The Worst Featured Topics Wesbite Presentation

Featured topics in a website or blog are hard to miss. In a website, we either have rotating banners or carousels. In a blog, we’ll normally find carousels most likely powered by plugins – WordPress, woot! The idea is simple enough to interpret and hard to get wrong. But I was proven wrong, when I stumbled on this.

Nope, those are not banners – at least, I don’t believe they were suppose to be. They are suppose to be clickable topics for you to read more about.

As shocked as you, I couldn’t believe how a simple visual communication for featured topics was made into a marketplace like the screenshot. Sigh.

And, these aren’t static banners. They were animated banners! I thought I had traveled back in time when we used blink for all our text and no image was left not animated in a webpage.

 

Anyway, I’d really appreciate it if the company hired my Malaysia website design company to make things right. Because, this is definitely not even reader friendly.

Why You Should Not Do The Five Second User Interface Test Often

Previously, I wrote about a new online service I found online called; fivesecondtest. To me, it’s a free online user interface design test service. The invaluable benefit of putting your design up for a test is you’ll get user centric feedback. Though this isn’t a full fledged usability test.

Anyway, here are a few reasons I noticed why it may be unhealthy to use this to test too often. When I say often, it’s sitting and reviewing 4-5 continuous homepage designs.

Grown accustom to a single viewpoint

For example, website users have developed the habit of expecting the logo to be the top left and the main menu either top or left. If you reviewed 4-5 homepage designs continuously, your reviews isn’t from a fresh perspective anymore.

Eyes maintain previous viewing area

Image playing a shooter game where enemies spawned at the same place – same concept. By the fifth homepage design, your eyes are not wandering around the monitor but fixed on an area now.

Well, these were 2 observations I came across when I did some of the tests continuously. However, I personally still believe this is a great service and would love to see other features like:

• Ability to set custom duration time
• Mouse gesture tracking (CrazyEgg API integration maybe)
• API availability

Have you tried the fivesecondtest? What did you think of it?

My Blog was Featured on The Malaysian Insider

It’s been a really long time since my blog had press coverage. Last I remembered, it was done by The Star for the Merdeka Blogger Project headed by Minishorts. Yesterday, a friend jokingly told me over Yahoo! Messenger said, “Waaaah, u so famous wan ar till ppl wanna duplicate your blog  http://bit.ly/8w5Si”

That’s when I found out, the recent short Q & A I did for a writer via email had been published. However, I wasn’t expecting it to appear in The Malaysian Insider. I thought it was going into a Singaporean newspaper. Nonetheless, big thank you for highlighting me and my blog.

The published article was in regards to blog content theft, its affects towards our revenue and traffic, and how did we as bloggers handle the situation. Some of the included bloggers in the article were big names like XiaXue and Cowboy Caleb – made me feel even more honoured.

Well, there’s nothing much a blogger can do about content theft except deterrents or actions  such as:

• Right-click prevention scripts.
• Filing reports with blog host providers.
• Including ownership snippets at the end of posts.
• Practice the fule; ignorance is bliss.

Or, do you have other effective methods tested out?

Intel Partners and Bloggers Watch Aliens vs Monsters Movie in 3D

I was invited by Melody who called me for the Intel-Tumpang Core i7 launch event to come and watch Monsters versus Aliens. Besides it being an animated film (love ‘em), Intel gave us a bigger treat. It was in 3D! And, there was grub – before the movie! Free food and free movie, win-win!

Here’s a quick montage to recap what happened during the event.

The gist of the event was selected bloggers and Intel partners were invited, there was a buffet, plenty of people, Intel’s country manager is Ryaz Patel dressed as a movie character and 3D goodness.

The movie was an entertaining comedy and definitely a flick to bring the family and kids – crying babies included. I’d also highly recommend watching the movie in 3D, you’d just want to reach out and grab the cockroach!

Oh yeah, make sure to stay back at the end because there’s a teaser in the middle of the ending credits. Okay, you have been informed!

Free Online User Interface Mockup Design Test Service

From the Sitepoint newsletter, they featured a new free user interface mockup design test online. The free online service is called; fivesecondtest. It’s a user community generated test to get feedback from millions of online users on your mockup designs.

This might not be a full fledged usability test with cameras or mouse gesture tracking, but it’s good enough to learn about the effectiveness in your design mockup.

Imagine, first time users attention was suppose to be drawn to the product positioned on the left. However, many users gave feedback what they saw first was the registration and price positioned on the right. This is proof enough to rethink the layout and optimize it better.

However, through my observation and personal use giving feedback on random mockups, you can’t use this service too often. I’ll do a followup article on the reason and things I’d like to see added later.