90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Even if you don’t do a lot of UK rail travel, take a look at this walkthough I’ve put together for thetrainline.com. It’s amazing how hard they’ve managed to make finding cheap tickets. You have to ignore the search results, click on a textual link, and then select your fare from a page containing - wait for it - up to 150 radio buttons in a huge table - with the tickets differentiated by weird codes like 1ST ADVANCE2 and STD ADVANCE4…

The mind boggles!

Note: the walkthrough may load slowly. It’s best watched in full-screen mode. Thanks to Peter Otto for showing me this tip.

This isn’t really hot news, but it was news to me when George Oates mentioned it in passing during her piece at Dconstruct 07.

In an age of curious-sounding Web-site names, “Flickr” came largely by accident. The domain owner of “flicker.com” wouldn’t sell, so Caterina suggested “Flickr,” which Butterfield says made the service stand out. “We always had to spell it out for people, which helped make it stick,” he notes.
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Unsurprisingly, correctly spelled domains get loads of hits from people who don’t know how to spell web 2.0 brand names, and assume that the correct spelling would be the right way to do it.

So if you mis-spell your brand name just for a bit of ‘web 2.0 distinctiveness’, are you really doing yourself any favours?

After all, just two weeks ago, Del.icio.us decided to make the switch to delicious.com. How very sensible.