1998-2000 Web Site (Cont.)

It's no wonder that I have taken the opinion of Chris Macgregor so seriously over the years. I met Chris while we were both designing type and pioneering the sale of type on the Internet, but Chris has since become known worldwide as a usability expert. Some of his accomplishments include writing the Macromedia white paper on Usability for Flash design and producing what is currently the world's only web site focusing on Flash usability: Flazoom.com.

The idea was sound and profits were higher. By selling type in collections and making the price breaks so easy to understand, I was generating a higher sale on every order I filled, at the very least pulling in an extra $20.00 per order. Often I was able to talk many customers that placed orders over the phone into upgrading from a single purchase to a couple of packages at once, or even the purchase of the complete collection.

But the redesign had incorporated some oversights on my part. I ignored some of the basic rules that I had started to follow religiously by this time and their omission was obvious to me after a short while. First, even though the navigation was simple and had only the main options with six collection choices under the fonts category, I had used an iconic navigation for the collections. While that would have been fine if I was still selling single typefaces, the collection icons didn't really represent anything at all.

A typeface icon can show with a single letter what the style of a typeface is and will tend to show what the rest of the typeface will look like. This generally allows the user to browse through a group of icons and choose the one they think they will most likely want to see without having to look blindly through a variety of links. But with collection icons, the user was only able to see a colored square that had no useful information in it at all.

After the site was released to the public and had been out for a few months, I reviewed the site to find out if I should modify or tweak it in any way. The problems that I ran into in this redesign were not the ones that I was expecting. I expected to see a lot of complaints about the interface and the fact that I had dropped Flash support, but instead the suggestions that I received were more about wanting to view the typefaces individually. With this new redesign, I had gone completely away from the solid ground that I had been standing on. I had created a site about fonts where you couldn't actually view any fonts!

This happens to be one of the problems that you can encounter when the quality control and user testing departments of your web design firm happen to be you, and, um, you. Occasionally you drop the ball and have nobody to blame but yourself.

1998-2000 Web Site
Usability: the Site Speaks For Itself
1998-2000 Web Site (Cont.)