Adam DuVander on keeping it simple
Nick Bradbury has a neat, quick take on the history menu in browsers. For years it’s been easy to bad-mouth Microsoft and their Internet Explorer browser, but I am encouraged to see even small innovations coming out of Redmond.
Read Nick’s Rethinking Simple Things.
An ATM has a small, finite number of possible operations. At its most complicated, a machine can accept withdrawls, deposits, transfers, give balance information, and dispense stamps.
To accomplish this, ATMs have about eight buttons and a keypad.
Yet, to me, the experience of using an ATM is usually clunky. It’s as if the interface is too simple.
But if an ATM wasn’t so brain-dead easy to use, more users might make mistakes. In most interactions with computers, it’s not a big deal to do something wrong. On the web, you just click the back button. When it comes to our money, we want to avoid even mistakes that don’t matter.
Why aren’t we striving for that kind of clarity in all our interfaces? Probably for the same reason we don’t type using a joy stick to select letters on a virtual keyboard. Sometimes an interface is too simple.
Since it is so easy for me to grab forty bucks, it still has me admiring how much an ATM can do with so little. Do I sound split on this? I am. So, I find myself asking two questions:
Boiling user behavior in any situation down to a simple list of rules is tough. And often, incomplete. That said, The Page Paradigm misses very little in its two step process:
This is a pretty powerful–and easy–question to ask about each of your pages. Answering the question might be tough. If it is, chances are you have more to discover about your site and your visitors.
My friend Mike Duffy, who turned me on to this concept, has incorporated it into what he calls visitor effectiveness. He focuses on winery websites, but your site likely has audience segments you need to consider separately.
Seth Godin debunks the idea that “I’ll know it when I see it”
“You didn’t know it when you saw the first iPod or the first iteration of Google. You didn’t know it when first exposed to email or JetBlue or the Macarena or Britney Spears. No, in fact, you hardly ever ‘know it.’ If you did, you’d be a lot smarter than the rest of us, and we’d all be eagerly watching for your next product.”
(I guess it’s not just me that is always wrong).
Like most things, there is no silver bullet or magic solution. Just keep doing good stuff and try not to cripple yourself into thinking that you tell “it” from all the rest.
If you start digging into search engine optimization forums, you’ll probably go a little crazy with stuff to read. There are hundreds of tips and tricks. A lot of them probably even work. But the best way to get traffic online is to do good stuff.
Peter Figueredo noticed that Google’s webmaster guidelines want Affiliates Who “Add Value”. Rather than site created by a script and an XML file, The Goog is saying no to push-buttons.
When I started in on my last affiliate experiment, my goal was to do good stuff. I was going to write my own descriptions and pretend like I actually cared about medieval swords. It was tough to buckle down and do it. Doing good stuff is hard.
In helping others with their sites (most notably BestPlaces and Who2), doing good stuff is the right long-term strategy. When you are always working on the latest search engine trick, you’ll constantly need to re-tool. Search engines want good results, so they’ll constantly be tweaking their algorithms to circumvent the spammers.
Take a free pass from the constant game of chasing search results and just do good stuff.
