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.

hewo-featured-topics

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. :P

 

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.

Posted by dannyfoo on May 31, 2009 | Filed Under Website Design | 2 Comments |

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?

Posted by dannyfoo on May 30, 2009 | Filed Under Website Design | Comments Off |