Sep
30
2008
at 10:57am
This morning the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) launched a “do not call” service. Within hours the website was not available. The explaination:
“A spokesperson for the CRTC said the site ‘worked fine’ when it launched at midnight, and said she didn’t know what had caused it to freeze up.
She speculated that the number of people trying to access the site may have blocked access to some users
‘Try it later and cross your fingers,’ she said.”
They don’t know what happened???? “Cross your fingers”?? Did they not realize that when they announced this they’d be getting a flood of traffic? Had their web developers never heard of the Digg effect? Similar problem when you’re announcing a very attractive service in media outlets across the country.
What do do when things go wrong
- Find out what actually happened.
- Fess up. Admit that your systems weren’t able to handle the traffic (or whatever the problem was). Do not blame the users.
- Promise to get the site working ASAP.
- Do get the site working ASAP.
- In the future, make sure your servers can handle the traffic, or plan other ways to avoid the problem.
Posted in Usability | 6 Comments »
Sep
12
2008
at 1:56pm
The “chunky footer” is becoming a big trend in web design. This is a footer that is much bigger than what was traditionally used, often containing several sets of links and other information. Take a look at this flikr set for some examples.
Do you find these to be effective? I think from a design perspective they solve a lot of problems. Get a lot of links on the home page without cluttering the main interface.
The problem I find is that as a user I often miss them entirely. On Jason Santa Maria’s site it took me several visits before I even noticed it was there. Why? Because I didn’t scroll that far (on the actual articles there are often many comments, making the pages quite long. Most users wouldn’t read all those comments.)
What about my home page? Will people notice the Recent Posts block at the bottom? Will they think to scroll past the white? Granted, I was intentional in what I put there vs. what I put on the sidebar. It’s not exactly essential stuff.
Usability experts have found that users have learned to scroll (early usability research found that users wouldn’t scroll past the fold). But, do they scroll the whole page? Prioritizing Web Usability, Jacob Nielsen points out that users often won’t scroll further if they get the visual impression that there is no more content on the page. If users assume that the navigation ends with the top or left navigation bar, will they try looking further down for more links?
What do you think?
Posted in Design, Usability | 2 Comments »
