This article was first published on the Online EU Training blog

We at Arboreus are constantly experimenting. In the online world, customer feedback is an ambiguous thing: you don’t see your customer’s body language, tone of voice or behaviour but you can effectively measure browsing paths, email feedbacks and website analytics. The fundamental question is: how can we make your online experience better?

A challenge has come up recently in the form of usability improvements. We want to make the “flow” better so that users will need less clicks and clearer paths to find a menu, check out or download an ebook.

The question is whether adding tabs is the solution? Well, if the items to display are complementary in nature (details of a certain product), they are great. But if the relation is “and” instead of “or”, a linear listing and scrolling works better.

Another new trend is having not just tooltips but full-scale sneak previews upon mouseover (as Facebook has recently introduced for its profile views). Istockphoto, the world’s largest stock photo site, has full-scale videos displayed in a mouseover bubble.

A lot to tweak and tough choices ahead…but it’s so much fun!

Any suggestions? Ideas? Your comments are most welcome!

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