Right or wrong, companies who care little about the design of a customer’s experience are often thought to care little about its customers. Poor design encourages people to believe in a brand’s ham-handedness, in its cloth-eared reluctance to listen and respond. If openness, communication, and accountability are the bellwethers of clarity, then poor design is a smudge—a flaw that seems to hide rather than reveal. That was the problem with my breakage scenario: The marketing guy preferred to hide from people, withholding information and feigning incompetence rather than fulfilling what seemed to be a sincere obligation.

via Dustin Curtis – The Clear War by Kevin Mattice. A designer’s job is provide a seamless experience not to trick customers.

Count me in with the second group. Apple hasn’t thought of everything with iPad, but what they’ve thought about, they’ve thought about very deeply. I got mine Saturday morning, and I’ve been using it since — or at least as often as I could get it away from my son. Here are my thoughts.

via Daring Fireball: The iPad. Gruber on the iPad, overall positive except when it comes to the limited RAM, pixel density and document transfer to and from the iPad.

Users should feel comfortable when they visit your site. They should feel that your site is designed, arranged and filled with logical information that they know how to get to. When you are consistent you make your users happy which will compel them to return.

via Consistency: Key to a Better User Experience | UX Booth. I agree.

Web users spend 69% of their time viewing the left half of the page and 30% viewing the right half. A conventional layout is thus more likely to make sites profitable.

via Horizontal Attention Leans Left (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox). Nice to see that a conventional layout works best and yes this website is not a complete conventional layout. I’ll probably take this into consideration if I perform a re-design.

Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold.

via Scrolling and Attention (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox). Jakob Nielsen, ever insightful and thoughtful analysis and perhaps even better provides fixes to help web designers solve usability problems.

Be aware that there are a million caveats to accent rules. You will almost certainly get it wrong for somebody, somewhere. Nearly every alphabet has a few extra-special marks that do affect meaning, and, of course, non-Western alphabets have completely different rules.

via A List Apart: Articles: Accent Folding for Auto-Complete.

Apple’s first genuine hit was the Macintosh with a graphic user interface that made it easy for everybody to understand how to interact with a computer and see what was going on. What sparked Ebay’s first real success ease of access, selling was quick and painless. If you didn’t sell well who cared it was junk anyways. YouTube lowered the bar towards sharing videos online, Flickr photos, Google searching, Obama to donate and get involved, the list goes on and on. Why is MasterCard adding the ability to pay with out even pulling out your card, ease of access towards that card. The easier it is to use your MasterCard the more likely you are to use it.

As a business you should not create artificial barriers towards letting your users interact with your business/product. This means provide lots of free samples, make it easy to get in touch with you, make your web site easy to navigate and fun to use.

If you are a software company make you applications easy for your customers to get their hands on and use. Interfaces should be clean and easy to grasp. Limit preferences, most of the time the defaults are just fine, the more settings you have the more chances you have to confuse your customers. If a customer can’t grasp an interface the user doesn’t need to be educated the interface needs to change.

I don’t know if the bar can ever be low enough or if it ever is too low, but the lower you make the bar the more likely you are to attract people to your product (be it software, hardware, food, information, skill, or even yourself) means that many more potential customers.

Thanks to Matt Cutts for the inspiration of this post based on his review of the Google Voice Search iPhone App. Specifically “The easier/faster it is to search, the more I searched.”