«
»

Subtle UI Problems: Large Headers

This is particularly true of Pros using smugmug, but anyone doing customization can benefit from thinking about this a little bit more.

People come to your galleries to view your photos (and for Pros, to buy!). It’s great to have your brand/studio/company name prominently displayed, but let’s face it, they’re really there to ooh and aah over your photos (and buy them!).

It turns out that people are allergic to scrolling, particularly to see photos. They don’t want to click, scroll, click, scroll, click, scroll. Yet many people customizing their smugmug pages put enormously large headers on their photos which cause their viewers to scroll their pages. Many leave in disgust, not having seen (or bought!) most of them.

So, here’s smugmug’s internal guidelines for making sure your customers are happy and able to see your photos, not to mention buy them. :)

  • At 1024×768 screen resolution, using Internet Explorer 6 on a Windows PC with the browser maximized and default toolbars, there should be no scrolling vertically or horizontally in the Elegant style.
  • At 800×600 screen resolution, using Internet Explorer 6 on a Windows PC with the browser maximized and default toolbars, there should be no scrolling vertically or horizontally in the Elegant Small style.
  • Make your images lightweight (as in bytes). If they’re large, your page will load very slowly and no-one will stick around to see your photos. No multi-megabyte header images!

    • That’s the main reason smugmug’s logo is so small… it’s not because we’re not proud of our brand (we are!) but because we know people are there to view photos, not ogle our cute logo.

    Might want to give your own headers a little re-thinking and possibly re-tooling.

    This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 19th, 2005 at 12:14 pm and is filed under UI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

    2 Responses to “Subtle UI Problems: Large Headers”

    1. Mike Lane Says:
      July 22nd, 2005 at 8:01 am

      Have you guys updated the yourname.smugmug.com/keyword/ portion of the site yet? My guess is no, the elegant style is wider there than anywhere else I think, there are no rss/atom tags at the bottom, and…well that’s all I can think of right now.

      So what are the chances that we could force a gallery style to the keyword results? Maybe thumbnails instead of elegant?

    2. Freddy Says:
      January 29th, 2006 at 10:32 am

      Just to let you know that I think the website is great and I wish you all of the best for the future. http://cheapest-valium.vidanal.com

    Leave a Reply