When the branding gets tough, the tough …

I just read a an article on UX magazine that talks about the challenges in maintaining brand guidelines online, when at times these guidelines were created without online, let alone interactive, applications in mind. A situation like this can put designers in between a rock and a hard place. It’s our responsibility to respect and preserve the brand– to represent it well. However, when branding guidelines box us in to the point that we feel it is hampering user experience is when it gets tough.

It takes discernment to know when to embrace the rules and when to stand up and say that the rules need some improvement (which is a tough sell when these guidelines were set up specifically to preserve the brand). And, to me, that’s where the heart of this conundrum lies: your brand is upheld by all interactions with your audience. So maintaining your logo standards is one piece of it but by no means is it a silver bullet because overall user-experience can make or break the brand.

When making decisions about you online presence, some things to consider are usability, tone, clarity, reliability, and the list goes on.

The Fold Versus The Scroll

The fold… that mysterious moving target that webmasters around the globe wrestle with daily. Their challenge; to make sure that all branding, navigation and primary content is located at the top 600 pixels of their web sites so that visitors won’t miss any important messaging. This practice presumably based upon the assumption that web users don’t scroll.

A recent article published on Boxesandarrows.com called “Blasting the Myth of the Fold“, author Milissa Tarquini challenges this notion. Tarquini quotes recent studies which have found that most web users not only scroll, but they will scroll and respond to features located at the bottom of a website. The key to successful web layout is therefore not to cram your content above the fold, but to write compelling content that will entice the user to want to scroll to read more.

Invest in Email Newsletters

Jakob Nielsen ranked email newsletters as the top priority in redesigning. This is especially if you are trying to build a relationship with your constituents. Nielsen observes that while “websites give customers detailed information and let them perform business transactions,” newsletters fill in a “different need.”
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Computers in movies also warrant suspended disbelief

Computers in movies also warrant suspended disbelief Some time ago, I watched Jack Bauer from the TV series “24″ use his cellphone camera to magnify a serial number on a jacket 200 feet away. That said, I was also willing to suspend disbelief that his PDA can download an abandoned building’s schematics in a matter of seconds. (and that they were able to retrieve that schematic diagram in the first place!)

Would watching a show like “24″ where computers are standard props have any effect on the way we perceive technology and usability? Jakob Nielsen thinks they might. Could it potentially explain why we, the populace, expect to understand any interface we sit in front of and rant if we can’t figure it out? Would it explain why we have a hankering for everything voice activated?

In his chuckle-inducing article “Usability in the Movies — Top 10 Bloopers ” he summarizes that “User interfaces in film are more exciting than they are realistic, and heroes have far too easy a time using foreign systems. ” Here are some of my favorites:

1) “This is Unix, It’s easy.” Enough said.

2) “You’ve Got Mail” is always good news. Wading through hundreds of emails after getting back from holiday break makes these three words cause for trepidation. (”Nooo! I still have 243 unread emails!”)

3) “Big fonts. ” Another website observed that they seem to be an inch high. Imagine glaring “Yes” and “No” buttons and fullscreen “Enter Password” screens.

Read all 10 bloopers on UseIt.com>>

Uncle Sam Surfs

Let me first clarify: I don’t have an uncle Sam.

The department of US Department of Health and Human Services recently released the 2006 edition of Researched-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines, a booklet (294 pages) outlining best practices for producing a website.  Aimed at helping anyone consider what a good website should contain in order to aid the visually impaired (think Section 508), it includes an exhaustive list of best practices, and even ranks them based on the strength of the supporting arguments.

User Productivity

Recently, Apple sponsored a study that found large computer monitors (particularly the 30-inch Apple Cinema Display) increased user productivity by 50%-60%. In response to the press that this study is getting, Jakob Nielsen criticizes the study’s methodology and findings saying that “it didn’t test realistic tasks, and it didn’t test realistic use.”

The take away for me from reading this article is not whether I should get a bigger monitor, but just the thought that productivity is a key aspect in evaluating usability. Specifically, productivity should be a theme that penetrates usability tests not just for the workplace, but also for websites or any piece of web communication.
In the article, Nielsen argues that productivity should be evaluated by looking at “operations� (“Was the user able to compute his taxes?�) rather than “tasks� (“Did he enter the information in less time?) which is supposedly what the Apple researchers did.

So in application, I think the ideal that everything is “one click away� is challenged at this point. If everything is a click away, that’s almost like receiving the phone book in a scroll rather than in regular binding. Thinking that we can be more productive on a website by shaving off the number of steps to an action is an incomplete strategy. The strategy needs to be balanced by the creation of simple paths to the action that allows the users to accomplish their goal, whether takes them 20 seconds or one minute.