, and you want to be known as an authority on good user interfaces, and the site on which you intend to launch or grow this authority has a completely FUBARed user interface... I think it's fair to point that out. Orange text…
Only after this did I realise that one must pay attention to smaller screens too while thinking of UI design. (I am just a developer and almost never did any UI design I must admit - but it was an observation that seemed interesting to me).