Dear Restaurant Owner, Please Ditch the All-Flash Web Site

I was scheduling lunch with a friend, who asked me to recommend a restaurant and send him the physical and Web addresses. No problem, right? Wrong.

Check out the Web site for Kora in Crystal City - http://www.korarestaurant.com/ The Web site is pretty, but if you’re trying to get an address and send it to a friend, it’s not user-friendly at all!

  • It took me 5 minutes to find the address.  It’s not on the home page, nor under Hours and Directions.  It’s under Contact Us and Reservations.
  • Because the site is entirely in Flash, I couldn’t copy the address and paste into the e-mail I was sending my friend.
  • I also could not copy and paste the address into Google maps so that I could send my friend directions from Reston.
  • Forget being able to bookmark specific pages because the URL never changes in the single Flash file for the entire site. So I couldn’t send my friend the URL of a menu page.  Aaaargh.
  • Oh yeah, you can’t print Flash pages either unless print-friendly pages have been specifically created; most designers don’t bother.  So if you want to print Kora’s Hours and Directions page, you’re out of luck.

Amen. If you don't talk to users, the most straightforward things can be easy to overlook.

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How Will Normal Folks Ever Use Twitter?

Jeremy Toeman has a fantastic analysis of the Twitter experience for new users. Lots of lessons here for Twitter -- and for anyone putting together a new user experience.

Twitter needs to thoroughly overhaul the new user experience.  Forget “suggested users” and focus on “suggested uses.”

via livedigitally.com

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