Jul 06 2011
Jakob Nielsen explains why the Wall Street Journal is failing miserably with their iPhone app. Hint: it has to do with poor design.
The long-term impact of this confusing application UI is a severe erosion of the WSJ brand among the people who matter most: loyal, paying readers. As this case perfectly exemplifies, usability is not just a matter of whether users can press the correct button. User experience is branding in the interactive world.
It bears repeating: "User experience is branding in the interactive world."
As Nielsen demonstrates in his article, design is critical to ensuring not only a "pretty face" (after all the WSJ's start screen isn't ugly), but one that will 1) convert new users and keep existing customers happy, and 2) keep the company brand from eroding.
It's because of that bottom-line everyone has an eye on that design is so important. But you can't just have something – be it a website, mobile app, brochure – designed and leave it at that. There's measuring and testing that needs to occur in order to optimize results. Otherwise, just grab your wallet and flush it down the toilet. No, really.
Or you can learn from examples like this one. I would go so far to say that small business owners need to learn from these kinds of mistakes that behemoth companies make.
Good, solid, strategic design is not just veneer, folks. It can quite literally help a business earn thousands or millions in revenue, while bad design that's created just out of the blue or on a business owner's "hunch" can have the opposite impact. Which would you prefer?