The home page is dead. Long live the home page.

Ever since the dawn of the Internet, the homepage has been the point of focus for website design, a front door of sorts through which visitors unlock all of the goodness within that we’ve built for them.  And quite a bit of web design is done accordingly: get the homepage design right, the theory goes, and the rest of the site will follow.

But as we continue diving headlong into a connected, social-media-aware, bot-crawled online world, the homepage is fading into irrelevance.  No longer do we surf the web by flitting from homepage to homepage, but rather by diving right into the depths of sites thanks to deep links from Google, page recommendations from friends, shopping aggregators … or even apps on our phones.

What’s happening here is an important shift in web design: your homepage is no longer your homepage.  Rather, anywhere a user might land on your site - be it from a Facebook link, a bit.ly link embedded in a tweet, or a reference on an obscure blog somewhere - becomes your de-facto homepage.  Every page needs to grab the user’s attention, give them a reason to be there, and a reason to stick around for a while.

Looking across our research and design projects, we’ve seen a few key ways to make every page a ‘homepage’:

• Location: Every page should give a sense of location: Where am I on the site? What’s similar on the site, like related products or information?
• Structure: Every page should expose the structure of the site: How big is it? What major features are there? How do I get around?
• Big picture: Every page should quickly give the big picture, answering What is this site? What’s special about it? What can I do here?
• What’s new: Every page should include something dynamic, even if it’s just a small widget in the corner, highlighting what’s new or interesting - and for ecommerce sites, what’s a deal, what’s a steal, and what’s on sale.

Will the iPad save traditional broadcast media?

For years, technology innovation has been drawing audiences away from broadcast media, siphoning attention off into a land of free and non-monetizable content. But the advent of the iPad holds the promise to redefine how the world produces and consumes media, and may just bring us all back under the wings of the major media houses. Through parallel storytelling, shared experiences, and new social interactions around media, the iPad — and ideally many new devices to follow — can give broadcasters rich new ways to engage us, our friends, and our families in their media events.

Parallel storytelling

Take a look at the media we consume today: nearly all of it is in the form of a single stream of content. Stories told among friends, books, movies, and broadcast media are all constructed from a series of vignettes that combine to tell a story. However, reality is much more messy: multiple things are going on at once; there are subtexts and back stories. Even when movies explore time shifting (Pulp Fiction) or alternate outcomes (Run, Lola, Run), the underlying format is the same: a string of events. However, people have a thirst for multiple streams of information: think record album liner notes, DVD extras and director’s notes, and the 1990s hit “Pop-Up Video” television show on VH-1, which visually overlaid little snippets of information on top of music videos.

With the advent of the iPad, media producers will be able to capture this thirst for additional information and explore new realms in parallel storytelling. Rather than just sitting back and passively watching a TV show, for instance, people will be able to simultaneously explore the back story. Imagine leafing through coffee-stained pages of the CIA dossier on Jason Bourne while he hides in the Caribbean, or training a virtual spycam on Godot to see what the heck he was up to while Vladimir and Estragon were endlessly waiting. And this doesn’t necessarily have to all happen on the iPad itself; we’ll see the rise of simulcast media, watching the main story on satellite or cable on the big screen in the living room and interacting with this sidecar content on our iPad from the comfort of the sofa.

Read the rest of the story on VentureBeat.com

Building trust through experience quality

While in the field doing in-home research, we recently passed a new house on the market for US $2 million. From the street, it wasn’t possible to see if the structure was sound or the quality of the construction was good - but what we did notice was the house number stickers on the mailbox. They were the cheap stick-on type from a local hardware store, with each digit slightly askew. And that made a big impact: what else did they skimp on?

Websites work the same way: they are a direct and immediate reflection of the company behind them. We’ve seen consistently from our research that no matter how much social media, web 2.0 interactivity, and rich media you build into a site, it’s the little things that quickly add up. Poor website quality affects not only clicks or sales, but can also create a strong and lasting negative impression of a brand. Frequently, each individual issue isn’t that grave - users may not even consciously notice them - but in combination they erode the experience:

Amateur visual design: confusing page layouts and low-quality graphics, especially those with compression artifacts

Lack of alignment: no sense of grid or other visual structure to the page, making it difficult to parse and understand

Inconsistencies: lack of cohesive feel throughout the site, such as a button marked “Buy” in one place and “Purchase” in another

Outdated design: use of antiquated visual design styles or methods of interaction (aa.com comes to mind)

Difficulties finding: issues with finding content or features, whether on a specific page or across the site

Weak Copy: bland, corporate-speak, excessively long or content-free text that does not bring immediate value to the visitor

Lack of content: missing details on products, lack of selling messages (“Why should i buy this? Sell it to me!”), and lack of depth on company

Technical bugs and performance: layout and font issues, dead-end pages, poorly-designed UI widgets, and slow response times

What do you think?