Repent of your sins and be happy. Or how small usability flaws spoil the whole result.

Working with different people and seeing their interaction with computer and software, I mentally divided them into two groups. Some, faced with problems, begin to blame everyone but themselves. And when asking for help, they kind of ask to bring bad programmers and their programs to light: “Well, did I do everything right? Was that a mistake in the program? ”

Usually such people, at least, lag behind in their development. And in the average case - are in the active phase of degradation.

Capable people, on the contrary, are worried that they are fools, and we stuck to the wrong place somewhere, that something did not work out for them. And they politely ask for help in understanding themselves: “I can’t understand where I made a mistake, please help me understand what I did wrong.” Such people usually learn quickly and they have a lot to do.
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Unfortunately, in recent times, I realized that I acted as a person from the first group who blames others, and does not want to repent of his mistakes.

Having developed several applications (for which I spent quite a bit of time and effort) and put them in open access on my website (with attendance of about 1 thousand people per day), I also created a page with a request to support the development of projects with the details for translation. A banner led to it (the one at the beginning of the article). It was located in the right column of the main and all other pages.

And yes, I confess, when I transferred a little money, there were dirty thoughts in my head that my audience was extremely not grateful, and even various bad epithets arose ... (this despite the fact that I saw a lot of positive reviews and the popularity of these programs).

But, I missed one moment. The banner was either at the very bottom of the field of view, or slightly lower (I don’t remember exactly). And when in November I simply raised it, the contributions to the site jumped sharply to the top. You can see for yourself on the chart:



Yes, I was very wrong when I thought that there were very few grateful people in my audience. In fact, I did not give them the opportunity to get on my page "Support the site." Along with repentance came relief.

But my experiments did not end there. Somewhere about a month ago, a man visited my website, as he described himself: well-versed in usability. He said that the banner is not even clear that it should be clicked. And he suggested adding a button under it. For me it was extremely strange: “how so? that's why he and the banner to click it. " But I trusted the person and added a simple button under the banner. Again, the result is immediate and impressive, see how in the second week of March the attendance of the “Support the website” page began to grow.



In this case, my goal was to develop the project, and I wanted to get the maximum support. But, as we see, ignorance of trivial things has thrown me back in development. How many more such nuances that I do not know and which could be used for the benefit of the idea? And in fact, compared to the work already done, these are such trifles, but what they are!