Stumbled across an
interesting post this evening on
25hoursaday.com, a blog by Dare Obasanjo, aka Carnage4Life. The post, entitled 'Your website's
UI is synonymous with your brand', is a riposte to a
post a few days earlier by Jeff Atwood on another blog, Coding Horror, re. the redundancy of a key element of the minimalist Google interface: the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button. (Yes, I know, what a bloody mouthful).
Jeff puts forward that the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button is superfluous. After all, he argues, despite using Google thousands and thousands of times, he can count the number of times he's used the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button on one hand (see below). We're all probably with him on that front.
He starts by saying this:
You might say it's only one more button, so where's the harm. I say giving a feature that's used less than one percent of the time parity with the "Search" button is a needless distraction for users.And then kicks out with this:
I urge us to omit needless buttons. I hope the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button isn't considered a sacred cow at Google. Removing it would be one small step for Google, but a giant collective improvement in the default search user interface for users around the world.But our man Dare makes a post in turn out of the comments by readers on Jeff's post, which provide a real insight into the dynamics of a successful website — see below. If you're having problems reading the small type, click
here and trawl through the comments yourself.
OK, this post hasn't got much to do with cards, but it has got a lot to do with understanding that websites need to be about more than mere functionality, ROI, click-through rates, calls to action — and everything else performance-related. The bottom line is that a good consumer-facing website, like Google's, and as Dare reveals, will have elements of playfulness, and contain things that, well, really don't need to be there.