Little ways to make it easier
Use the Unexpected
Have you ever signed up for a web service and not noticed that it defaulted to a different time zone?
You don’t notice because you don’t expect to have to think about it (especially if, like me, you live on the west coast where most software seems to originate).
Time zone is important for Jajah, whose users live all over the world.
You don’t expect to see numbers on the right-hand side of a signup form. It catches your attention.
Once you notice the time, it’s easy to glance from it to your system clock. They match? Check, you’ve got the right time zone.
Sometimes requiring an extra click helps your design. Other times, it doesn’t.
Don’t be too clever
OrganizedWisdom is a health care search engine where information has been organized by human editors into “WisdomCards” of various topics.
In other words, “What’s a WisdomCard?” isn’t just some offhand detail - it’s the core of the service. It has no business hiding off in the corner of the site!
Theoretically, when you click on this corner of the site, it reveals an explanation of what a WisdomCard is, why I should care, why I should trust this site for my health care research needs. But nothing happened when I clicked it.
Use Javascript to streamline design or just look snappy, but be prepared for the eventuality that it will break with some new browser release. It shouldn’t be the only way to make your first impression on your users.
“Marketing” can be super-simple
TinyURL turns long URLs into short ones - the type of service that makes perfect sense once you’ve used it.
But most users won’t use something they don’t understand.
TinyURL has done a great job of explaining and previewing exactly how the service works. It’s not fancy, it doesn’t have images, it’s not “market-y”, but it works.
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