So, Cineworld have a new website. Hurray! It was long overdue and in my opinion it’s now the better looking one out of the 3 chain cinema sites, the Vue and Odeon. I have a Cineworld card and I visit the site frequently to check cinema times and film info. I’ve been using the new site for a while now and as much as I like it there are just a few things which, if tweaked could make the site much slicker for return users.

Here’s what I like about the site

• Much improved design; fresh and contemporary
• Apart from the ads not an overly busy looking site
• Simple site navigation
• Good consistency of design and layout throughout the site
• Simple one page booking system
• Site degrades gracefully with no javascript

However as a frequently returning visitor (at least twice a week) the most common task for me is viewing cinema times - which feels like a long winded task; and I am already tired of repeating it. I personally, have a choice of 3-4 cinemas that I like to visit (in and around London). When I return to the cinema page I would like it to remember which cinema/s I visited last. And in fact it does - but it’s not very discoverable in my opinion. It’s hidden in the first drop down menu “Choose a cinema”.

I can imagine finding the same (or a select few cinemas) is a common task on this page for over 90% of visitors. Here are a few ways this could be dealt with.

The map could default to a view with the last visited region loaded. In my case the default page view would be like this, showing the inner London region. Now I am one click away from my cinema.

The version with no javascript could be improved from this version:

To this, which includes links to the last three cinemas visited, a rewrite of the flash message and correct font sizes on the region list:

These are 2 simple changes for getting to a cinema’s listing page and it would make the process much more intelligent and helpful for returning users. It is worthwhile optimising the most common site scenarios. It’s also a good way to be the best in your field. The Vue and the Odeon have a “Remember my favourite cinema” option - which is also a good idea. But as we’ve just discussed you might have more then one cinema that you visit; so you should consider this scenario.

If in doubt, research into this would be the best way to make the decision, although it is not a big change. Perhaps people who go to more than one cinema is the edge case and Cineword should optimise for people who have one main cinema. However I think with these small changes and the addition of a “Remember my favourite cinema” both scenarios can be easily catered for. It’s always a good idea to make a site more intelligent right?

Stick around for part two when I go through the cinema listings page.

Hi everyone. It’s been a long time since I have dedicated time to post on my blog. It’s a real shame, as I miss posting items and being more involved with some of you other bloggers out there.  Anyway… I’ve been so busy, because at Snow Valley we are super busy with great projects to deliver hence we’re hiring! So it’s a great time to send in your CV and join our expanding User Experience team. We’re looking for all levels right now, junior, middle weight and senior. Key skills we are looking for are

• XHTML and CSS (Table-less design is a must!)
• Javascript (Jquery library experience would be fantastic)
• Accessible design
• Familiarity with .NET web technologies

You’ll be joining a passionate team [cool dudes like HT and myself!] who drive each other and work collaboratively on a variety of exciting projects. There are opportunities to grow and continually develop at Snow Valley and make a real contribution to our first class ecommerce platform.

So if you’re interested please email your CV to our Resourcing Manager, Laura Strasdin

Please take note that we do not deal with agencies.

Worldwide events

• An event apart August 18-19, 2008
• UX Intensive - June 16-19, 2008
• UX Week August 12-15

I did have more events listed, however this post was hacked. arr. So Annoying. Once I have secured the site I”ll add the rest of the events I had listed. Thanks

We’ve all come across some sites that have frustrated us, and I’m sure you’ve recounted this to your friends. Maybe you’ve even gone as far as not using that site again if it’s frustrated you that much. That’s all well and good if there’s an alternative available, and even then it might not be any easier to use.

This post was motivated by some recent use of an Apple store site and the Transport for London site. It just so happens that in both cases I have had some bad user experiences with them and I have no alternative site to turn to in hope of a easier life! What a shame! What makes it more annoying is that with just a few simple tweaks, these issues could be resolved.

What’s got my goat with the Apple site?

Your online reserve system for the Genius bar! Come on Apple, you do everything else on your site so well, please think about changing how people can book a place at the genius bar… My scenario:

I have a problem with my MacBook Pro and I want to book an appointment at the Genius bar in the Apple Regent street store, London.

1 - I hit ‘Reserve�? under the genius bar heading.

2 - I am presented with a screen asking me if I am a guest or member. “Hmm… Guest or member… what’s the difference? I guess I am a guest?�? So I click that.

3 - I am now presented with a Sign in screen. “I have to sign in?�? I read the information under the sign in heading. “Please sign in with your name and email address. Also please include a phone number where you may be reached regarding your reservation.�? “ok, I guess this makes sense�?. So I fill in my details.

4 - Now I am presented with 3 options… “Technical Support / Genius bar�?, “Personal Shopping�? and “Workshops�?. Well now I am thinking “Didn’t I already make this choice?�? So I click Technical support anyway.

5 - Now am being asked which product I need help with. I chose Mac.

6 - Now it asks me to choose a day. Now depending how lucky you are; you get either a day where you can click and see available times, or you get no days available!

I have been going through these steps frequently for the last 3 weeks trying to book a convenient time. I’ve had no luck so far and have had to endure this back to front & unnecessarily long process with no appointment made yet!

Suggestions for improvements:

Once I have selected that I want to book an appointment at the genius bar, you should be presented with the available times that you can book. Once you have chosen an available time, you should then proceed to give more details and secure that booking.

The steps could look more like this

1 – Reserve genius bar
2 – Calendar of dates (If no dates, provide details on alternatives, ie, can you book by phone? Do you have to wait until the next dates are released? When is this? Etc. )
3 – Register details along with which product you need help with
4 – Confirm booking

These steps ask for the same information, just in a more useful order and only once. I think Apple have forgotten to consider that the user may not be able to complete this task first time round. It’s very possible you won’t be shown a date and time that is convenient, if any date at all. So streamlining this process as much as possible is essential to making it a useful tool. Apple, please reconsider this design. At the very least, once you have taken my details, save them so when I want to check times again I can go a little faster.

Onto managing my Oyster card

I live and work in London and I want to manage my Oyster card on a monthly basis (it was weekly not long ago!). In my eyes I am a power user and I feel that I represent a large portion of the London Oyster card internet users! As a daily tube user I usually want to do one of two things when I visit the Transport for London website.

1 – Check a route for times and changes
2 – Log in to my oyster and top up my card

The first one is nicely addresses on the homepage with this handy search box:

The second one I always have to fight for. I never remember how I got to the login page on my last visit. So I start to quickly scan the page and look for the first thing that suggests I will be able to log in. Scan, scan, scan… I can’t see the word “log in: or “sign in” anywhere. I see the Oyster card image, so I just click that hoping I will come closer to my goal.

Nothing happens… If you look closer the url has changed to https://oyster.tfl.gov.uk/oyster/entry.do but nothing new on this page.

Arr, already… I am annoyed.

So, I scan some more and try to concentrate. I must be missing something surely? It’s my fault, I am stupid! So I decided to try the Tickets button at the top of the page; after all that’s what I want isn’t it? To renew my monthly tube ticket.

I am now on a page with more Oyster information. I must be on the right track now! Scan, scan, scan and still no login or sign in. [Pulls hair out] By this time I am really annoyed and decide I may as well do it at the station!

This is a real dead end and if it wasn’t for the fact I have to travel on the Tube and buses I would never return to this site. I usually come back and struggle on because I forget to do it at the station, or there is a queue. But even so, managing my Oyster card at the station is not something I want to do, so I battle on with the TFL site. (For the time being)

Currently, to get to the login page, you need to click “Top up pay as you go�?. What a limited label. I wanted to renew my Oyster monthly season ticket, so I was not looking for anything to do with Pay as you go. Why not just “Sign into Oyster account”?

It seems the TFL Have failed at addressing the thousands of people that return to the site to log in and GIVE THEM MONEY! Why there is not a sign in area on the homepage directly, I do not know. They could very easily do something like this to bring this key returning user task onto the homepage:

Click to enlarge:

I think it is time the TFL realigned the content on the homepage and though little bit more about their terminology throughout the site. It is very much geared towards educating and encouraging people to have an Oyster card. Now there are many people who own an Oyster and they need to cater for people who want quick access to their account. Another point to note is the complex password system they have in place forcing you to create a password that is impossible to remember and resulting in you forgetting it every time, or having to have it written down somewhere! Which totally defeats the object!

I hope anyone reading this has learned some lessons on how not to approach a problem and how to think about your users goals. Putting sets of redundant screens in front of them ad setting them up for a failure 90% down the process is a sure way to frustrate users and turn them away. Even if you are the only website in your field!

[end rant]

It’s been a long time since my poor blog received any attention. I’m sorry blog… you’ve been neglected… so neglected that today I had to upgrade you because you’d been hacked into. And worst of all; I hadn’t noticed! Oops… So here’s a bit of advice for any Wordpress users on version 2.2, UPGRADE! I was attacked by someone/thing that could access my posts and add malicious code. eek! Yuk! Luckily that’s all fixed now. I should make more of an effort to stay on top of updates and I think I have learnt my lesson.

But I’ve had good excuse for neglecting the blog! I have moved to the great city of London and joined the team at Snow Valley and have been working hard with them for the last 5 months. It’s gone extremely fast and I’ve already worked on numerous exciting projects, some of which I can’t wait to talk about soon! The folk at Snow Valley are packed with knowledge and it’s great to be surrounded by people who seem to each have a specialism. The latest two projects Snow Valley have been working hard on are Majestic wines and mfi. I’ll update you on more new sites as and when I can. If you interested you can always check out the Snow Patrol blog.
Signing off and I’ll be back soon. I promise!

I am happy to say three of my latest projects in collaboration with Jupiter Design have gone live!

1. Bournston - a property development specialist
2. Freeth Cartwright - a regional law firm
3. Weatherbys Bank - offering a full range of banking services

A friend of mine pointed Quicksilver out to me about 2-3 months ago. It’s a nifty application for Mac OS X (10.4 Tiger) that extends the operating system by giving you quick keyboard control to an uncountable quantity of commands and actions. And this is nothing new boys and girls, if the forums are right, it looks like this has been around since April 2003! Want to send an image attachment via email to someone? Don’t open mail and send it manually, do it with Quicksilver in a few seconds! Break free of the mouse and get more actions and control from your keyboard.

To really understand and appreciate what Quicksilver can do, you need to see it in action. I would recommend watching this quicktime movie by the Apple blog to get you started.

If you’re impressed by what you see, you can download and quickly install Quicksilver and then I would watch another movie by Stephen from inserttitleblog who shows you how to set it up so you can get the most benefits from it and swiftly start learning how this clever tool can really help speed up your work flow. Once you start using it you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it and why it doesn’t come as default on the Mac OS X!

There are a lot of resources all over the net and Quicksilver is becoming more known slowly but surely. I wanted to post this article to spread the word and help Quicksilver get the recognition it deserves.

If you own or use a Mac, give Quicksilver a go and see how you get on. It took me a few days to remember to use it and break some old habits, but now I find myself typing and tabbing my way through tasks that I would usually use my mouse to do and spend a bit more time doing it. I hope you find it as intuitive as I and so many others do.

This is good news, isn’t it? Safari is a pretty good browser as it stands, so I am expecting some updated behind the scenes stuff (such as security and performance) and some new CSS support is always welcome (Multi-column support, yes please). But what I didn’t expect to hear was they are releasing it for Windows and there is a new feature called “Resizable text fields”… (Yes this is all news to me!)

Maybe the text field you’re typing in is a bit too small to read. Or maybe you just have a lot to say. Either way, Safari lets you resize text fields on any website, just by grabbing the corner of the field. Resize a field and the web page re-flows to make room.

I am a bit suspect about how this is going to work… I just have visions of websites breaking and becoming unusable and confusing the user. I don’t have visions of this being a seamless “click”, “drag”, “arrh that’s better”. I can see this being one more thing that developers have to deal with/design for and clients/users becoming confused when it breaks the design of a site. I really hope this feature has been well tested and I am proved wrong. Of course, if websites are designed properly they should either offer the resize on the site (will this cause conflicts for sites that do offer this client-side??) or be a sufficient size in the first place. I did a quick Google to see if I could find some more info on this, and Macworld have a video of this feature in action. It would appear I have nothing to worry about, but I am holding my breath until I have a go myself.

Safari on Windows… Well, from a non-web developer point of view; great! Another choice for users and competitor for Microsoft. This is favorable news. However, I do wonder how well received it will be by Windows users. Will the “Safari on windows” market share be advanced users only? People who are interested in using or exploring how they access the internet? It will be intriguing to see how it does in the ranks in the months to come after it’s official release.

What about testing? That’s my next question, and it is the main reason I have not installed Safari 3 beta yet. Can we run both versions of Safari side-by-side? Is this just another huge can of worms for us web developers? Questions, questions, questions… Some more Googling on this one and I couldn’t find a solution to this yet. Some people have tried running 2 alongside 3 and it appears to work. However Mac OS X will use the new version of Webkit that ships with Safari 3, so that’s no good. Has anyone found a way around this yet?

Enough of what sounds like my negative take on Safari 3. On a good note, there are some very useful additions, that Roger Johansson goes into more detail about on his website. I would like to applaud the revamped “on page search” and highlighting. (A success in Firefox!) Also, the ability to drag a tab out into it’s own window is cool! I tried this in Firefox once, hoping it would detach into it’s own window and I just ended up with a shortcut on my desktop to the url!

Watch out for the official release of Safari 3 and lets hope and pray we can test simultaneously on both versions with no pain! I know I’ll be developing with Safari 3 in mind starting… as soon as I can get my hands on it with Safari 2 still running.

I have recently developed a food blog for my other passion in life; cooking. There have been a few times where I really wanted to post food things on here! But I am trying to keep this blog, web topics only… So now I can present you with… food.zucchetti.co.uk! The blog about food, food and more food.

So there you’ll find me posting recipes for home made delights and probably pics of my food outings to restaurants and any kind of eatery.

It was also another chance to play about with a simple Wordpress template and try a site done in em’s to scale nicely. The photos were important to me on this site, that’s why they are so big! I designed the site so the photos scale with the whole layout. Change the font size and you’ll see what I mean.

Pop on over and see what you think. I hope you enjoy some of the recipes I post on there.

I am on the search for where to live in London and I wanted to get a rough idea which areas in London are more crime ridden than the next! I typed into Google, “crime maps London” and I came across this little beauty which was exactly what I was after.

A clever mashup example, which uses Yahoo maps, data from Upmystreet.com and Jibble.org. Load up “Where should I live” which shows you a map of London. Choose what you’re interested in seeing from the right hand menu and watch a colour overlay load over the map, illustrating high and low densities of what you chose!

I thought it was pretty fast considering how much information it had to pull in. My only comment here would be to add a loading message somewhere. Because I did not have my browser open fully and I was not sure if anything was happening at first, and I missed the appearance of the High and Low legend bar at the bottom of the page.

I really do hope you guys continue the project. I can see much more being done with this; it’s very useful.

Some things to consider:

1. Adding a location search box for quickly finding places in London. I would have liked to type “Highgate” and then the map would zoom to this area and I can then choose what I want to see in this area, crime or population etc.
2. A clear/toggle button. Once an overlay is on, I can’t turn it off without reloading the page.
3. More detailed crime list, Types of crimes with the date of which year the figures are coming from. Maybe even choose from the past 3 years to see how/if the rate has changed.
4. Put a loading bar or alert somewhere and don’t rely on the appearance of the bar at the bottom as not everyone will see it.

Has anyone else seen anything like this for the London area? This has already been a big help for me, as looking through a chart of numbers and trying to figure out which place is better or worse… well it’s no fun.

Thanks for this neat innovation.