About those advertisements on Facebook

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I have a Facebook advertisement gripe.

I don’t really mind advertisements on the sides. Facebook is an incredible resource which we use daily and its free for us to use, but somebody’s got to pay for the servers and employees who provide updates and security patches along with many other resources. Advertisements are a necessary evil.

Sometimes, there’s something that I really like advertised on the side, so I click. Maybe that’s stupid of me, but I want to see that item, see how much it costs, etc.

The thing that gets me is that I cannot actually FIND the item in the picture. This devalues the… value… of the advertisement. If I click, I expect to find what I’m clicking upon. The image did grab my attention far more than the words (i.e. human nature).

What I’d really like is to have the ability to FIND the object in the image. This object may be far outside the price range that I’m willing to spend. Maybe it will be exactly what I’d expect for the object to cost. Either way, I want to find said object and have the option to buy it, see reviews, read comments about it, etc.

I don’t think I’m asking for much. What it really comes down to is relevancy.

If you are a company who is providing advertisements to bolster the attraction to your business, please do your potential customers a favor and provide relevant imagery to represent your business. This not only will bolster the attractiveness of your products, it will also increase customer loyalty and trust.

Ok, Done, Cancel, Next… buttons

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In a post which I wrote previously, I talked about the power of the “done” button (among others).

I’ve recently been working on a lot of IA and am finding myself coming back to the essential contents on this post.  Along with this is the discussion between alignment of said buttons and orientation.

 

So many interfaces (including mobile devices) differ in the placement.  Even the organizational order of which comes first first next, if it’s left, center, or right aligned – all of which seem to differ.  I remember the other day being confused at the store when the touch-device upgrade changed where the buttons were… I ended up accidentally canceling a transaction because they moved the cancel button to where the enter previously was!  Do they really think everyone reads the buttons every single time?

A blog that I’ve read on a few occasion points to a very strong opinion on this based on user tracking Why ‘OK’ buttons … best on the right .

I feel that it comes down to contextual consistency.  There are some cases where anything which is a “moving forward” action item is on the left, at which point, that platform has made a consistent effort to instill the expectation for the user to locate anything which requires action to be placed in its own space on the left, as though the person was reading and moving to the next line.

Then there is the windows phone 7 platform.  This one goes all over the map, but always within the means of contextual navigation.  Related actions which bring you to new screens are centered and to the bottom.  Specific navigation within the context of the content delivered on the screen (such as going to contacts and then touching someone’s name to get to their profile) is directly delivered in-line, while sections of globally related content are a slide/pan left or right (think of a top-menu navigation on the web.  This would be a series of globally related content items – they relate to the website and support its purpose… hopefully).

Then there are installations of applications – this one is where I get my pantyhose in a bunch where the windows platform is concerned.  Every application seems to take a different direction.  Some have the buttons side by side, aligned to the right, but with the “next” button first and the “cancel” second.  Some have those buttons flipped, some have the next button all the way on the left where the cancel is all the way on the right…

There are so many variations!  Personally, it makes sense to me that if I’m going to the next screen, that I’ll look for the next button to be directionally placed – to the far right.  Where the cancel button is can differ, but this is where wayfinding comes in.  We as human beings use a whole lot of wayfinding metaphors.  They make the best sense considering where we’ve come from on an evolution sort of way.

What do you think?  Should there be a standard regardless of platform?  Is it contextual?  How would you make that decision if you were the one with the power to instill that decision – or do you even think about it?

 

Firefox's tab "groups"

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I finally did it – I allowed Firefox to update to 6.0

I don’t believe I’ve put it off for TOO terribly long, but I did continue to push the “update later” button until this morning.

 

Most of the time, when I update, I hardly pay much attention to the message by the Firefox reps regarding the update.  I’m just wanting to use the browser and consider the frequent updates to be a bit too frequent.  I understand, security risks are a factor as well as patching performance issues and implementing new user experience features, yadda yadda yadda.  By the time I finally push that button to update, I’m getting more than just 1 update, and am just looking for the notification to please just stop asking me to upgrade.  I’ve posted before about my disdain towards too frequent software patches, so I won’t go deeply into that topic here.

Like I said before, the button was pressed to update Firefox and for some unfathomable reason, I paid attention to their little welcome message illustrating what this update was about… and glad I am of that!

Being a creature of habit, I tend to go to the same places when browsing – so this new tabs group thing is very nice.

Whomever it was that came up with the idea to integrate this functionality into Firefox – should be given some serious kudos.  If they’re seattle based, maybe the company can pay for their parking for a month or something.

 

Anyway, I thought it worth mentioning.  Kudos to Firefox and maybe kudos to their messaging or marketing team who made the upgrade details screen stand out in such a way that I actually was inclined to pay attention.