Bruno Pinheiro

August 4, 2008 7:27 pm

categories:
Business, Design & Marketing, Information Architecture, Usability

ESPN Brasil lauched it new website last week. Only today I took notice of that, reading Silvia Melo’s post about it.

Despite the new audacious interface design (I’m not pretty sure about it’s efficiency), the central question is that it lacks the basic: content. After the first impression, when you start to use it, there’s no new offer. Taking Google as a benchmark for user navigation behavior seems to me a little misconception. A so hidden navigation menu is a rupture that I’m not sure people are ready to face.

The new ESPN Brasil Homepage. Audacious interface design, but is it efficient?

An internal page, built upon searching a pre-configured tag. Impressive, but lacks rich related content

The only thing that seemed to me an interesting feature is the related content ‘mind mapped’ at the end of the page, with the related tags represented with photos. That’s a cool navigation system I would like to study more deeply to check it efficiency. Choosing Tags as a central navigation system without a semantic tool or controlled vocabulary to support it is quite a risk. Specially when you have a very poor relation between the items (volley has only three related terms).

The mind map navigation system for the topic Volley

And there are some implementation problems. As you try to break the tag search, you may reach a page that has no picture to illustrate it, and you get the content left miles away from the top of the page.

A fragile URL building rule system makes the page miss the opening background image

At the end, the new ESPN Brasil website intends to use a (somehow) new user interface design, but fails on offering clear navigational paths. Using search is not as fluid as pointing and clicking, and putting all the bets on related tags doesn’t guarantee a flow. Nice work, good experiment, but still with lot to be improved.

July 25, 2008 3:10 pm

categories:
Usability

Today I received an email informing that Silverback is up and running, for us to try it for a 30 day period.

I took noticed about Silverback through a blog witch I sincerely don’t remember now (sorry). And using it own words:

Silverback makes it easy, quick and cheap for everyone to perform guerilla usability tests with no setup and no expense, using hardware already in your Mac.

Yeah, you read it…just for Macs. It was to good to be true.

And what’s up with the gorilla? Well, that’s the coolest part that the clever guys from Clearleft thought about. They will donate 10% of all profits from Silverback to saving the gorillas.

Well Usability guys that use Mac, check silverback out and tell me your impressions!

April 8, 2008 2:54 pm

categories:
Usability

Today, as many bank users, I tried to find the telephone number of my bank agency through their website. As a internet user, I almost don’t need to contact my manager. But this was a special case and I needed to know the manager’s telephone.

I went to their website and tried to use the “Find an agency” service. The first problem: the page loads at the very beginning a form that asks “Why do you need to go the agency”. Well, it’s a noble initiative, to offer some services that may help the user and (maybe) save him an unnecessary trip to the agency.

So what’s the problem, you may ask? Well, just below this “innocent” question goes a form where you put your Agencu and Account number with a contextual button. Depending on what you select as your “need” at the select field, the form changes. And the very first option of the form is to “loan some money”. Tricky!

When users get to that page they certainly wants to get an Agency number, directions or something like that. But the search service in fact is the last thing the user sees. First there’s a lot of selling services, in a gray box, with texts in bold. Confusing, disruptive, annoying and you could say dishonest in a certain way.

But the very best is of the story comes now.

After struggling with the selling box I finally got to the search service itself. Well, I informed the agency number and ‘voila’, the system says “Invalid agency number!“. I double checked my bank card, and that’s the number, I’m not crazy. Let’s try again….It didn’t work! The service that is the only reason for that page to exists doesn’t work at all! Holly Jakob Nielsen Batman! I bet that the selling service works just fine! But I refused to test it, that would be too much!

I wrote to the Bank Customer Service complaining about that. Let’s see what will they say.

The Unibanco Agency Search Page