So, being Easter and all that, it’s time for a bit of spring cleaning, and I’d much rather some of these domains get some better use than they’re currently able to from me, so I have some domain names currently for sale as follows…

brighton-music.co.uk
brightondesigner.co.uk
brightondesigner.com
brightongraphicdesigner.com
londoncitydesign.co.uk
londoncitydesign.com
recordr.co.uk

I’m happy to do a very good rate on these as they’re going unused at the moment, so please get in touch if you’re interested in any at all… I’d rather see them go to some good use!

1985 Texturepack 001 – Click to download
This is a series of 47 high resolution photographs of macro textures. Largely these are organic surfaces, from grasses and dirt, to animal shells, shattered ice, and a few man made surfaces like eroded brickwork and carefully carved walls. There’s a few liquids too like thick gloopy jam.

The total filesize of this set is 85.1Mb (zipped). Each photo is about 1.2Mb full quality JPG.

Please comment!
I really hope that some of you can use some of the shots in your work. If you do find some use for it, I’d love to see some of the results and am happy to link to your work, so please let me know or drop a comment onto this post!

Creative Commons
No credit is required, these photos are free to use and totally royalty free. Please do with them as you like!

Now I had hoped to release these photos under a Creative Commons license, but you know what, I can’t find find one that just says do what you want with them for commercial or non-commercial purposes, so in this case… do whatever and enjoy!

More to come
I’m going to publish some more sets of free photographs if this set gets enough downloads to justify it. If you think anything would be particularly relevant, or you’d like to get access to anything in particular, then please let me know. I have sets of quite a lot of materials… not the absolute finest quality in the world mind you as I am very much an amateur photographer (it’s not be primary skill!), but some are quite useful as components to work with as part of a piece. If you think of something you’d really like to see, why not leave me a comment t?

I’ve been blogging across a number of sites for several years now, and think I’ve created some articles that have been fairly poignant, timely, or mildly amusing.

And although each time I post a new article I get a good swathe of new visitors, and progressively increase the traffic to my site through organic search as a result of having more keywords listed and fresh content, etc – I still get very, very few comments on any of my articles.

I’m looking at deploying some additional comment plugins that interface with Facebook profiles, for example, to make commenting [as you] much easier. But I’m a little skeptical about how much difference that will really make.

Could you recommend me some ways in which you think I could encourage or better position my site that would get more reader comments?

I’d love to hear what you can come up with…

(…Oh and if this post gets zero comments I might just give up!)

There’s a big range of hurdles to overcome when coding for email. My objective is to get the most consistent possible representation across email clients, and in 99% of cases I am successful across Microsoft Outlook 2000, 2002, 2003, 2007 and 2010 Beta, Gmail, Microsoft Live Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Thunderbird 2.0 and 3.0, Lotus Notes 6.5, 7 and 8, Apple Mail 3 and 4, AOL Mail and Mobile Me.

If you’re thinking that you can write off a lot of these clients, especially older ones, because you’d like to code W3C valid markup and you think progressively – then these useage stats published by Campaign Monitor might change your mind. They indicate Outlook 2000, 2003 and Express with 32% usage share – by far the most commonly used.

Campaign Monitor also publish a very useful table of which CSS style elements are supported by each mail client. Quite long, but a useful reference if you’re unsure about using something specific.

These are my 10 top tips for a successfully marked up HTML mail campaign…

10 tips on coding for HTML emails:

01. Wind back to 1998 – the return of tables!
Forget DIVs, tables are the only way to get HTML emails to represent correctly in older mail clients, which are still the most commonly used. Outlook 2000 was a real powerhouse and it’s used widely by business and home users alike still today, so you need to make sure your emails work correctly for it. Cut your design up into a convenient grid structure than you can use to rebuild the entire thing in table cells. If you haven’t built sites for a fair few years yet then you may not remember the days in which this was just the way things were done. Most of us are glad things have moved on a bit since then. This doesn’t mean that your email doesn’t have to validate properly though – you should aim for it to pass as it’ll still have to render correctly across each browser when viewed in Gmail / Yahoo / Hotmail, etc, but it should use tables at its core which is not ideal for normal web standards. Oh and by the way, forget about applying background images to cells (or to the document as a whole) – they just don’t work with several clients, and the <body> tag is stripped out also.

02. Use Inline CSS Styles – Essential
Gmail and some other clients strip out code above (and including) your <body> tag, replacing it with their own. Understandable if they’re web based because you can’t declare those tags half way down a page. This means that externally loaded CSS sheets are an impossibility, and CSS enclosed in <style> will be lost in sending too. Instead, each element on your page needs to have style applied to it individually inline. So use <p style=”font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;”> for example. This obviously does bulk out your code, so if you’re concerned about efficiency then you’ll have to use some clever planning to minimise the damage.

03. Use Premailer to preflight your inline styles
Premailer is a really useful tool that takes your CSS stylesheet and converts it all into inline styles. This means that you can code your email as normal, run it through Premailer, and it’ll spit out the proper inline styled version. An excellent time saving tool. I believe this may use Campaign Monitor’s processing engine, so expect high quality results.

04. Use run-time copy where possible
Most email clients, both web based and standalone software turn off images by default in new mail. Many users may never click to display the images in your email, so make sure if you have important copy included then its delivered in run-time (embedded text) format, instead of within an image. Obviously this means that your font selection will be limited, but this is no different from coding a site normally. I stick to run-time copy for body copy, and use text in images for headlines that need better type choices or further artworking.

05. Don’t forget Alt tags
Considering the last point, make sure your photos have descriptive alt tags, and any headings or other copy that is included in an image is represented fully in the alt tag for the element too. If your main heading for your email is inside an image, then DO NOT forget to make it an alt tag too, or the primary message for the email could be lost!

06. Always include a Plaintext version
Some mail clients just won’t display images at all, and some subscribers will have opted for plaintext mail only, so ensure you send both / multi-part. Thankfully Premailer also offers a tool that outputs a plaintext version of your email for you, so with a bit of tidying up the whole thing will be done for you.

07. ‘Above the fold’ applies, sadly
I’m no advocate of ‘above the fold’ style thinking online, as I believe that web users are much more used to scrolling to explore content, they don’t necessarily engage with a site in a linear context, and they can also be guided through effective design and messaging. However for emails this is slightly different due to the Preview pane built into many email clients. This displays a short strip of your email to the user without them opening it in full, normally no more than about 300 – 400px from the top of the mail, often with images turned off – so make sure your core messaging is included in this section, or at least something enticing enough that might encourage users to open it. I don’t normally include a call to action in here, as I believe if a user is interested enough then they’ll open it to read more first before clicking.

08. Keep it short and sweet
Including too much content in your email will negatively affect your click-through rate, as the user will either have been bombarded with content that they can’t be bothered to read, or will have been given enough information that they will have already decided on whether the specific promotion (or something else) applies to them. You ideally want to withhold enough that the user clicks through to your site to get more info, in which you can interact with them more thoroughly, and also gather some vital statistics on their interest and the success of the campaign.

09. Make call to actions matter
It’s an obvious one, but please if you expect a user to click through to your site then make the call to action simple and compelling. Include a statement about what they’re clicking through to, so instead of ‘Click Here’, use ‘Click To Buy’, and include some sense of immediacy, so ‘Click To Buy Now’, or ‘Limited Time Offer – Click To Buy’. Make buttons look like buttons – conventions will help you appeal to those users who aren’t entirely tech-savvy. Ideally there should be only one exit point from the email, not lots of optional things to click on, direct users to one well thought out landing page instead. That normally means dumping the nav bar you’ve put at the top under the header (these aren’t normally used very often in my experience anyway). Normally I apply the rule that if I think something is obvious, it ideally needs to be at least 3 times as obvious to work en-mass. If your call to action link is text based (ideally it’ll be more attractive than this!) then make sure it is underlined. If its image based (yes please) then it’s essential that the image has a representative alt tag as it will not be displayed by default and must still be usable.

10. Use Litmus for testing (don’t forget Hotmail)
Proper testing of your HTML email is critical to ensuring an effective campaign. There are LOADS of different clients, each with their respective quirks, so its tough to test properly without installing lots of bloated software. Litmus provide a pretty good testing environment which allows you to upload your campaign and get back a series of screen shots showing you how it will appear in each client. Litmus is not free but in my opinion it is very fairly priced for the resource that must be required to provide this service. At peak times it can slow down quite a bit, and it does occasionally crash and go offline altogether for certain clients, but generally this is top quality time saving tool. Oh, but they don’t include MS Live Hotmail, so for that you need to create a Hotmail account and test it yourself… I’m unsure why?

It can be quite stressful at times, but with persistence and patience the results can be rewarding. The worst offenders amongst the clients are Outlook 2007, which for some reason uses the MS Word rendering engine to display emails – much worse rendering than any other version of Outlook (and Outlook 2010 looks the same based upon their Beta), expect major problems surrounding colspan / rowspan; and Lotus Notes 6.5 which is also very poor especially with nested tables. Combining rowspan / colspan with nested tables can also mean a disaster. On some occasions I am guilty of writing Lotus 6.5 off as it has a small user base. Oh and one last tip – MS Live Hotmail will put a strange bit of extra padding around all of your images unless you declare each one as display:block inline. Crazy but true.

Remember… test early and test frequently to avoid wasting lots of time fixing and patching at the end!

Good luck with yours!

Although I fall into the later category, I empathise strongly with those who have become disenfranchised thanks to the years of sleaze, protracted war, economic meltdown…

As a recently paid up Member of the Labour Party, the lead up to the next General Election is a particularly interesting time for me. It really is the only time I am prepared to engage in party political discussion with friends – normally I’m very happy to talk ideas, policy, ethics, but now issues of personality and competence are also suddenly pretty important. These are big issues for people and can quite easily overshadow the root policies and [more importantly] principles that as a society we need to get to grips with. Sometimes politicians push the competence argument rather than engage in policy discussion because it plays to their advantage either to embarrass their adversary, or to cloud a debate because policy decisions just haven’t been made yet.

Frankly I am unsurprised that so many people, especially young people, are so disenfranchised with politics. Recent months have proved that we’re in a real slump, new sleaze allegations come out every week – from Labour politicians selling their influence to lobbyists for a measly £5 grand, to the Tories proving that they have no real sway amongst their UDP allies in a key vote on the transfer of justice and policing in Northern Ireland. What a shambles at the highest level, but even at the day to day, street level there are significant problems. I’d go so far as to say that British politics runs about 20 years or more behind the progress of commercial business. They could learn a lot from the operation of some of the big corporates, how they handle PR and generate ideas within the company.

I was particularly surprised to receive a Labour welcome letter in the post last week, officially headed by Gordon Brown MP, containing no less than three typographical errors. It was printed on pretty low grade 60 or 70gsm stock, printed on both sides, and well… it really didn’t feel very valuable. I realise that this kind of thing would be silly to waste limited financial resources on, but taking care of new members is important, and attention to detail is important in building trust. You want to feel special and included when you sign up to something as important as a political party.

Hoping to do my bit, I also sent a few emails offering some of my [very limited] time to volunteer, making it very, very clear that I work rather long hours and can only really field calls in the evenings. This was followed up by numerous voicemails at 10:00AM each day from dowdy old men telling me it was “sensible” to attend a stall that they had set up somewhere near Paddington at the weekend.

Now I don’t know too much about the local political machine in Westminster, but when someone with years of experience in design for web and SEO offers their free services, I’d probably be tempted to snap them up for something more valuable than sitting on a stall handing out leaflets.

Competency, clarity, quality of information… The role of the graphic designer and the huge power of the internet seem like they could be pretty useful applied here. A lot of people I know are quite unclear about the policy differences between the three major political parties, and with many key issues I am none the wiser. Reading their central websites is helpful with about 50% of the information you might expect, but there’s still a lot of core issues unaddressed. I suspect this is purposeful, but its bad news for open democracy. I’d really, really, really like to see an independently run website that lists 50 or so of the most important issues at a national level, and gets definitive policy information, in plain English, from Labour, The Conservatives and The Lib Dems. I really don’t see why this doesn’t exist, there are  a few sites that go about 10% of the way toward this, but nothing very substantial. No wonder noone turns out to vote when they have no clue what each party stands for or how they’re ever going to achieve their objectives.

A lot of the sites around the fringes of politics, like research organisations also suffer the fate of incredibly poor communication and UX, for example Ipsos Mori‘s site is just a monolith of textual information and links that require about 5 levels of navigation before getting to much information of interest or value. Enter at your own peril.

However, one of the most innovative political sites I found recently is Tweetelection built by the guys over at Sense. It “harvests and analyses thousands of tweets each day so that you can see what Tweeters have been saying about the three main political parties in the past 7 days.” And it’s beautifully designed with lots of pretty graphical representations, cute pie and bar charts and all that. Nice!

There are a lot of politicians on Twitter actually and Tweetminster can help you find your local ones. My favourite political Twitter account has to be @eyespymp though, who publish the [often very amusing] location and activities of a lot of fairly high profile MPs every single day. If you’ve ever wondered where Harriet Harman is eating her lunch, or what club Ed Balls has ended up at after the end of a hard party conference, then this is the account to follow!

Voting online seems a million years away, which is a shame, as I think the convenience factor is a strong barrier in turning people off voting. I know there are assumed risks in offering this, from straight up fraud and security vulnerabilities through to opening up the vote to snap decisions based on what users have just seen, but I believe that these could be overcome. We do after all live in the age of online banking – which has phenomenal security issues that in the main are overcome, and social networking where political and social issues are discussed openly every single day… do we really need to stroll down to the local school in the pissing rain to put of scrap of paper with an ‘X’ on it into a cardbord box? This seems like it has just the same vulnerabilities to me… in fact I don’t think many people really care about defrauding the vote – phishing for Paypal passwords has got to be a lot more lucrative.

To be honest my patience is quite short with this kind of thing, and that’s probably as far as my volunteering will now go. Instead I’m headed down to the Samaritans next month to give some of my valuable time to genuinely help people! Much more beneficial use of my time I think, and they seem a million times better organised and more professional than the political scene.

If you know of any sites that are related to British politics that you think are innovative, well thought out, have well considered UX, or are just plain pretty, then please let me know about them!

I think he raises a valid discussion point. A ‘fold’ line is something I do normally work with, and something I definitely see as relevant. After all, there is a simple fact that information displayed first and most prominently, regardless of the media used, always gets the most attention. Some users will just bounce out of sites if they don’t see something immediately relevant, so I really can see some clients’ perspective on this.

For that reason of course it’s important to consider, but I think the remedy is just better decision making in terms of how much can (or should) be fit into this area.

Have a read!

At the pub a couple of nights ago I had a discussion with some friends who had recently graduated from their respective universities. Naturally many of my friends have found temporary work in pubs or in retail while they plan their next move. I’ve decided to share with you a few tips and resources on finding creative jobs that I have found useful in the process so far.

Preparation
To put it bluntly, no-one will employ someone who has no experience, or proof of that experience. If you have no experience, and you have no portfolio, then you need to go away and start thinking about how to solve this (see Free Work, Home Learning and Self-Initiated Work). Creating that proof is going to be critical to you getting the job you want.

I spent quite a lot of time putting together my website, CV and Portfolio. Design / brand wise, they all fit together quite nicely. My website features a taster of some of my work, with my Portfolio containing a much larger sample as a PDF document, with the CV being solid text describing my key qualities, abilities, work history, qualifications and references (again, PDF, but occasionally required to submit as a Word or RTF document). It’s been a moderately big task overall.

I feel that format wise, a CV should generally be A4 Portrait, and should reproduce well in Black and White (it’s likely to get photocopied), and a Portfolio should be A3 Landscape as it provides a lot more room to display work. If anything my portfolio is a little cluttered – it’s difficult to know where to draw the line between enough work, and too much work. I try to avoid repetition and long descriptions. I posted an article previously with some CV writing tips, if you’re interested.

Online, my site doesn’t give everything away, but it does provide an taster for initial visitors, and background profile information about me for those who want to read further. As you can see, I keep it up to date with regular blog articles on a variety of subjects related to what I do. The fact that people visit my site and blog of their own accord (not just people I send my CV to) makes me very happy!

You will also need to provide a Covering Letter for each job you apply to. I normally use the body of my email to send this over, but some people like to provide it as a third PDF. For me, it’s very important to write a covering letter for each employer that I send an application to. I am very careful to make sure that I read about the job I’m applying for, and genuinely care about the role and company enough to apply, so for me writing a Covering Letter comes quite easily, and I make sure that it details why I believe I am suitable for the role. For me I think this works well so I recommend it, but if you are intending to send applications to a larger volume of employers, then you may wish to have a more generic covering letter that you can adapt each time.

Searching For Creative Jobs
When I moved to London I was quite surprised at quite how many jobs are available. There are literally hundreds of creative jobs out there. Comparatively, Brighton (where I lived for the past 4-5 years) had very few options available.

This section is unfortunately a little bit London-centric, as its where my efforts have been focused recently. But some of the sites do work at a national level, so they’re worth checking out. If you live outside of the London or London-commute area, then you might find other regional sites more appropriate. In Brighton (East Sussex), for example, my site of course would almost always have been Wired Sussex.

My favourite places to check frequently are…

Creative Pool
National site, listing over 450 jobs at the moment, all in the creative industries. Plenty of opportunities on here for graphic designers, copywriters, web designers, web developers, UX consultants, and lots more otherwise. You must register to apply, and expect to go through recruitment agencies for most positions.

Chinwag
When I asked the nice folks over at Wired Sussex what they felt the equivalent London based job directory was to their own service, they recommended Chinwag. Again, lots of jobs at a national level and a very wide variety of positions available across the board. Currently indexing 706 jobs, so just under double the size of Creative Pool. Chinwag requires a registration process to apply for positions, and please do expect recruitment agencies managing the vast majority of positions.

Arts.ac.uk
Job listings provided by The University of The Arts, London. This site has a lot more entry level positions than either Chinwag or Creative Pool. You’ll also find part time opportunities, temporary work and internships here, plus more positions that are a little bit non-standard (Trainee Footwear Designer, for example). For most positions you will be contacting the employer directly.

Arts Jobs (Arts Council England)
Indexing 275 new jobs this week, including plenty of Freelance stuff and lots of interships (paid and unpaid), this is a great place to start looking for places to get your foot in the door. I also subscribe to their mailing list which sends me a list of relevant opportunities via email – great for getting in early on hard to get opportunities.

Freelancers.net
Despite the title, this site doesn’t just list freelance contracts. In fact it has quite a comprehensive Jobs listing too, although its not as prolific or frequently updated as their freelance projects. If you have a solid portfolio of work though, the odd freelance project might be a good start to build a body of commercial work, or just to meet likeminded individuals or corporate contacts. This site also features a really good forum of UK based freelancers that can be useful in sourcing project work, or for getting more information and useful tips.

Gumtree
Normally a first port of call to sell your old broken kettle, Gumtree is primarily a classified ads site, but it does actually list an extraordinarily large number of jobs across a whole range of industries. In London it lists quite a lot of Creative, Marketing, Media, PR, Fashion and IT related jobs, and offers convenient filters that cut out a lot of the nonsense. Expect a pretty even split between recruitment agencies advertising positions, and employers seeking applicants directly. Gumtree is free for employers to list jobs on, and requires no registration to apply, so this likely explains why there is so much on there. Conversely, ensure your application really stands out, as advertisers normally get bombarded for the same reason. Be especially careful for scams and other nasties too.

Londonjobs (Metro, London Evening Standard)
Currently indexing over 4,500 jobs in London, and with lots available when searching for ‘designer’, this site is also a good starting point. This is a very popular site as it powers Metro and London Evening Standard newspapers’ job searches, so for some reason I have tended to avoid it as it feels a bit oversubscribed – but I’m really not sure what I’m basing this upon, and you may well have plenty of success here.

Using Other Resources

Register with recruitment agencies
For jobs like Graphic Designer and Front-End Developer (i.e. quite specific roles) you’ll find recruitment agencies useful to register with. There are lots in London and I have had mixed success with them in the past. Some agencies will be even more specific, for example specialising in Digital (i.e. only new media, web design, flash, web dev, etc). You will need a solid CV and Portfolio established before registering with an agency though. Expect to be asked to meet your recruitment agent for a short (usually informal) interview, and to oddities like having your passport photocopied by them for their records. Try Propel for purely digital work, Source, ECOM, or maybe Cogs to get you started, but there are lots.

Check individual employers’ careers pages
You may be surprised at how many roles are available with companies that you respect, or that you use/visit every day. I’ve spotted roles advertised by Harrods, Selfridges and Net-a-porter in the design sector within the last few weeks. Make a list of companies you’d like to work for and visit the careers page on their respective sites. Normally expect very high standards of work, and a highly competitive application process.

Google
You’re a genius at creating targeted Google queries right? OK well if not, try using speech marks and plus signs in your search queries for jobs to get more accurate / specific results, for example: “graphic designer”+”west london” will probably return more accurate results that searching: graphic designer west london. Expect mixed results and plenty of out of date jobs though.

Twitter
Searching Twitter for related terms, or adding the many Twitter based job reporting bots out there could be of some use. I added some and then eventually deleted them when I found they weren’t anywhere near as targeted enough for me. Beware spam.

Write to your favourite businesses
Sadly we are living in a time of recession and there aren’t a lot of businesses out there that are going to be prepared to hire people on a whim, but if you have some exceptional talent in your particular field, say Photography or Graphic Design, then you may consider sending some of the places you’d really like to work a copy of your portfolio. This could be an email, though beware of sending to info@ or form based black holes, instead try to find a relevant staff member’s work email address and direct it through them. If you can afford to produce an impressive printed portfolio and post it out to your dream employer, I’d say you’d create more of an impact. Don’t expect instant results or even a call back necessarily, but if you are an exceptional talent then there are employers out there who will snap you up. This can be particularly useful in finding internships, especially if you can manage an unpaid one, as many businesses will be prepared to give you some of their time even if they’re not actively advertising their availability.

Freelance
Freelancing without a body of contacts or without contracts to get you going is likely to end in disaster pretty quickly, but you may find some contract work that will pay enough to keep a roof over your head while you build and extend a portfolio of work. This can be a good way of getting some solid corporate work done, and building some good contacts in the business world. Remember that word of mouth is key, and completing good work on time is likely to lead to more.

Create your own internship
OK I just made this up, but you might consider contacting companies who have no internship programme, who may have never even thought of taking an intern, and offering to do some work for them for free. Just beware you don’t get stuck making tea, and make sure that they aren’t stepping over any employment law or insurance issues beforehand.

Getting cash together whilst on an internship
Sadly it does seem that internships in the UK are reserved for those who’s family home is located conveniently close to where they want to work, and / or for those with rich enough parents to keep them in food and shelter whilst they build up experience. Apparently however, graduates are allowed to continue to claim jobseekers allowance for periods in which they were an intern of up to 13 weeks, according to this article in the Telegraph. If that’s true, then I hope that the policy is rolled out to all jobseekers as it could be a really great way to give lots of unemployed people a chance to improve their skills base and experience during the recession.

I really hope some of this helps. If you have any comments, additional advice, or other links that you think I should add then please let me know!

There’s a universal draw for businesses, perhaps justifiedly so, to launch a site rapidly upon startup or when a need arises suddenly. It’s fantastic that we finally live in a time where decision makers are quick to realise the power of the Internet as a marketing and a commercial tool. It’s also fantastic that this level of technology is so democratised that businesses of all shapes and sizes can put together high quality materials for the web, affordably and with scalability.

The key term I mentioned above is ‘rapidly’. Rapid deployment is one of the first things to come up in most initial client meetings from my experience. I will normally give a client a basic timeline with milestones for a project based upon an initial consultation and when a project spec has been firmed up. It can be difficult not to overcommit on this, especially if one really big factor is unresolved within the first stages of getting a project underway.

That factor, you guessed it, is content.

Many business people I suspect have had the need for a website rammed down their throat for so long that they have accepted the prospect and launched into it without asking themselves what on earth they’re going to say.

There are some classic business questions that are essential to answer in order to build an effective site, whatever your requirements are. That means tackling questions like: “What does your business do?” or “What are your key advantages over your competitors” and simply “What’s your USP?”

These look like rather basic questions but I have often worked with clients doing business across a range of sectors, with several core products and working in highly competative markets where a clear USP is difficult to flesh out. Add to this a requirement for these answers to be short and effective, and we often have quite a substantial chunk of work.

I’d say that helping clients come to answers for these questions that they end up happy with is actually one of the most rewarding elements of my career to date. It can also help give me a far greater insight into what the client wishes to achieve and communicate with their site than any briefing document ever has.

But for pure cost effectiveness and to genuinely achieve rapid deployment, coming to the table with at least the essential barebones of content prepared is going to let your designer focus on what they really do best.

Today’s minor excursion was over to Westfield shopping centre (near White City tube) with the intention of helping my lovely housemates Michael and Joey pick out a good new set of drawers. Westfield is much like any of the glass, mall-style shopping centres that you now find in all major towns and cities up and down the country. Except it’s bigger, much bigger than most.

Large scale shopping in complex glass structures presents a unique challenge to your Sunday homeware shopper, like me. A cynic, you might call me, but I will assume for now that these places are designed to confuse, redirecting customer attention to flashy window dressing and powerful brand exposure. They are especially confusing for first-time visitors and the inexperienced. Westfield veterans may have built a knowledge of corporate landmarks that give them a big time-saving advantage.

The solution provided for us is most often some kind of digital map and store index, usually built into a heavy duty, assault-proof stand. My personal experiences of these have been mixed, but today’s effort at Westfield was surprisingly efficient… for me.

However, while in the short queue to use the device, I just couldn’t resist watching the two lovely young ladies in front try to use it. A catalog of problems proceeded, and I spotted some familiar usage patterns that brought me home to the world of site usability testing. Don’t worry – I won’t bore you with an essay on testing methodologies or anything like that. Instead, I’ll just share some of these points with you!

First of all, our two young ladies were ‘Searchers’. They started off their information finding journey using a text field to find the necessary store. Online, this fits a large proportion of web users, often those who are more tech-savvy and who certainly arrive with preconceived requirements. It really does highlight the importance of running an efficient and effective search on your site. Make sure search fields look like search fields, and are appropriately labeled, i say ‘Search’ will probably do, maybe using ‘Go’ in an associated button. Results pages must be formatted so that information returned can be scanned quickly by the eye for key words – that could mean putting search terms returned into bold.

The second issue arose because there were two users in this case. Friend #2 quickly gives up on the search and switches to a feature labeled ‘Index A-Z’, by way of hitting several areas of the screen which were not buttons, including a titled labeled ‘Find’. This throws up an interesting couple of issues:

Most importantly, that people engaging in a UI for the first time are inherently confused because they are in a place they’ve never visited before. This confusion should be minimised as much as possible – specifically by giving the user as many points of reference as we can. Give them things they’ve seen and used before, and they’ll interact with them in the same way. In this case, navigational items need to be visible. For textual links, that means underlining, for buttons – well, they just need to look like buttons! This is important, because it really limits the scope of flexibility for the designer, but we’re not working with a blank canvas here.

Additionally, when Friend #2 doesn’t find her result using ‘Index A-Z’, Friend #1 promptly hits the back button. Returning the user to a completed set of data is critical (might be worth saying again – CRITICAL), because the height of user frustration comes from having to retype queries or complete forms twice.

There is a dilemma here between how much you, as the designer or site owner (or whoever you are), already know about your site, your product, your service, and so forth, and how much the average user is in the dark. I’ve had long conversations with colleagues about how obvious a particular design element or written statement should be, because for most people who are directly working on something – these things are just plain obvious and don’t need spelling out. Alternatively, you might take the viewpoint that if a user doesn’t know what your site does, then why are they there in the first place. This is all of course looking at the problem in completely the wrong way. It’s our jobs as designers, site owners, etc, to make our message crystal clear to the user upon their first visit; to make their experience with the site as fast and as frustration free as possible, and ultimately to give them the information or product that they want quickly and easily. As a rule, I would say that whatever you believe to be already blatantly obvious to the end user… make twice as obvious again.

Here’s a little summary for the day… Minimise the time a user engages with your UI, and they’ll spend more time engaging with your product.