LeftClick Blog

As a self-confessed geek, I am always looking for new ways to get the information I want when I want it, preferably without having to do anything (geeks, as a people, are inherently lazy). But as a geek with a sense of design pride, I also want my information to look pretty.

Enter Yahoo! Widgets, a nifty application that mimics the functionality of MacOS X’s Dashboard to provide an infinitely customisable suite of widgets, some of which are very shiny indeed. On my desktop at home, for example, I have a widget to tell me when I have new email (because I need to know now), a graphical display of the strength of my WiFi connection, an alarm clock that wakes me up with my favourite MP3s through iTunes (so I can avoid having to listen to the radio), and a Weather widget, which looked like this on Monday afternoon:

Notice anything odd? The temperature, at about 3pm on Monday, was… well, actually, I’m not entirely sure. The large numbers in the top right, which are supposed to represent the current temperature, tell me 30Ã�º; but then, in the top left of the "long range forecast", the maximum temperature for today is only 22Ã�º. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s another box telling me that the temperature on Monday will be 19Ã�º.

Which is it?

We’ve been made aware recently of an interesting brand-damaging phenomenon arising from the placement of affiliate content within e-commerce websites.

We’ve been testing a number of websites in the travel industry recently and these sites are commonly signed up to one or more affiliates that provide the website with the ability to add functionality and earn revenues.

Typically, these sites will insert some code into the body of their site and that code will run an external call that presents certain information or functionality to the user. For example, a tourism site may have an embedded control that allows people to search for and book hotels.

Here’s an example:

Apart from obvious problems with usability and user-experience, we’ve found that a high number of people expressing a sense of distrust in BOTH the company who’s site they are visiting and with the affiliate site as well.

OK, a provocative question granted, but it’s not one that I ask, it’s the question that I’m getting asked all the time by e-business owners who’ve spent heaps on their website, perhaps for the second or third time even, and still not getting the business results they are looking for.

The reality is that the vast majority of business owners are in the laps of the gods when it comes to website design. They may have some goals, but only a small number of these poor people have a good sense of what’s really needed to achieve them.

So these good poor people, experience the pain and then come to us saying “Are our web designers at fault for getting wrong?” To be honest, it’s a bit of a curly question with no simple answer but there certainly are some common factors I see that I believe are central to many of the failures.