ease of use Archives - TheWayoftheWeb

It’s Sunday night and for various reasons I’ve been offline for about 48 hours and I’m pretty tired. So what am I doing?

The Xbox is currently playing Forza Motorsport 3 for itself as the AI goes through the tedium of endless races to get the final game achievement and clear the way for Forza Motorsport 4 – important considering the amount of coverage I’ll be doing on OnlineRaceDriver.
My phone is currently uploading 100+ images from today to Flickr after our trip to Woburn Safari Park, which I’ll then need to group edit and tag.
And I’m on the laptop, having cleared out any notification emails, scanned and marked as read any RSS items, and started sorting out what I need to finish this week for both client sites and my own. Assuming that’s ever finished, hopefully I’ll catch up with the F1 race from earlier with iPlayer.

What struck me is that I don’t think the fact I have 3 internet devices all chuntering away on a ‘relaxing’ Sunday night is at all strange. And while I might be slightly unusual in running my own online-based businesses and spending most of my leisure time online, I suspect we’re still nowhere near the peak demand in bandwith for uploading and curating personal content online. What was once the preserve of the geeks and over-sharers is not only increasingly normal for everyone, but faster internet access, mobile connectivity and general access throughout less-developed countries means we’re still figuring out what we can do, and crucially, how to do it more easily.

Checking out my stats on Flickr, it’s blindingly obvious that most of my uploads have all come since I started using a smartphone, which allows quick uploading to Flickr. Without that, everything would still be on my memory card or hard drive.

And it was only recently that I finally got around to using the group edit functions, and could suddenly make a lot more photos public and accessible with at least some attempt at titles and tags (My default upload is always private for various reasons).

And that’s adding up to 10’s of thousands of views on Flickr alone.

It made me think that so much of the web is still so difficult, and that we’re still miles away from the potential in universal easy access. And that will also enable us to more easily spend time offline or better utilise mobile connectivity. It’s time to make things easier for everyone…

There’s a difference between successful new technologies and websites, and ones which fail.

All the successes are able to answer a problem, or solve an existing one, in a simpler, easier, faster way than before. If what you’re planning needs explaining in more than a sentence, or needs instruction for a consumer/visitor to use, then it’s probably not quite right. After all, if someone came to your house for a meal, would you expect to have to explain how to use the doors, use the stairs, go to the toilet, flush the toilet, and walk down the stairs again?

If you need a comprehensive take on this…or a handy reminder, see ‘Don’t Make Me Think’ on the book list, right…it’s full of things you might forget in the excitement of site building.

This was brought home to me for the umpteenth time today when I went to the doctors. I’m sure many people have already seen this with their doctor, but when I went in, I was amazed to find that I no longer had to queue for ages to speak to a receptionist to tell them that I had made the trip from my bed to doctor’s surgery without accidentally ending up in the pub.

Instead, I just had to type my sex and birthday on a touchscreen, and in return I got a personalised welcome, plus a rough idea of the current delay between my appointment and the time I’d be seen.

It saves a line, it saves receptionist time (which means they can be doing more complex tasks), and it gives me a rough idea of whether I can nip to the loo or not before my appointment….

A digital Sunday evening…

Make your website simpler, easier, faster, better…

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