Digital Explorers

Digital explorers are the Marco Polo’s of a new age.

In 1287 a man named Marco Polo changed the face of the western world making one of the first significant connections to the eastern world. His established connection was more than an anthropological one. The connection eventually opened up a trade route named the Silk Road. Its connection yielded a huge benefit to the western world.

What happened to people like Marco Polo?

Do people like Marco Polo still live today? Or are the days of exploration of new parts of the world over? Is there still room for exploration of new and lucrative venues of business? Are there still people like Marco Polo connecting parts of the world in a new way?

The Silk Road.

The Silk Road was a series of ancient trade routes stretching across Central Asia to Europe, its name still evokes imagery of caravans drawn by camels packed full of Chinese silk, ivory, jade and gold. These caravans traversed across snow topped mountains through deserts and every imaginable geographic and cultural obstacle. The great explorers that piloted these caravans spent years making journeys, but only a few completed the task and the ones who did reaped tremendous profits. Read the rest of this entry »

Limit rather than confuse.

This is an issue that we have experienced more than we actually would admit. When building a new website it is easy for someone to feel that they must offer their users every imaginable feature. The results are typically a complicated navigation process, confusing content, and a general lack of direction for future site features.

So what then is the key to ensuring this doesn’t happen to your site?
Limit rather than confuse.

Ok, ok, so what do I mean? Quite simply, if a feature seems unnecessary or would benefit less than a fifth of our users, abstain. Don’t build it. Building a feature that is only useful to a small percentage of your users doesn’t make sense, especially from a return on investment perspective.

Remember MySpace? They let users run wild customizing and adding everything possible to their MySpace page. The result? Users were able to customize images, CSS, and it eventually lead to their pages being so complicated and confusing that usability went out the window. Each MySpace profile page had its own navigation scheme, or lack thereof, color scheme, and varying content. Users had too much choice, too many features.

The trend of limiting features is happening in Social Media sites, just look at MySpace versus Facebook, and Facebook versus Twitter. Users want great features but not at the expense of being confused. Build a few features and build them great.

Homepages that work: Amazon.com

Amazon.com is America’s largest online retailer with over 50 million visitors a month. With so much traffic, how do they tailor to each user and convert them?

Goals: sell online & offline products, sell user’s content & items, sign up new users, extend website’s reach

Audience: consumers, sellers, writers, businesses, developers and advertisers

Clear, consistent navigation.

The header of the homepage features the logo that doubles as a home button, a left hand navigation bar, an expanding search bar, a shopping cart button and a login for returning users. All of the elements remain consistent throughout the rest of the site, even the left hand navigation bar which condenses into a drop down on subpages to allow for underlying content to fill the full width of the page. Read the rest of this entry »