Stolen from The Web Usability Blog.
I had this conversation with an acquaintance about why I sometimes rewrite headlines to include the word “Top”, I some I explained to her that posts with those headlines tend to do better for SEO.
Even if the headline reads, “The Top Ten Reasons I Would Design My Site In Baker, California.” Users see “Top”, assumes David Letterman had some part in it, and click.
Voila, instant traffic!
Whenever writers are low on ideas, the always lean on Top Ten lists — they are easy, and readers loved them. They’re also lazy, because they require very little real work requiring research, just opinion.
All you have to do is come up with some ideas of what the top items are, and write them. Unfortunately, most of the top lists have no attribution to studies nor have data to support them. Just one author pointing out what they think should be a top item on a list.
Smashing Magazine, which has nearly 120,000 readers of their RSS feed, publishes articles like 30 Free High Quality WordPress Themes. That’s wonderful, but for what?
Everyone does this. Jacob Nielsen does this (Top 10 IA Mistakes). Mashable does it. Jared Spool does it (Ten Ways To Kill Good Design). We do it, alot.
There’s no context what the lists are for. Can those WordPress themes be used for a personal site? A corporate site? A sports site? IA of what? All IA? Does some of it really cover interaction design?
For a field that uses “it depends” a lot when talking to clients, we sure have some absolutes, especially without context.
Many of the top lists are great to do because they are a bunch of screen shots, but frequently we get no analysis of why they are great. It’s more of, “Here they are, they look cool, go get them.”
That’s wonderful, but for the multitudes of designers out there that are a designer only because they read Smashing Magazine, opened up Photoshop and started charging $50 an hour, the top lists may be the only articles they read.
There should be some kind of explanation why it belongs on the list. It might even be better to show poor design, and explain why it’s poor other than “it just is!”
There’s no way some of the people listed above have seen every website, talked to every IA, visited through every social media application, and documented every design mistake to make up the list. For example, it really should be Ten Out Of A Thousand Ways To Kill Good Design.
Our view of the world is very narrow, and it’s because we can’t process every piece of information of what we’ve seen, much less what we haven’t seen. (And in many cases, it’s up to us to provide filters for our readers, but with an explanation that we aren’t Moses coming down the hill with the Ten Commandments.) There’s just too much data out there, and that’s why we make generalizations based on our experiences and knowledge. Thus, we make judgment calls.
And publish top lists.
Get out all of your company's printed materials – your business cards, letterhead, brochures, fliers, ads, newsletters, etc., as well as a printout of your website's home page – and spread them out on your desk. Take a good look at what you see and ask yourself: Is it visually obvious that all of these items are from the same company?
If not, why not?
A big part of branding is recognition. Having a "look" that you use across all of your marketing materials makes it easy for your customers and potential customers to recognize that a message is from your company. So what are the elements of this "look"?
Remember, it often takes multiple exposures to an advertising/marketing message before a consumer will decide to make a purchase or inquiry. If your materials are a mismatched hodge-podge of colors, designs and messages, it will be very difficult for you to build a recognizable presence in the market place.
Why do most corporate sites lag so far behind smaller organizations?
You’ll get your answer soon enough.
Meet Dustin Curtis. He’s a designer that took it upon himself to redesign the American Airlines site and post it on the web.
And he got a response. Here are some selected quotes from an anonymous UX Designer at American Airlines:
First, an introduction. I'm Mr X, and I work here at AA.com. I've been doing UX design and development for about 10 years with a variety of companies in a variety of industries, and I work with a team of other UX specialists on AA.com. I like to think I'm decent at what I do, and I know the others I work with here are all pretty good. The problem with the design of AA.com, however, lies less in our competency (or lack thereof, as you pointed out in your post) and more with the culture and processes employed here at American Airlines. … AA.com is a huge corporate undertaking with a lot of tentacles that reach into a lot of interests. It's not small, by any means.
…
But-and I guess here's the thing I most wanted to get across-simply doing a home page redesign is a piece of cake. … But doing the design isn't the hard part, and I think that's what a lot of outsiders don't really get, probably because many of them actually do belong to small, just-get-it-done organizations. But those of us who work in enterprise-level situations realize the momentum even a simple redesign must overcome, and not many, I'll bet, are jumping on this same bandwagon. They know what it's like.
…
So, since it won't all get done overnight, don't give us a bad grade if you don't see it happening fast enough for your taste. Even a large organization can effect change; it just takes a different approach than the methods found in smaller shops. But it'll happen because it has to, and we know that. And we'll keep on keepin' on, even if most of us really and truly would prefer to throw it all away and start over.
For large companies, redesigning something as simple as the home page is like moving the Titanic on a dime, and redesigning a complete site could take a year, because at some large companies,the number of stakeholders could reach over 100. Not kidding.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Big companies are sometimes slow to move because they make changes that could kill the revenue stream (eBay is a great example), and sometimes it’s because not just User Experience has a voice: add in Product Management, Quality Assurance, Customer Service, the guy from Accounting, some gal in Shipping, and the three people who are relatives of the CEO, and pretty soon, you have a site that’s nowhere close the original design.
That’s what all User Experience folks go through working with multiple stakeholders, right?
Send me a message if interested at jobs@usabilitycounts.com.
That’s really something I was thinking about when reading through the RSS feed of KillerStartups. A lot of good ideas, and a lot of poor execution. Is it because User Experience people are preceived as too process driven? Can’t contribute enough to the final design? Not willing to take the pay cut?
Your thoughts?
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact
