The other day I was chatting away with a potential client, I asked for their phone number, as you do. They replied with 1800 GETT AWEB (no that’s not real) . I asked what that was a real number, there was silence for a moment, then “I have no idea,” was the honest reply.
It’s not that phone names are anything new, but it did get me thinking.
The use of the phrase (name) as a number was all well and good if I wanted to remember the number. It’s well know that people remember words and phrases better in general than they do strings or numbers. Clearly why phone number names are so popular.
You have built the perfect web site, the colours invoke the right emotional response, the visual imagery leads customers to the relevant information while allowing the audience to personally relate to the site. The content is ideal for the web, not to much but enough to convince people of the service. The major call to actions are in the right locations, and easy to find. Everything is set, the web site is ready to take on the world!
Still no matter how perfect your site is, if the last step, when they encounter the web form, isn’t streamlined and usable, the rest is a waste of time.
Over the years I have been trying to implement UX design tools and techniques into my day-to-day production cycle. This would be very simple if all my projects where large ones with moderate size teams. However business reality is that this is not often the case. The projects I tend to work on, as an independent user experience consultant, can be with a large team for a limited amount of time, to 8-24 weeks as the sole user experience practitioner on a project.
More often it is the case that the projects are just micro projects for small business. These projects can be anything from 2-3 weeks in length.
This year I was honoured to be given the opportunity to speak at OZ-IA 2009. I will also be speaking at the Edge of the Web 2009 in November for the first time, right after the keynote, talk about pressure!
The following is my initial transcript of my presentation at OZ-IA 2009, The Art of Skywriting – The Demise of the Tag Cloud.
Now it’s not going to be word for word the same as the audio recording, but you’ll get the idea. As usual it’s also available on Slideshare along with all my other presentations, distributed under creative commons license. Soon as I have the audio I will sync it with the slides to make it easier to understand – promise.
Tagged: design patterns, IA, OZIA, ozia09, presentation, ripclouds, tagclouds, tagging, transscript, ui, ux, webdesign
