Skip to main content

"Every Day" Applications

Lots of good insight in this short article: http://bokardo.com/archives/everyday-app/

It's interesting that across the world, the number of sites that we use on a daily basis is relatively small and consistent. I can attest to this, as I fit pretty much in the 7-8 range.

Quite often when designing a site for use on the public Internet, we obsess over all of the little details that take up the majority of the development cycle. This evidence suggests that we should do otherwise.

Think about the relationships we have with brick & mortar stores - we probably also have just a few that we frequent on a regular basis - grocery store, gas station, dry cleaners, bank, etc. All of these stores are designed with efficiency in mind. They want you - the customer - to get in, get what you need, and then get out as quickly as possible: grocery stores now have self checkouts; banks have drive-throughs and ATMs; gas stations let you pay at the pump, and so on.

Stores that we only visit on a monthly or less frequent basis have a different and more complex challenge - actually getting us to go there and then keeping us coming back. Their marketing challenge is far greater than that of the grocery store, as they know that they are not a commodity site, and we - the customer - have more of a choice. These types of stores include furniture stores, car dealers, specialty stores, and so on.

The experience with one of these stores typically includes some sort of interaction with their sales staff. They don't focus on efficiency as much, as they prefer a more guided sale, which often includes attempts at up-selling us to a more expensive product or option.

Thus, when we're building a site that is not classified as an "every day" site, - which may be more frequently than we had originally thought - we should take care to do the same. Focus on ease of use and simplicity. Add in as much guidance and make it easy to contact someone, should the user deem that necessary. We have to assume that the visitors of our site are not frequent visitors, and we only have a few seconds to entice them to become a customer. Thus, the entire experience should cater to this fact.

One final point - I totally agree with one of the comments regarding Linked In. I have also signed up, connected to most of the people that I know, and have the same "now what" feeling. Please let me know if I'm missing something!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Custom Export to CSV

It's been a while since I've updated my blog. I've been quite busy lately, and just have not had the time that I used to. We're expecting our 1st child in just a few short weeks now, so most of my free time has been spent learning Lamaze breathing, making the weekly run to Babies R Us, and relocating my office from the larger room upstairs to the smaller one downstairs - which I do happen to like MUCH more than I had anticipated. I have everything I need within a short walk - a bathroom, beer fridge, and 52" HD TV. I only need to go upstairs to eat and sleep now, but alas, this will all change soon... Recently, I was asked if you could change the way Export to CSV in ApEx works. The short answer is, of course, no. But it's not too difficult to "roll your own" CSV export procedure. Why would you want to do this? Well, the customer's requirement was to manipulate some data when the Export link was clicked, and then export it to CSV in a forma

Refreshing PL/SQL Regions in APEX

If you've been using APEX long enough, you've probably used a PL/SQL Region to render some sort of HTML that the APEX built-in components simply can't handle. Perhaps a complex chart or region that has a lot of custom content and/or layout. While best practices may be to use an APEX component, or if not, build a plugin, we all know that sometimes reality doesn't give us that kind of time or flexibility. While the PL/SQL Region is quite powerful, it still lacks a key feature: the ability to be refreshed by a Dynamic Action. This is true even in APEX 5. Fortunately, there's a simple workaround that only requires a small change to your code: change your procedure to a function and call it from a Classic Report region. In changing your procedure to a function, you'll likely only need to make one type of change: converting and htp.prn calls to instead populate and return a variable at the end of the function. Most, if not all of the rest of the code can rem

Logging APEX Report Downloads

A customer recently asked how APEX could track who clicked “download” from an Interactive Grid.  After some quick searching of the logs, I realized that APEX simply does not record this type of activity, aside from a simple page view type of “AJAX” entry.  This was not specific enough, and of course, led to the next question - can we prevent users from downloading data from a grid entirely? I knew that any Javascript-based solution would fall short of their security requirements, since it is trivial to reconstruct the URL pattern required to initiate a download, even if the Javascript had removed the option from the menu.  Thus, I had to consider a PL/SQL-based approach - one that could not be bypassed by a malicious end user. To solve this problem, I turned to APEX’s Initialization PL/SQL Code parameter.  Any PL/SQL code entered in this region will be executed before any other APEX-related process.  Thus, it is literally the first place that a developer can interact with an APEX p