I often think about how little design changes can make a big difference in the user’s experience (see my note, “One of my favorite ideas” here), and how those little things translate into customer loyalty or lack thereof. So I’ll entertain you on an ongoing basis with my thoughts on some of these things. If you’ve been brainstorming too and want to share, send me your ideas! (I’ll give credit, I promise).
Let’s begin:
* Now that I’ve designed my site with Yahoo! Site Solution, I’d like a matching business card to reinforce my brand. Yahoo doesn’t offer this portfolio service though, which is a drag because I’m neither a programmer nor a graphic designer. In fact, I chose this solution for ease of use, affordability, flexibility and reliability. And I’m really happy with the results! But I’m left hanging, and the money I’ll be spending on the complimentary brand identity pieces will have to go somewhere else (unless Yahoo decides to do me a favor and buy Vista Print). Opportunity missed. (Note: I do value a company’s ability to stay focused on its core services, so I’m not really picking on Yahoo! I’m just pointing out an example of how we often miss the user’s perspective).
* VistaPrint does it the other way around; buy business cards from them and you can get a minimal (but matching) site.
* While searching for templates I considered Homestead.com, which has about 2,000 templates to choose from. I had to compare templates manually by writing down the name of the template and the page number I was viewing, clicking through the next several pages until I found another one that I liked (and writing it down too), then clicking back to compare. This got tedious when I was looking at ten different designs. Homestead needs a tool that lets their users compare templates in one view.
As I think about it this note is leading me to another, related column. This one, instead of being about existing products or services that could be made better, will be about things that don’t exist yet. Stay tuned…
(Update May 11, 2009: I have now converted my site to WordPress because Yahoo lacked the social media functionality I require, such as RSS subscription, comments, SEO and statistics. The site is much more powerful now, and I was fortunate enough to find a programmer who was as service oriented as I had hoped he would be).
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