Back in July three of us spent 24 hours straight developing a Ruby on Rails application for the fun of it. At the time we thought it’d be fun to create a review site where anyone could post a review for anything - and we did. And we called it “Weratestuff” (go figure, huh?). Well, after a few months of judging (unfortunately the organization faced some problems), the results came in a couple of days ago.

Weratestuff took the 1st place for the best User Interface, and we’re quite happy with the outcome. We didn’t do it for the prize (even though the passes for the now past Adaptive Path User Experience Week would be awesome) but to prove that the right set of tools and people can do great things under huge constraints.

See our previous post on our railsday project from back in july.

Simple things often dictate the success of a product. Details. Clever design. When you get it in a second. When experience beats complexity. Here’s a bit of inspiration from Steve Jobs. When asked whether he was concerned about the competition from Zune, here’s his answer:

In a word, no. I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.

Apple has attached an image of human interaction to the iPod (mainly with the dancing models on their ads), and Jobs uses that to his (and his product’s) advantage. If nothing else, a pretty clever twist.

Everybody loves widgets - they’re everywhere. They’re on “Ajax homepages”, like Netvibes, Google, Live.com, on my OSX Dashboard and on the new Windows Vista Sidebar - everywhere, really. Now, they’re starting to invade our blogs too, and the question is: when is it going to stop?

Content first, please

Widgets give you one thing and one thing only (at least so far): little bits of useful information. Now, useful information is exactly that, useful, but usually (most of the time, I hope) not as important as content. That’s why the OSX Dashboard hides widgets away so you only see them when you need them.

Let’s put it this way: what’s really important to your readers? Is it what you write on your blog, or is it the last tracks you’ve heard on Last.fm, or maybe the time in San Francisco in a beautiful stylized watch, or webcam widgets showing 5th avenue (everybody loves those) or, let’s go all the way with this, what about a streaming music player? - I bet everyone would love that.

The fact is, nobody really cares about anything but your content - and truth be told, thats good: it means you write, and people read. So what is the point of having weblogs look like christmas trees if that only annoys the hell out of people, makes page loading a pain in the butt, and confuses the eyes to a point where they scream at the brain: “Find the feed URL and lets get out of here, now!”.

Well, Christmas is coming, right?

The “blog as christmas tree” is the metaphor I came up with for the widgetification of weblogs and websites. People cram everything they can into layouts, like they were decorating a christmas tree. There is one very important thought here, though: in a christmas tree, the focus is the tree, whereas on your blog, the focus is your content, not your recent searches, your google ads, your shopping list or your 50 album recommendations. Remember when people visit blogs like this, their brain screams “get out, just get out now!”.

Lately - and I bet you’ve noticed -, ads took control of most of our experiences. They’re in our websites, they’re in our televisions and radios, they’re in our feeds, they’re in our video-games. While advertising is a necessary thing, we’re seeing way too much of it. If only they were relevant, right?

We’ll see online ad usage growing and growing, as businesses realize how much cheaper it becomes to actually launch ad-supported products (the launch now, “business plan” later method). However, we must become much better at actually using advertising in a way that doesn’t bore people to death, and in relevant ways. Here are a few examples, off the top of my head:

• If I’m reading articles on a blog about design, I want the ads present to be relevant to the content I’m looking at - this gets me at least some value out of the real estate the ads are taking from me. Current solutions are “okay”, not “good” when it comes to micro-content relevancy.
• If I’m playing a video-game, I can easily tolerate in-game ads if they’re unobtrusive (and, dare I say it, help the ambience - Oh please, be creative, you know what I mean). And obviously, gamers are always more interested in ads about other games, or accessories, not necessarily music bands or IT solutions.
• If I’m watching TV, I want the ads to be relevant to my interests - heck, give me ads on design and user experience and I’ll be happy to see a few. I may be pushing it a little with this one, but with IPTV, we’ll be real close to real solutions to this problem very soon. Right, Google?

All these examples mean to convey one very simple idea: we’ve learned to cope with ads, but the fact is, they’re still a burden on our everyday experiences. The whole advertising world would be much better off if ads were actually delivered in ways people would like, not despise.