One of the outcomes of the rediculously-fast rise of social networking web sites is that it’s got us asking a lot of questions. Not a day goes by here at UIE where we aren’t discussing MySpace, Facebook, or Xanga with each other or with clients. These sites are truly mysterious, in part because they’re not really made for our demographic but also because we’re not sure why people actually use them in the myriad of ways they do. As a result, we’re learning a tremendous amount of new things about social web design.

What I’m interested is, as designers, what we’re going to learn from all this, with regards to how we design for change.

In recent user tests, we’ve noticed something very peculiar. Something I call the Amazon Effect.

The most successful design teams focus on designing the content pages first, ensuring they have all the information that users need on those pages.

Advertising is all about disruption. TV ads disrupt users from the content. Billboard signs can disrupt people from focusing on driving. Online ads function similarly — they disrupt users from the content they’re looking for. That’s why it’s a surprise when we encounter online advertisements that work effectively.

Though we’ve only been at it since July, we feel that blogging has been a very positive experience. So I want to put it out there and see if you have had similar experiences or not. Are you blogging, or thinking about it? If so, do you think that it has been worth it? What has happened as a result?

While the Million Dollar Homepage is an innovative idea that paid off for the site’s creator, it really hasn’t paved the way for a new approach to successful advertising.

In a recent study described in the scientific journal Nature, Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa describes her research study examining how long it takes users to form impressions about the visual aesthetics of a web site.

While the copywriters for the Century House’s web site wanted to convince people to visit the Century House, the words don’t seem all that persuasive.

It’s amazing how many different ways web sites handle sign-in pages. The messaging of the interface, whether or not to sign up for an account, and the HTML elements used are just some of the details that change drastically from site to site. Just recently I was doing an interface review to see what the state of the art was, and I was simply boggled by the different approaches I saw. Here they are…