In love with a hippo

I love reading and listening to Kathy Sierra, her blog and talks can teach anyone amazing stuff about user interface design and product-making in general. One important question that Kathy often asks is: What products are you passionate about?

I'm passionate about filehippo.com, it's a wonderful wonderful site, providing speedy almost-1-click downloading of all the apps one needs on a windows machine (firewall, anti-spyware, winamp, acrobat, open-office, firefox, opera, etc.)

Everything is organized in a non-nonsense interface, the Search on the top right works like a charm if you want to quickly find something, and the logo is insanely great.

Great work.

Passionate about websites? Applications? online Radio?
Write a comment and tell me about it. (I'm curious)

The forgotten art of the landing page

I was reading some article on an Israeli content site and noticed an ad for a well-known israeli artschool called "Camera Obscura". I usually don't click on such flashy banner ads - but sometimes I do, wondering what the following page looks like.

It took me a few minutes to realize that I have no idea how I got the image above - it looks like some basic install of DotNetNuke (a web content management system), and it has a mini-form inside that asks the user for details such as name, email, etc.

The surprising thing is - this form appears to be real - it's not a bug - the people at Camera Obscura, or the agency that sold them the flash ad - sent all users clicking on the banner to this irrelevant looking page with the mini-mini form inside that's titled (loose translation): "Schedule a meeting / Request more information".

My bet is, only a tiny fraction of the users actually went on and entered the requested information. Most of them probably wondered what this weird pop-up page is and closed it right away.

It should be common knowledge by now, that animated flashy banner are not enough by themselves - they can be impressive and stuff, but if they direct users to a weird-looking page that has nothing to do with the look & feel of the original banner and context - they accomplish nothing.

The ad agency also abused its responsibility - it sold an online ad that achieves almost nothing - it only confuses users and leaves little or no impact.

For more on landing pages try seth godin's post on the subject.

Great flash sites

Mathieu Badimon creates some great flash websites.

These include some vector manipulation games at the 'lab' and some great windowish interface at communicationresponsable

[via computerlove]

lineto

The folks at lineto sell fonts.

They have a nice site up with great navigation - based on the 3-pane file navigation of the iPod / Apple Finder.