BBC.co.uk is possibly the best web site you can find on the world wide web. Quality (and quantity) of content is just great, web site overall look and feel is both a lesson in understatement and usability, giving a top class user experience to users.

Just some examples:

My AdSense account is experiencing problems and I can't access my reports or any other page of the AdSense web. The following is the message Google AdSense is returning on a two lines message.

The AdSense logo, the my user name (in this case my Gmail address, Last Login time log, the Log Out link, the Help link and a Search AdSense Help input form are the elements provided in the header.

The footer offers links to the AdSense Blog, the AdSense Forum, the Privacy Policy, the Terms & Conditions, the Program Policies.

The following is the only info given in the main part of the page:

Error

We apologize for the inconvenience, but we are unable to process your request at this time. Our engineers have been notified of this problem and will work to resolve it.

Everything you need to know, the easy and clear way

What's going on?

Error

Web Design Guru Jacob Nielsen interviewed on the Guardian Unlimited, spending some words on users attitudes on web browsing, his own attitude on what the web should look like, and the Google monopolio.

There is something good about upsetting people, because it's making an impact, (...) "It's not good if you only annoy people (...)

In a previous post, Visualizing Maps: Google Analytics maps, we saw how Google Analytics maps render when extruded from their context and/or seen as a black & white image.

USA states?

Looking at the USA map where users origin is highlighted darkening the relevant state, the first thing that stands out is you have to know the state name just looking at the map. If this is, or should be, a quite easy task for an American reader, things are not so obvious for someone from Europe or somewhere else. If is it true that you have the detailed list of the states, together with their relevant figures, in a table just under the map image, is it also true that if you just look at the map (as it would be in the case you take the map alone to insert it in a custom layout for printing/slide show) it's not so immediate to find out the state name.

Visualizing maps is a key factor when dealing with statistics and complex data, online maps as the ones used by Google Analytics, the Google service for web statistics, could take advantage of the internet medium to enhance the user interaction but what happens when you have to read those same maps on a different medium (say you what to print them) or with a different format size?

Usability choices in web design do have a real life impact, indeed. One example is the recent Primavera Sound festival, a music festival held in Barcelona, Spain, that saw performances by Sonic Youth, Blonde Redhead, Modest Mouse, and Beirut among others in this year edition.

How green is your program?

The fact is the designers had no better idea than provide a .pdf program to download all white on black, that is you print a letter/A4 format program all black with band listed in white. Could you be more stupid than this? Quite difficult. It was quite disgusting to see how near everybody (20k people daily attended the festival on a 3 days program) had printed the program, the fault isn't obviously the people printing a .pdf, the problem is some silly designer (in the the sense is sooooo cool at doing graphic design) has no idea of what design means.

A simple, effective implementation of a usability trick that could solve a great deal. Reading through a End User License Agreement (EULA) is always a pain in the neck, admit it or not there's nobody really reading all the legal thing, scrolling down for pixels and pixels. The fact is you usually have to scroll all the text to activate the next button.

To save you some time, and the additional pain of using the small scrolling bar, the Open office EULA provides a quite useful button: the Scroll Down button everybody. Push the button, and the text will scroll down, that's it.

Yahoo has a page dedicated to Wii, the Nintendo video game console, which is quite cool since it's rich in web 2.0 content, user generated or not, and really looks like Yahoo is now a completely different experience. Like it's web 2.0 for them too. And that's the problem.

Brand without a clue

The Wii page on Yahoo is interesting as it's full of external, user generated content such as Flickr images, tags Wii-related from Del.icio.us and MyWeb, features stories, and useful links. The following is the Wii - Yahoo! Games page screen shot.

Now, this page is nice, it has enough web 2.0 features to make you reach the informations you were looking for, you can actually be part of the content as you as a user could be an active user of this very same page. The problems start if you look at the big Yahoo picture, it's web presence that is.

Just a personal opinion on how product design might just forget about the users, and the world we're currently living in.

Something get lost in the way

The Oral-B Pulsar™ is a toothbrush. Quoting the product web site:

Pulsar is the only manual toothbrush with revolutionary MicroPulse™ bristles that independently pivot back and forth to penetrate deep between teeth (...)

It looks like the critics met the audience in awarding the Best Navigation/Structure Webby Award to IKEA, Dream Kitchen.

Flash revenge!

It's the revenge of Flash, and of all the silly humor you had on viewing your friends summer vacation slideshow. Well, this has interaction in it, like click and skip to next photo. Doh! (Just to be sure, I'm being sarcastic on this...)

Barcelona, Spain, authorities sent me and my neighbours (and I guess all the town residents) a bag containing three re-usable bags to be used to differentiate and recycle home garbage. The idea, quite obviously, is a nice one; also the packaging and marketing of the initiative is great, together with the usability of the explanation for the bags use.