One of the things I liked about my favourite Italian restaurant in Sydney is the fact that they put there pizza plates on the wall. So if you ask the waiters how large the small pizza is they just turn around and point to the plates hanging on the wall. Situations like the one I just described always remind me that in a lot of cases information can be represented much more effectively by using images instead of text. Since strong images convey information in a universal language which everybody understands immediately.

One of the biggest usability problems on the internet is still the inconsistency in which links are displayed. Back in the good old days my Netscape browser displayed every link on nearly every website in the same way because not many people knew how to change their looks. Nowadays this is not the case anymore. Probably one of the first things a web designer does when building a new site is overwriting the default link design. However this leads to a lot of pain especially for people who did not grow up with the internet and do not have that sixth sense when it comes to knowing what word, box or picture is a link and which is not. Lets have a look at Twitter as a concrete example. As you can see Twitters main site uses a wide range of designs for their links: underlined text, text in a different color, boxes, pictures,... I doubt that you can tell me the number of links on the page after one quick look. Now lets compare this with the most visited site on the internet the Google Search homepage. As you can see the site uses only one design for every link: blue underlined text. Obviously this makes it very easy to spot links.

It will be interesting to see how this topic will evolve further. I strongly believe that it is important for every website to have a consistent way to design links.

By the way this post was inspired by my own attempt to improve the links on this site. As you can see every link, except to top menu, is underlined, now. Hopefully this will have a positive effect on the usability of the site.

I am really passionate about presentations and presentation design. Why? Simple, I hate wasting people's time! Imagine you are doing a one hour presentation in front of 24. If your presentation is boring then you just wasted one day of a persons lifetime!

So how can you make sure that you do not bore people to death with your presentations? Well, there are a couple of ways. First of all make sure to check out presentation zen. Garr Reynolds is the brain behind the site and it has lots of great tips on how to become better at presenting something. Perhaps the best advise I got from Garr was to look at public advertisements as an inspiration for crafting a message.

Everybody knows that people do not look at boring things. However what could be more boring then your standard slide featuring a list of bullet points on a white background. Even the interestingness of your flashy company logo will not save you if you serve one boring slide after another.

So everyday while waiting for your bus or train, look out for advertisements which make you look. Then think about why you like them and how they caught your attention. Was it the typeface, an interesting image or the composition?

You might say "Wait a second but I am not selling any goods with my presentations so why should I dress them up like an advertisement", well, in a way you are always selling something. It might be an idea, inspiration or you want to make people think about a certain topic.

So have a look around and see if you can find some inspirations. They might help you to make your slides a little bit better.

Diana Scharf Hunt

By accident I stumbled upon these rather hilarious posters which can be found in the Tokyo metro. Apparently each month they come up with a new one. Click here to see all of them.