Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action I like Hoekman's books. They remind me of really good web writing, in that they're efficiently written, but still full of real examples and strong insights for immediate (and beneficial) takeaway. Personally, I've implemented a couple of his suggestions within days of reading certain chapters and have filed away others for future reference. It's worth mentioning, I'm a relatively good fit with him philosophically, so your mileage may vary on the action items, but no matter what your approach is to web design, both this and Designing the Obvious are worthwhile reads.

I mess around with this site a lot. This week, in particular, has been interesting. In the past week I:

• Moved my interface images over to CloudFront, Amazon's new Content Delivery Network (CDN.) I'm especially hoping this will increase initial page view performance for my site in Europe and Asia, where I've always had some lag. I'll be monitoring my bounce rate to see if that's the case. The initial results are positive (an overall reduction of 1-2% in my bounce rate over the past week), but the numbers are still too small to really draw any conclusions.
• Took advantage of Firefox's Link Prefetching to speed up all those next gallery links. I tested it out and between link prefetching and all the caching I do, browsing gallery pages in Firefox 2+ is screaming fast.
• Added some copy and rewrote some of the text/labels right here on the blog. Spurred on by the blog chapter in Designing the Obvious, I decided to implement a couple of his recommendations. Within 20 minutes of having read the chapter, I'd changed the header for the comment section, added the little descriptive blurb below it and changed the label for my RSS icon from "FEED" to "Subscribe."

  Small changes all, but maybe they'll improve the experience for folks.

  Or maybe not.

  And if they don't? I'll try something else

This kind of ongoing enhancement is core to the way I approach web design/development. I often speak of sites as being living organisms and this is the kind of thing I do to keep mine growing/evolving in positive ways.

Fun times.

eMusic, the cheaper (by a factor of four or five) and DRM-free alternative to iTunes that I use recently redesigned parts of their site. The biggest change came on the album pages, which now truly focus on the album. A prominent rating, track listing and album cover now dominate the screen. The former design had much less focus on the album itself and instead featured other site features, none of which I actually used.
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Remember the "Small Site Enhancement" I introduced last month? For a refresher I linked all of the images in my gallery flow. Instead of simply being static, they now link through to the next image in the gallery flow. I did this hoping to increase the number of page views per user by making it easier for them to click around and do those things that users love to do After nearly a month of the change being in place, I have some preliminary results:

For the period from 2008/05/03 to 2008/06/01 I averaged 4.79 pages per visit

For the period from 2008/04/03 to 2008/05/02 I averaged 4.38 pages per visit

Those numbers represent an increase of 9.37% or .41 pages per visit. I'm not going to make Google tremble, but I'll take it.

I made the image in my gallery pages "hot" today. Each gallery image now points to the next image in the gallery flow. It'll be interesting to see if that increases the average number of page views per user. I'm thinking it will as a lot of people use that technique so I'll hopefully be leveraging that learned behavior. Logically it just makes sense as those back, home and next buttons are way too small. I'll report the results in a couple of weeks…

Check it out here.

I'm actually in the process of recoding all the gallery pages (with the exception of the alphabet I posted yesterday, which was built that way from the beginning) to have an actual anchor tag wrapped around the image. For now I'm doing it with a little bit of JavaScript:

var imgs = $("artimg").getElementsByTagName("img");
for (var i=0; i< imgs.length; i++) {
    imgs[0].onclick= function() {
        document.location.href=$("next").href;
    }
}

where "next" is the existing ID applied to the next link in gallery pages. I love being able to use such simple JavaScript to enhance the user experience in such a (potentially) large way.