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Few days back I have blogged about 100Plus’ new bottle design, and how it had a usability problem. Well, good news is that 100Plus has replied to my post and ensured that their design team will improve the bottle design to make it more user-friendly. Here is their reply:

Dear Ades,

Thank you for your feedback on 100PLUS.

As our customers’ safety and satisfaction has always been our top priority, the 100PLUS team is looking into improving the 100PLUS bottle design to make it more user-friendly.

We thank you again for your kind feedback.

Team 100PLUS

100Plus is an isotonic drink in Malaysia, it’s produced under F&N Coca-Cola. Previously 1.5L bottles had a design like any other soft drink, but in 2006 they have changed the design of the bottle to somewhat cone shaped one. As you can see from the images above, this design has a big usability problem. The plastic around the bottle slides out when you hold the bottle.

I have seen this happen at the supermarket counters few times, and I have experienced it first hand one or two times at home (after which I learned not to hold over the plastic).

Amazing thing is that this design has been out there for so many months and the company has not taken any corrective measures. Instead at their official product site the first thing you see is a big banner about this (faulty) new design.

I really hope they will do something about this, because this is not only a bad usability but a danger to the people. I am not sure if there was a case in Malaysia, but it can easily break or hurt someone if the 1.5 liter drink drops to someone’s toes.

You may contact the 100Plus’ officials here: contact form.

What are the top things you can do to make more money? Following here are 10 Internet tactics with a particularly high return on investment (ROI). Several usability findings lead directly to higher sales and increased customer loyalty. These design tactics should be your first priority when updating your website. Jakob Nielsen.

1. Email Newsletters
2. Informative Product Pages
3. High-Quality Photography
4. Product Differentiation and Comparisons
5. Support for Reordering
6. Simplified Text
7. Catering to Seniors
8. Gift-Giving Support
9. Search
10. User Testing
Bonus Tactic: Loyalty Program

Read the whole report at www.useit.com/alertbox/roi.html

Increasing conversion rate can be a daunting task that requires a delicate touch and some expertise, not to mention some trial and error. Don’t be afraid to fail at it - just remember to keep trying until you succeed. If you work hard at optimizing your site, you really can double or triple your conversions. That said, I put together this quick and dirty list to give you a few changes you can make to get started optimizing your e-commerce site for better usability and more conversions.

1. Remove clutter
Cluttered web pages are one of the most common mistakes on the Web. For some reason people like to jam all their information on one page. Clean things up by removing distracting, useless images, charts, or text. read full

via convertup.com

There many websites such as Ta-Da Lists, Remember The Milk, and Voo2do that offer you the chance to manage your tasks and to-do lists online. However if you are a conventional guy who likes to write down your to-do lists on a A4 paper then this printable PDF is for you. It’s called Emergent Task Planner, David Seah is the creator of this and other useful forms.

Check out his website at davidseah.com

Summary of features covered

1. Simplicity
2. Central layout
3. Fewer columns
4. Separate top section
5. Solid areas of screen real-estate
6. Simple nav
7. Bold logos
8. Bigger text
9. Bold text introductions
10. Strong colours
11. Rich surfaces
12. Gradients
13. Reflections
14. Cute icons
15. Star flashes

www.webdesignfromscratch.com/web-2.0-design-style-guide.cfm

If you are using Gmail you might have faced this problem -where you cannot find a particular email. Maybe you have forgotten to create a Label for it or maybe you didn’t create a Filter that auto-assigns the Label to the email. Whatever the reason maybe, if the email was not assigned Label to it and if it was an email that was received last year, your chances of finding that email will be really slim (unless you know the sender or the senders’ email).

For this reason I have contacted Gmail Team and suggested them a new feature - option to add custom tags to each email. This is how it could look (red text):

This would save time, and make searching and finding emails a lot easier and faster. For example if you receive one-time email from someone, you would just add a tag to that email instead of creating a Label exclusively for this one email.

Delicious.com uses tags to manage links - millions of them. I think it’s time for Gmail to introduce such a feature too. What do you think? I hope Google will consider this suggestion of mine.

Matt Mickiewicz interviews Jakob Nielsen, author of the brand new book “Prioritizing Web Usability,” about AJAX, usability’s close link to keyword advertising, and some of the advertising formats we’re seeing around the Web today.

What do you think of the current implementations of AJAX
(Google Maps, Writely, Google Suggest, Zimbra, etc.) on the Web today?

They are irrelevant for the vast majority of business web sites. (And by “business web site” I also mean sites for government agencies and non-profits.)

A business site will profit much more from writing better headlines than from sticking a programming trick on its pages. Take maps: yes, it’s one of the usability guidelines for store finders and locators to show a map of your location. But don’t make this a highly interactive map — it’s better to use a hand-drawn map that’s optimized to giving directions to your address. One that shows landmarks, recommended parking lots, and bus stops, and emphasizes freeways, but excludes the small side streets that people probably wouldn’t use when driving to your building.

Read the full interview

1. Easy Ajax with Prototype
2. An Explanation of Ems
3. Improving Form Accessibility with DOM Scripting
4. CSS Layout Starting Points
5. DOM Scripting Your Way to Better Blockquotes
6. Practical Microformats with hCard
7. Don’t be eval()
…etc

www.24ways.org

Above is the salary trend for Usability Experts, as you can see for the last 6 years the salary of these Experts have not changed much, we can say that it stayed almost the same.

On the other hand for the last 6 years, there were around 32 million new websites went live, and around 82 million new domain names were registered. (see below)

No wonder there are so many not-usable (useless?) websites on the internet, eventhough number of websites going online is skyrocketing every year, there are still very few demand for Usability Experts. This problem should be addressed properly, websites especially corporate websites should be designed properly and companies should hire Usability Experts to check their websites. Website usability might not be direct contributor to the company’s profits but it is an important element for company’s success. As for e-commerce sites the usability is the crucial element in their business since all the sales are done online, the website should be usable. Otherwise if a customer does not know how to go about buying a product on a particular website then this particular company has failed in providing a user-friendly-usable website to its customers. Unfortunately there are still many e-commerce websites that do not pay attention to usability.

What do you think? Comments? (Sorry for the registration requirement for commenting, will address that soon).

Sourses:
www.useit.com/alertbox/salaries.html
news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html