Sarah Hyne is part of Bluewire’s alumni. Sarah was Bluewire’s interactive designer from 2007 until she accepted a position at Map magazine in 2010 where she could pursue design in all forms, not just on the web.
The problem with poorly designed websites might not be incompetent user-experience and graphic designers, but a stifling corporate culture.
This is what blogger Dustin Curtis discovered when he wrote an open letter on his blog to the team behind the American Airlines website.
In his letter, he spoke of the dissatisfying experience he had booking a flight on the AA website. He wrote:
How did this happen? If I was running a company with the distinction and history of American Airlines, I would be embarrassed — no ashamed — to have a website with a customer experience as terrible as the one you have now.
Writing for the web can be tricky. But do it well and you can watch your site’s SEO results, usability and overall effectiveness as a marketing tool soar to new heights. Here are a couple of tips to improve your web content.
“Web users are an impatient bunch. If users can’t immediately find what they’re looking for, they move on. For this reason users tend to scan information rather than reading it closely. One reason is physiological. Research—by Nielsen, Stanford University/The Poynter Institute and others—has shown that reading pixels on a screen makes eyes work harder than reading ink on paper.”