So, both of the things we’ve been talking about really in the previous examples, both previous examples show how you’ve either failed to meet my expectations or you behave in a slightly inconsistent way, and doing that is a problem in yourself. If you have to do it for whatever reason, the way you get rounded is by really strong feedback. And feedback is the technical term for how the site communicates to you, how the site says, “This is what I've just done. This is what's just happened.” Something did just get added to your cart and there's a big arrow that says, “This is where your cart is,” which wasn’t in the first example. Similarly with the second example, we’ve just switched the navigations to content area.
In order to make sure you know that, I want to have a big red star flashing next to this navigation point as an example. So that’s feedback and the feed back has to provide the recognition. The audience have to recognize it, but which I mean has been noticeable. If it is too settle such as you’ve seen in the previous examples, the fact that this is now orange was too settle for me to notice that the navigation has shifted. It has to show me the result of any action, so it has to look like navigation, it has to look like a shopping card. And has the redundancy, redundancy is where you use more than one way of showing information. So, if the color doesn’t work for the fact that it’s bold does or the fact that its blinking does, whatever may be.
So, you never rely on just one method to communicate something when it’s—especially when it’s important. So color change is never enough in isolation particularly when you think about color blind people. That’s the most obvious example. But equally when people are scanning, not really paying attention, moving through a site very quickly, things that you think look obvious aren’t because they're not really appreciating the beauty of your web design no matter how many—how as you labeled over it. They’re just running through the thing like a bull in a Chinese shop and you need to really make things as obvious as you can.
So strong feedback, incorporate redundancy, we just said that. So, here we go. A lovely redesigned play.com. So, what happens if I click buy now or buy in this instance shall we say. They’ve redesigned it and it’s now a lovely little pop in pop up, whatever you want to call it. That literally is an arrow is saying, “Hey, this is where we put your stuff. This is a shopping cart. You got a DVD in there. It’s Mel Brooks. You got a good taste, I like it,” continue. So that, you can't miss, you can't continue without pressing close, you could argue, it would be nice if they had a “don’t show this again,” click box which would be pretty sweet. But apart from that, this is very, very nice. Far better than the previous design. And, you know, always chop when I saw they had changed it to these because they had obviously done some—testing and found that the old design which I picked up on previously was causing people trouble. So it’s always nice when you see that things are getting fixed.
Here, test goes, you’ll see you add something to the basket and actually that’s all the feedback you get. So if we go down, so I'm clicking here, I click that button and then it goes slightly darker with one end basket. Now, that may to you, in this sort of environment where you're sort of kind of paying attention even though you’re a little bit tired, but you kind of pay attention to what I'm saying, I would like to think. That may look enough. However, me, as university educated person, I'm not a little bit glamorous I’d like to think. Didn’t get that, and added like four or five to the basket before I realize what was going on. So even something as I say that in the cool kind of environment of an office with biscuits seems good enough, but if someone is really not paying attention and just think about the next thing in there life—can they really to make it super, super obvious. As in a site, yeah, how quickly in a site, they’ve got navigation column here which you can scroll down, kind of doing frames. They’ve got the main content area here if you can scroll down, then they’ve got third column which is a shopping basket which you have to trust me, you can also scroll down.
Now, that is not how website are normally built. So you would think and you’d be correct they are breaking the first rule which is meet the expectations, how websites normally behaved. However, they are able to do that for two reasons, one is lots of other—reason or number of other supermarkets are built this way. The other reason is, they’ve done the research, one assumes and made a calculate gamble that this is actually the more efficient way of designing for this task, having different scrollable windows.
Because where test goes, because people use our site a lot, they would learn how to use this very quickly. It’s not like once in a moment deal, but we’d like once a week deal. And because the way our test goes, there is brand loyalty there as well. So, people like to give us a bit of a chance. So, even though the design is kind of hard to understand, people would be willing to make that little bit as long as it’s well enough designed that it’s not really, really hard to understand. So, you can see how what might traditionally be called poor practice, you can get away with in certain circumstances and for certain topic company with certain type of audience.
So again, it’s all about applying these things logically rather than just accepting best practice and sort of slavishly following it, because in this example, accepting best practices would probably result in an interface with things took a lot longer and, you know, that ultimately would probably annoy people even more.
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