Craig Ritchie is a web strategist with an extensive background in experience design, content and community planning. product creation, management and marketing.
Craig Ritchie is currently focused on social media creation, brand building and online reputation management.
Craig Ritchie is also:
Strategist at Organic
Web Consultant/Owner of Thunderpulse Consulting
Product Management, Marketing & Content Rock Star for Bluehaze
my latest twitter updates
Build Something Great, Drive Traffic, Grow Community, Repeat.
Craig Ritchie is a Strategist focused on the new paradigms of the web.
Growing community around brands, products and ideas requires strategies built upon these 10 pillars:
Growing community around brands, products and ideas requires strategies built upon these 10 pillars:
| Ideas | Sales & Education | Business | Communities | Information Architecture | Design | Development | Tools | Measurement | Futurism |
A few days ago, I did my part to support the North American car industry by purchasing a Ford Flex. Among the myriad of standard features, Ford (and I’m sure many other manufacturers) has upgraded, compacted and simplified the key fob. This remote entry system used to be a separate piece of equipment dangling from my keychain. Now, it has been integrated into the key itself; it’s overall foot print is smaller and more intuitive — one item gets me into the vehicle.
I’m not trying to sell you a Flex. (You can follow @scottmonty for that.) The point here is that car designers push forward with all of their designs on a macro and micro level. There is always room for improvement on any interface (more times than not, there is lots of room).
Follow these eight recommendations to improve your user experience:
- Plan your strategy and your user experience before you build
- Develop a long-term strategy
- Prototype — e.g. with Axure, or paper prototyping
- Build a site using a malleable CMS, structure and design
- Never assume what’s been done in the past is perfect
- Test and analyze your interface
- Listen to your users
- Experiment, but try not to make your users think
I admire more and more the interface subtleties of the Wordpress admin interface. Overall, I would simplify the pages for faster management of posts and comments, but I’m sure there’s some plugins for that.
Specifically I like the flash-and-fade error and confirmation message after an action is taken.
This is an example of a Wordpress message.
Big, bold, and then it becomes unintrusive all by itself. (Did you miss it? Refresh this blog to see it again.) Note that I’ve changed the colors to match my blog to demonstrate the change from sparkling to faded. I’ll be recommending this type of message styling for many web sites in the future.
Categories
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- Flash (1)
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- mobile (1)
- Social Media (8)
- Social Networking (6)
- Twitter (5)
- Uncategorized (3)
- Usability (2)
- User Experience (3)
- User-generated Content (4)
- Web (2)
- Web 2.0 (11)
- Web Strategy (9)