HTC One - EPIC FAIL

HTC did it! The launch of the latest flagship HTC One, brought changes to HTC Romania front page, which is now highlighting the latest addition. The message that HTC wanted to display was "What will inspire you"(Romanian: Ce te va inspira) and on the green button below should have read "Try it! Click here"(Romanian: Incearca-l Click aici). Instead of that the website actually displayed "What will inpire you", but that's not the icing on the cake. The fail can be seen on the green button, which said "Incearca-l Fa". If you translate that from Romanian you'll get "Try it hoe!". The message that was supposed to appear was too long for the green button, so it was trimmed that only this Romanian slang appeared on it. The issue has been corrected after a couple of hours, but still, a fail of this magnitude is worth noting.

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RANT: The Above The Fold myth rebunked

Last week I read an article that left me scratching my head in wonder. It made me ask myself existential questions and wonder if I've been living under a rock for the last 32 years.

First of all, what is this above the fold?. Well, it's basically the first thing that you see when you open a website, the index page, the face of the website. The name comes from the printed paper industry and refers to the headlines shown in the first half of the paper cover, the part that is always visible even with the paper folded.

The author implies that it is not necessary to put your most important content and call to action in front of the users, and that users have gotten used to scrolling web pages in the last 20 years. The scrolling part is entirely true. Yes, we have evolved. Yes, we are scrolling. But do we like it? The answer is no. Anyone would rather have the things they are looking for right in front of them. We all want what's easy for us.

No, I'm not lazy if that's what you're asking yourself, I'm practical. I don't want to waste time on a website scrolling and looking for the thing that I need instead of having it in front of my eyes. The author of the above mentioned article wants you to believe that your visitor is smart enough to scroll down and find the product or whatever you're selling by himself, but the truth is, nobody wants to do that. I do it all the time, and I hate it. The author presents a best case scenario, that is likely to happen in 5% of the cases at most. Anyone in their right mind should be looking at the 5% visitors that define the worst case scenario, the scenario when someone opens up your webpage, sees nothing of interest and leaves immediately. If you can convince these 5%, you've got it. The truth is you can't convince these 5% so easily, but you can damn well try. In order to try you need to show those visitors as much as you can in a small window of time and pixel space.

So you're gonna wonder why the hell am I reading this article here, on a technology blog? Well, because it's all about technology.

In my 10 years as a developer and user interface designer I've tried to put the most important features right in front of the users, so they won't have to look hard for them. No too many, but not too few. You have to find the balance. We, the developers, we have issues, problems. People think that we're weird, crazy, geeks. They think we know little about usability, which is false. We work with multiple platforms and encounter countless issues that most people are not aware of, until they encounter such issues. As a developer, I have to think about every potential user of an application that I develop, be it desktop, web or mobile. When developing desktop apps, things are simple. You design the app to look well on the smallest resolution and that's it. But when it comes to web, we have a whole different matter. Not only is a website restricted by the same issues that a desktop app has(resolution), but it's also restricted by the devices it can be seen from. A website can be accessed from mobile phones, from tablets, where screen estate is a premium.

My point is this: how easy is it for a visitor of your website to reach your desired call to action if it's positioned in the second screen of your website? There are three answers here:
1) For desktop browsers: easy enough(by scrolling) but confusing(why wouldn't a main action be in the first page?)
2) For tablets, hard. You first have to zoom in to read the text, and then scroll down to see the action(and we all hate scrolling down on mobile devices don't we?)
3) For mobile phones, hardest. Besides the zooming in for a decent read, you have to scroll endlessly down for the action.

So IMHO, the industry is not trending towards more and more scrolling, but towards an easier to access important information on a small screen. Just take a look at Apple's website. Everything they want to sell is on the top row. The second row of information consists in the latest devices they rolled out, still about sales. They don't even have a second screen to scroll to. Next example is Google's website. First row, is all you can get from Google, while the second row is the actual search. No fuss, no blazing graphics. All you need is simply before your eyes. Next, let's get a negative example, Yahoo. On their website you got links all over the place: left, right, top, bottom, we've even got tabs within tabs. Do I need to tell you that Apple and Google are making billions while Yahoo is drifting?

P.S. I wonder how many more comments are in the quoted article that never saw the light of day.

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Help needed. Support me to become the Nokia Lumia Amazing Ambassador

Hey friends and readers. Today I need your help. Nokia Romania is holding a contest where I could win a Nokia Lumia 800. If I would win this phone, I will also be able to cover Windows Phone on this blog.

In this final phase of the competition, there are only 4 contestants left. The voting closes on August 5th, so please vote me until then and if you can encourage your friends to do so too, I would be deeply grateful.

Follow this link and hit like in order to support me.

Thank you.

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Rant: How to turn paying customers into defectors

As any decent mobile apps user, I pay for apps I'm using. That's because I want to support developers. Being a developer myself, I know they put a lot of work into these products. But sometimes, just sometimes, I tend to forget all that, and here is why.

After you pay for an app or game or whatever, sometimes you run into trouble. If the developer behind an app quickly addresses your issues, you feel like you haven't paid whatever you paid for that app for nothing. In my opinion paying for an app doesn't just give you access to that app, it implies some amount of support. But when the support people stick it to you, that's when you defect. That's when you start using their apps without paying for them.



A while back, I was browsing Nokia Store just like I do everyday, to find new things I may like and download or buy them if they're paid. And so I stumbled upon some Gameloft games that were on sale. I thought "WOW I should get these games while they're 60 Euro cents". And so I did. I bought 4 games: HAWX, Dungeon Hunter HD 2, Spiderman Total Mayhem and Assassin's Creed. I was a happy gamer for about a month. And then, things got ugly. After meddling with my phone's software for reasons not worth mentioning here, and ended up needing to reinstall the OS on my N8.

After reinstalling Belle I did the next logical thing, download my apps again. When I tried to download my paid games again, surprise! Dungeon Hunter 2 was nowhere to be found. I thought to myself "there's something wrong with the store client", so I searched from the store website. Still nothing. I didn't know what to think, but I figured "I'll solve this later" and moved on to downloading Assassin's Creed. To my surprise, instead of the usual Download button you get for apps you paid for, I was greeted by... wait for it... the BUY button! Strike two! The others installed fine, and I thought that these two will also be resolved after an email to Gameloft's support team.

Well, after searching like a lunatic for half hour, I found there was no support email, so I did what everyone else would have done in my situation: I left a message for them in their Facebook wall, explaining my problem. I got a private message a few hours later asking for my email address in order to forward it to support. It's been two weeks now and I still haven't heard from them. I even poked the Gameloft Twitter account, but to no avail. And you know what the funny thing is? They have a full development unit in Romanian! Yes, my countrymen! Plus, their Facebook page is in Romanian. They are 250km away from me. If they would have sent me a written letter response it would have reached me faster.

So what do I do now? Well, I found myself the games I paid for available as downloads on the web and I'm happy to say I play them every day. So yes, dear friends, I paid Gameloft for two games that I had to download from a cracks site. Nice right?

The next company that are doing it wrong is Dropian. With their latest release, they thought "let's promote it on Twitter". And here is how they did it:



What can one understand from this? Well, I understood something along the lines of "you better pay for it or else!". And then, just to reassure me I got it right, they hit it again:



Not only that, but they prove once again their "smart" marketing skills.



Don't I look like a pirate now?

That being said, rant over. If you've ever been ripped off by software companies, leave a comment below.

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