Working with utterly untechy people

[xoggoth]

Does anyone else have to do this? It's seriously annoying.

Have this small business with sister and we constantly have the same conversations. She wants the website to be all full of big pretty pictures of children in classrooms and flowery guff about enriching experiences with our products, I keep telling her that visitors have to find what they need in under 20s or they bugger off, plus you need relevant words for search engines but I can't get through.

Have done an Android app but warned her it won't sell very well and we should just do it very cheap as a promotion. Fortunately, she has a brilliant marketing solution, we should sell it to Wii and Nintendo owners as well.

[doodab]

Do what she says, let the business go under, then you won't have to put up with it any more.

Sorted.

[Mich the Tester]

Buy her this book;

Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity: Amazon.co.uk: Jakob Nielsen: Books

Plus, remind her that the world's most succesful web company has a homepage with one entry field, two buttons and no guff or flowers.

You could hire a usability testing firm, but expect to pay upwards of 1000 pounds per day for a short review.

[doodab]

Plus, remind her that the world's most succesful web company has a homepage with one entry field, two buttons and no guff or flowers.

And one of those buttons nobody ever uses

Actually, it seems that with instant switched on both buttons are redundant.

[xoggoth]

You could hire a usability testing firm, but expect to pay upwards of 1000 pounds per day for a short review

That's another favourite of hers. We should hire somebody young to market us on Facebook etc and advise on a "with it" approach and how to improve the "wow factor" of our products.

Who she imagines we are going to get out of profits of under £4k that is any good I am not sure. The only young person we could interest for that money would probably just be after a chance to walk out with our PCs while we weren't looking.

[doodab]

That's another favourite of hers. We should hire somebody young to market us on Facebook etc and advise on a "with it" approach and how to improve the "wow factor" of our products.

Who she imagines we are going to get out of profits of under £4k that is any good I am not sure. The only young person we could interest for that money would probably just be after a chance to walk out with our PCs while we weren't looking.

What are these products exactly?

[Mich the Tester]

That's another favourite of hers. We should hire somebody young to market us on Facebook etc and advise on a "with it" approach and how to improve the "wow factor" of our products.

Who she imagines we are going to get out of profits of under £4k that is any good I am not sure. The only young person we could interest for that money would probably just be after a chance to walk out with our PCs while we weren't looking.

Yep, that's why the book is a good investment. Last I saw, Jakob Nielsen's company were charging 30 grand for a usability test.

I personally have an investment in a usability testing firm here in Holland, that could do a good job for about 10 grand including providing a redesign on a basic e-commerce site, but that´s way beyond your budget, and only worth investing once you´re really up and running. A lot of what we do is actually pointing out stuff that appears to us as really basic, like ´get rid of that flash film´, and ´people want to know what´s available, what does it cost, how fast can you deliver and how do I pay; they don´t care about the beautiful geometric forms of your trademark´.

Just follow Jakob Nielsen´s guidelines and you´ll do fine.

Having said all that, let me see the site and I'll perhaps give you a little advice for free.

[SueEllen]

That's another favourite of hers. We should hire somebody young to market us on Facebook etc and advise on a "with it" approach and how to improve the "wow factor" of our products.

Who she imagines we are going to get out of profits of under £4k that is any good I am not sure. The only young person we could interest for that money would probably just be after a chance to walk out with our PCs while we weren't looking.

Depending on what your product/service is you may find that using Facebook as a promotional tool is completely useless. Facebook users tend to stay on Facebook there as users of other social networking sites are more likely to click on links to external sites.

[xoggoth]

What are these products exactly?

Software and printed materials on nature, for children/schools mainly.

I had to strongly resist putting my brother's fabulous animation of a butterfly on the front page of the website. It was 4.7Mb.

[jmo21]

Issues I've had with users this week.

user1 - Why do we have to click the save button? can't it just save itself?

user2 - How do I get to the form? (note: it's a website)
me - the address is etc......
user2 - so I type that into google then? (it's an internal website too)
me - no, at the top of Internet Explorer there is an address bar...
user2 - ah yeah ok.......nope doesn't work.
me - can you send me a screenshot
user2 - ah, it's working now.