RSS
Email
SMS
30-3-10 Rule To UI Effectiveness Of Any Website!
(Rate this article)
Loading ...Email It!
This post is an outcome of an intense discussion I had with a (funded) online startup owner a few days back. The problem the startup owner was having is that he was not able to communicate effectively to his development team exactly what kind of UI he wanted for his online web presence as his entire product dependant on it.
Well im no UI expert nor do I claim or want to be one in the future but at that moment I came up with a solution which I was quite proud of myself. So I thought of sharing the same here.
This is what I did.. I asked the Founder to draw his proposed UI (the one he wants to build) on a sheet of paper. This can be done very simply for eg. Think you were the founder of google and were conceptualising google’s homepage you would typically draw a search bar and other links like advanced search, language preferences etc. In the same way any website needs to be first drawn with hand or digitally as the UI is conceptualised in the minds of the founder/designer etc.
So the startup founder drew the UI and when he had finished I asked him to do something more.. I said..
Close your eyes now. Forget that you made this UI and now with a blank mind open your eyes and look at it again. What do you see and understand from the UI?
Can you in 30 seconds tell me what this website is?
Can you in 3 minutes tell me whether you like or dislike the website?
Would you in 10 minutes want to forward this website or make a decision to use it regularly?
The online startup founder was a little taken aback as he could not disassociate with his own creation.
So I told him this.. Take this UI and show it to 30 of your TG (target audience) and ask them the same questions I asked you. If possible do it with 100 TG (basically as big as a sample size you believe is good) and ask them the same questions. Now he said Ok Ill do that but how do I know what their answers mean?
- What they think about your site in 30 seconds is what you are! (Not what you believe you are through your mission, vision etc! So if your self company perception and this result do not match then you need to change the UI!)
- What they think about you in 3 minutes will decide whether you were successful in building a Intuitive User Friendly Website!
- If they stick around for 10 minutes then they are your long term customers and possible evangelists who will spread the word about you to others!
So thats when I crystalized a simple 30-3-10 rule to UI effectiveness! Its very simple for even the smallest of the small startup to execute! I again dont claim that this is the only way to create great UI! NO! But yes its a way to know what your customer thinks and change things accordingly as you might be different from your websites TG. All in all do take this post as my 2 cents on how to zero in on a UI that does wonders for your online startup. Im sure there are tonnes of UI experts out there and I would love to get more value add on the above thoughts. Even a thrashing would be welcome 
Loading ...
Ahaan, thats an interesting one Rajiv.
Seems good.
Nice post… as part of a new (funded) startup, I will be very interested if some of your readers’ comments after they conduct this experiment… I will attempt to do the same
Check out paper prototyping, its similar to what you described - http://tinyurl.com/3b4xho
That is an pretty effective rule you created.
Would be interested in knowing the outcome of the exercise..
Your thumb rule seems to be very shallow. What about navigation issues, what about color scheme. I think its only applicable for whacky 2.0 ideas where site’s usefulness is at the mercy of user’s first 30 sec encounter.
Be clear and careful when you go about bragging the bull shit on this blog.
Another fact,
Any visitor has only 4 seconds to judge your site… so it is UI + Loadtime…
@Shah Habeeb - “site’s usefulness is at the mercy of user’s first 30 sec encounter” I think the whole site is at the users mercy. Only the user delight focussed sites work. Also my post was not about detailing on UI. It was a simple rule which any Tom, Dick and Harry can use without any knowledge of UI.
As stated earlier I am no UI expert and this post was just my two cents. If you think it is shallow i respect your point of view and possibly you could state here what else could work better.