The Cafes » User Interface

What’s more important? Attracting new customers or keeping the ones you’ve got? Almost any sales text will tell you that it is far, far easier to keep an existing customer than it is to recruit a new one. In fact the cost of attracting a new customer can be measured. The exact cost varies from depending on what it is you’re selling and what industry you’re in, but you usually don’t even make your money back until the third or fourth sale, especially on relatively low-priced consumer goods.

Given this simple fact of business, you’d think that online businesses would do everything they could to make life easy for their existing customers, especially when they can do so at almost zero cost. You might think that, but sadly you’d be wrong. I remain amazed at sites that manage to recruit customers and retain them for multiple transactions but still can’t do one simple thing to make these customers’ lives easier:

Put the login on the home page.
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I have a confession to make. About ten years ago, I was webmaster for a major photo agency here in New York. My first task was designing their first ever web site. We had lots of great photographs going back decades, and we decided that the best way to display them would be with white text on a black background. Why did we decide this? Because photo galleries have black walls.
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Cool user interfaces have The Flow. They let you do what you need to do without consideration or thought. Poor user interfaces break The Flow. What do I mean? Let me explain by example.

This is my digital camera. More specifically it is the battery compartment of my digital camera:

The battery fits into this camera in exactly one way. Turn it upside down or around, and it doesn’t fit. I invariably try to shove the battery in backwards. Even when I stop and think about the problem and realize that my natural instinct of which way the battery goes is wrong, and deliberately reverse it, I still put it in the wrong way! I have no idea how Panasonic managed this, but they did. This device does not have The Flow.
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One comment has come up every time I’ve given my RSS, ATOM, OPML, and All That talk. As soon as I describe RSS/Atom as “push”, I know a hand’s going to shoot up and some techie is going to say, “But isn’t the feed reader polling the server every 30 minutes to pull down the content?”, and my response is always, “Yes, it is; but that’s irrelevant.” (more…)

I recently succeeded in switching back to Cablevision after a few years with DirecTV (and it only took three appointments!). Thus I find myself learning a new interface for something that is supposed to be a TV, and it’s clear that cable folks have no more clue about human interface design than most PC software companies do.
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