Plagu3's Blog

This week I’m going to talk about user experience from a website specifically in terms of design. Before we begin looking at a particular example I will bring up a few points Eric Reiss made in his blog about User Experience (EX). Eric makes a point that UX gained from a website is the sum of a series of interactions made on that site. For design specifically a good UX comes from usability, visual design, physical affordance and stream lining the interactions users are going to have with your site.

Is important to remember that no website is going to give a good UX to every user. Most websites cater to a specific topic of interest for their user audience. By this fact alone a website for hunters cannot give a good UX to a user who is against hunting. What we can do with design is try to reduce the number of negative interactions our site might provide. This means if a user not affiliated to your website stumbles onto it they are not going to leave immediately etc.

The social media-driven site I have chosen to look at today is NZHondas.com. NZHondas is a forum for the long established New Zealand Hondas Car Club. The site is powered by vBulletin a powerful forum software tool.

Examples of Good User Focused Design:

• The site has a simple but effective colour scheme of red, white and grey. This colour scheme is used throughout the site allowing easy identification of what site you are on.
• The page structure is always the same allowing easy navigation and the sites tree is always shown so you know where in the site you are.
• There are many features to the site that can be accessed but you do not need to know them to use the site. This is good for newbies users who don’t want to be confused when trying to use a new site.
• The site uses CSS for the styles. This allows flexibility and the ability for the pages to scale across different monitor sizes from standard (4:3) to wide screen (16:10).

NZHondas provides a good UX for car lovers (Honda especially) but because of the variety of users in the community also caters for other more casual users. The design is simple but easy to use and that is important to me.

Viral or Word of Mouth media is a great way to spread information quickly and the internet is the perfect medium for this sort of distribution. Websites like Youtube allow any user to upload content for potential viewing by the millions of users of the internet.

Marketers have begun using viral media to increase brand or product knowledge through unconventional means. For example the 2008 movie Cloverfield used a teaser trailer that only announced the date of the up comming film not the name. This video was huge and went viral creating a lot of hype surrounding the movie. They also used social networking site MySpace to promote the film by creating accounts for the fictional characters and fake websites for businesses in the film.

The reason viral media works so well is because people use word of mouth to inform friends and friends of friends. This coupled with social networking sites who create huge lists of connected users allows maximum exposure through the strong and weak ties between people that make up these online communities.

In 2007 Wired Magazine released an article Sock Puppets Keep It Shill on Youtube detailing this new marketing phenomenon. They wrote how the European Union was trying to ban this type of marketing. The premise of the ban was to stop a person from “falsely representing oneself as a customer” in which they bring up an interesting point that are we all not customers and do we not all wear virtual sock puppets online.

Viral and Word of Mouth media can move information quickly to the masses and isn’t limited to just consumer products of services. News stories and even just funny things/events are all distributed using this very effective means of communication. It is important to remember that not all media is positive to your cause and negative viral media can be very damaging to a person or companies reputation.

Comp113 Blog Assignment 1:

Recently gaming development powerhouse Infinity Ward creators of the famous Call of Duty series of games started using Twitter to build up interest in their latest title Modern Warfare 2. Traditionally the games publisher Activision would create expensive ad campaigns for television and pay for marketing space in game stores. Last year IW’s Creative Strategist Robert Bowling started doing something different.

Robert aka FourZeroTwo started a Twitter account and began tweeting details about the upcoming game. These were all tiny details but people began using his tweets as the start of huge discussions about the game. Most importantly Twitter allowed fans to ask questions and give feedback negative/positive about the game.

FourZeroTwo now has over 90,000 followers and even today almost two months after the games release he is still recieving messages from fans giving praise or asking questions.

YouTube was also used where Robert tweeted a link to a video of him unpackaging the yet to be released MW2 Prestige Edition (read: super special edition with working nightvision goggles). Personally this video was what convinced me to drop $280NZD on a video game but I’m glad I did.

This new way of spreading the word didnt stop Activision from spending huge amounts on teaser trailers with Eminem and 50 Cent rapping but twitter showed huge promise as a marketing tool. This is a good example of a game developer using social media to engage the fans in a different way and it payed off.