1997 Web Site and Interactive Catalog (Cont.)

It took only a week to discover in Technicolor what the result of my test was. People did not like to be required to download a plug-in to view content on the Web. The user feedback that I received was overwhelmingly negative. I consider this test a success, mainly because I found out what I wanted to know.

Of course, in today's world, this isn't as much of an issue anymore. An 80k download over today's modems and high-speed connections is a mere blip for most people and some might not even notice it. In fact, the Macromedia Flash plug-in is built in almost everywhere that Macromedia could find a place for it, including the Playstation 2 and some cell phones.

I immediately revised the design to put the plug-in content on alternative content pages only. I went into redesigning the new site and catalog with a much better idea of what I could expect of my audience, and what I could get away with implementing on the site in terms of technology and interface.

When I designed the navigation, I addressed issues that I was seeing with the previous release. People frequently asked for easier ways to review all the type designs at once, so in response, I provided them with a main page that had type samples. This page led to a more detailed page about each typeface in their choice of either Flash or no Flash. The test that I had run earlier had convinced me that people dislike requirements, but that they loved options, so I allowed them the choice of what content to view.

During this time I was again starting to worry about how my users were enjoying their experience while at SynFonts.com. Outside of my requests for it, I had never had a lot of negative feedback. My assumption was that it would take an awful lot to get someone who was not satisfied to go out of their way to let me know they were unhappy unless they were really upset, so I was probably missing out on a whole lot of constructive criticism from users.

I implemented a form on my site that would prompt visitors to provide feedback. After doing this, the feedback I was getting became much more helpful in guiding the site design. I still got a lot of positive feedback that was complimentary of my use of Futuresplash (now Macromedia Flash 1.0) and the logs over the course of the year showed an increasing amount of use for the plug-in content. But in terms of actual use, it was not used nearly as much as the GIF content was. I kept it optional throughout the life of this version.

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I also implemented online sales at this time using an online sales service. With this addition the focus of the site also changed. The old method of processing e-mailed credit cards and taking orders by phone and mail was going to give way to orders being filled online with immediate download.

I made this decision one night when a very determined Italian gentleman placed no less than five failed repeat attempts to fax me an order three nights in a row at 3:00 in the morning, my time. It turned out that he really needed the fonts for a project that he was working on and he didn't realize that he was faxing my phone line. Eventually he called me and we got his order filled, but it was a pretty sleepless week.

Within a year of starting up online sales in this way, my sales had dropped to unexplainably low levels and I decided to see if there was a better way to handle the online transactions. I knew from my user logs that I was getting traffic leaving my site for the sales site, but the sales were not being "closed". I can only assume that something in their system or interface turned my users off right when they were about to order.

I had originally moved to the sales provider because they provided "secure" ordering, but I couldn't afford to lose sales the way that I was. I hooked up a deal with a hosting service that provided me with space on a secure server that I would configure on my own as opposed to using the pre-built system. After implementing this new ordering system into the site, sales went back up to a couple of orders a day.

1997 Web Site and Interactive Catalog
Usability: the Site Speaks For Itself
1998-2000 Web Site