HTMList.com, A Web Development Blog by Synapse Studios

Twitter is great for keeping up with the happenings of friends and family alike, but it’s also a great tool for discovering new people and resources. Example: I follow 37signals’ @jasonfried, who tweeted back to @joshwalsh that Basecamp was up and running again. I clicked on @joshwalsh to see his original post and happened to stumble upon his great blog on usability & interface design, Designing Interactive.

Josh’s latest post goes into some detail reviewing the usability of the Old Navy site. It’s a great article, but I liked his article on red as an error state even more. (In it, he notes a specific example where an expired coupon displayed in red when it should have instead been greyed out, since the user themselves did nothing wrong, and grey brings less attention to the no longer useful data, rather than more undue attention to it.)

Josh has a lot of great advice pertaining to both the nuanced and big picture issues that designers face when developing intelligent, innovative and clean user interfaces. Do yourself a favor and add him to your feed reader promptly.

Designing Interactive

Tagged with: Design, designing interactive, error states, interaction design, interface design, twitter, ui, user experience, user interface, ux

Posted in: Cool Stuff, Design

Recently, we needed to implement a rating system for a client’s application.  The decision came after the client agreed that the results would effectively be useless due to the potential for manipulation by users but the end goal of giving warm fuzzies to visitors is what was more important.  Unfortunately, since transactions aren’t processed or recorded through the site, we can’t limit who posts the feedback to actual, relevant purchasers. (Imagine if Craigslist provided user feedback profiles.)

The unfortunate “solution” we landed on involved having registered users fire an email to their customers.  Their customers would follow a link with a unique hash that allowed them to leave feedback about their transaction with the user.  Clearly, this has plenty of room for abuse.  Savvy users would simply create several throw-away email addresses and send themselves links.  Less savvy users would email their friends and have them give glowing reviews.  Either way, it would take an honest user to send to actual clients and even then, no user is going to send a review request to someone they just pissed off. And again, since the transaction isn’t completed on our side, we can’t simply trigger a feedback request. So you’re looking at about a 0% usefulness factor, either way you slice it. We’ll get into some of the pitfalls with ratings systems and a great piece on this by Boxes and Arrows, after the jump.

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Tagged with: boxes and arrows, information architecture, innovation, interaction design, manipulation, rating systems, ratings, Reviews, savvy users, stars

Posted in: Design, Development