www.rs-art.co.uk/

I’ve just had the pleasure of building http://www.rs-art.co.uk in Modx.

Very easy to intergrat the design in the system and very easy to add the template variables needed so that the client doesnt have access to certain parts of the code.

Now to add a new product all he has to do is navigate to the images, enter the price and details ect and publish the article and my code / modx does the rest.

All feedback welcome

Looks nice, simple, clean and easy to nav.

One comment though: I’d make the images found here: http://www.rs-art.co.uk/fordrs.php link to the detail page. It is a natural action to click the image to get more details be it on a book site or catalogue site or real estate site.

Thanks for sharing.

Cheers,

Jay

Thanks for the comments,
I agree about the images but the client didn’t want that, just want the "click for details" link

Paul. Send your client a copy of Steve Krug’s book, "Don’t Make Me Think!"

I know it can be a challenge sometimes but I always question my clients on that sort of thing. They often have some aesthetic or personal false logic that puts their own likes and dislikes above user behaviour. I challenge them and if they can offer a legitimate reason why they want to impede the user I’ll let them.

In all seriousness. I don’t give into clients on usability; they hired me as an expert in web design. You have to be tactful on how you present your argument but usually there are articles and data to support gravitating to user expectation.

In this particular case having a person visit the site and click an image to have nothing happen makes them feel as though they are doing something wrong. In addition, most people scan pages for clickable elements and images laid out in a catalogue format are most often clickable. In my case as a person who uses the internet more than 8 hours a day my natural instinct was to click on the image. In addition I thought I didn’t click in the right spot or something. It was only after I paused for a few seconds that I saw the click for more details that I realised there was an actionable element.

To further break from my surf pattern you have removed the underline from the "Click for more Details" so now I have no scannable visual cue that there is a link. Where do I click? What is my next action? Finally, on the main page you do have clickable images that lead me to a page with more images so my assumption that the images would be clickable here was built on you setting an expectation that that would be consistently the case throughout the site.

Okay, so its a minor thing but the goal is to get the visitors to move to the BUY as quickly as possible in as little time as possible.

Well put Jay.
I always get my wife to test drive a design as she’s almost web newbie.
Often I ask why she didn’t click this or hover over that or do something else.
9 times out of 10 she says "how would I know to do that?"
Don’t ever underestimate the need for regular, predictablepatterns!
Nor the power of your wife to make you look silly.

bunk58, my wife is a heavy user but a habit formed and I can always get my UX feedback straight and honest. Add to that she can usually articulate why it failed.

It is important that we don’t hide the steering wheel under the seat. Most small biz clients can’t spend 100,000s on user testing, eyetracking so following the the formed habits of users always trumps clever design when money is at stake. If being thought of as clever is the goal then by all means be clever but if making money or getting customers or appointments is the goal, don’t impede or stand in the way.

For some simple usability testing you may want to check
- crazyegg.com
- clicktale.com

I always install the free versions of these for my clients and use the results for continued UX improvements. It’s great for a soft launch and testing. It will also help show your clients why certain things work or dont.

crazyegg is a heatmap generator
clicktale actually shows you a movie of the users mouse and actions (not eyetracking but pretty dern slick)