RTE Needs to Learn That The Less Clicks The Better
The RTE website despite it’s recent facelift still has to work on minimising user clicks around it’s real estate. What I can’t for the life of me understand, that despite working on the Look and Feel of the site, social bookmarking and sharing methods are hidden away in a separate ‘Share This’ popup. Would it not be easier to stick these social sharing tags into a widget and add it to the template that the news pages are using?
Users are inherently lazy about interacting with the UI. One of the primary tenets of UI design and interaction experience is that users should be presented with as few mouse clicks and keyboard hits as possible. Simple is best. After searching about for *that* piece of info, in *that* subject, now you’re going to make me explicitly navigate to a popup? If folks with vanilla Wordpress installations can simply add social bookmarking and sharing tags, what’s so difficult about the IT department of a state broadcaster implementing it across they flagship offering? Laziness, ignorance or a blatant disregard for browsers.. take your pick.
EDIT: Fixing categories.
November 12th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
[...] Alexia blogged about RTE News online today and got me thinking. So here’s my gripes: [...]
November 15th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
Hi Alexia,
I’m actually the person that designed and implemented the ’share this’ widget for the RTE site! I originally had designed it so that the social bookmarking widgets on the page instead of in the popup, but when we did the mockups, it simply didn’t look good, plus the ’send to friend’ feature needed to be done alongside, hence the popup solution. It’s not the way *I* would have done it personally, but I’m just a cog in a (very) big machine
“Laziness, ignorance or a blatant disregard for browsers” is a bit harsh too. The guys in there work their butts off to get things right in all browsers, all the time. The RTE site is, rightly so, always going to be on the chopping block for criticism, but believe me, the folks in there do listen and they do genuinely care about user experience, myself included.
I think it’s awesome that the blogging community, esp. tech blogs like your good self, do take an interest in the site. All criticisms/praise about the parts that I work on, are most definitely taken in on board and will influence my work, hopefully for the better.
Keep up the great work with the blog,
Paul
November 15th, 2007 at 7:43 pm
@Paul
Thanks for dropping by and giving us an insight into why a certain design route was taken. I can understand how the ’send to a friend’ functionality needs to be wrapped in a pop-out, but I still think that having the other social sharing functions in the popout is flawed.
Perhaps the closing comment was a bit glib, but the intention was to kick off a discussion into how a major website refresh can get the simple things wrong. And it’s still wrong, in my humble opinion to have a pop-out for socially sharing sites. It’s a simple barrier to entry. RTE should have as part of it’s primary tenets, the goal to get RTE web content in as many places as possible. Get as many eyeballs ready to read and consume that content. Drive users to the site - if not only to read and disseminate the news, then to wipe up ad revenue. While it may seem simple, docking social sharing methods on the same pages as content is a seamless experience to the reader. Click and go. No messy pop-outs. No fuss.
My criticism is well-meant. Thanks for noticing. I’m a stickler about simplicity. The more, we as designers and developers of customer-facing systems, criticize and improve our methods of software engineering, the more users we’ll attract. Users won’t only come for the content, but also for the promise of good experience.