“You must sign in or sign up to purchase this item.”

I was ready to purchase a new theme for my blog when I read the following: You must sign in or sign up to purchase this item. Ugh. Why?

I found the theme on a marketplace so I figured I could probably go the original theme author’s website and make my purchase there. I found the website, and the “Buy Theme” button which, sadly, led back to the marketplace.

Please, make it easier to purchase items from your store and I might purchase more.

Give What Users Want. Now.

YouTube used to display a bar chart to present the “likes” and “dislikes” of a video. What I would immediately see upon landing on the page was the proportion of site visitors who pressed the like and dislike button. But guess what I would immediately do? I would drag my cursor toward the chart and hover the cursor on top of the chart because that was the only way to see the actual number of “likes” and “dislikes.”

Statistics does not mean much without a good number of samples. I’m interested to see the numbers first. YouTube has since replaced the chart with the old school, straight up numbers. I suppose a user could infer the ratio of “likes” and “dislikes” himself.

Likes Statistics

Likes Statistics

Great User Interface: Read Users’ Mind

Ever looking up a word online and having to look up another word in the original word’s definition? Here are the steps to do it if you look up the word online.

  1. Go to dictionary.com
  2. Enter the word to look up
  3. Read the definition
  4. (Upon finding another new word) Copy the new word and paste it to the search box

Step 4 may not be much, or it may be (a sequence of a double mouse click, CTRL+C, move mouse cursor to the search box, CTRL+V, and ENTER), but dictionary.com has managed to simplify that step 4 into the following sequence of steps: click the new word, click the tooltip immediately above the new word. That’s it–two clicks and barely a muscle to move the mouse.