I’ve spent the last 4 months working with the talented crew from 99designs.com on what would have to be my proudest professional achievement to date – the Ready-made Logo Design Store. I’m proud because I believe we’ve created a great user experience that delivers exactly what we set out to achieve – a simple, bare bones, focused, and easy-to-use offering. We’ve done this with a small team and in a short period of time. We’ve staged it well, closely collaborating with our design community and managing to collect over 4000 of their unique and stunning logo designs ready to sell to potential buyers.

Ready-made Logo Store Homepage

A lot of the user experience and key interactions are hidden to the general browsing public – they’re behind the designer administration screens (where they upload and manage their logos) and the purchasing and handover processes. Saying that I’d love to hear any thoughts you may have on what you see. I’m expecting the product will not be to some of my colleagues liking but I’m really keen for any feedback you may have.

I think the Ready-made Logo Design store will be a great compliment to the 99designs offering and a big success and I’m looking forward to building on what we’ve achieved to date.

I hate it when forms like this Oxfam donation form ask me to re-enter or confirm my email address:

Oxfam donation form - email address re-entry fields

I suspected I wasn’t alone so I tweeted to find out what others do when presented with this situation and I have to say I was overwhelmed with the number of responses I received. It seems most people (well I should say most of my online web savvy friends) hate it as well and that they usually copy and paste the email address from the first field into the second. Ctrl A, Ctrl C, Tab, Ctrl V is less keyboard presses than typing an email address and therefore tends to be the preferred approach.

To me the whole idea of re-entering your email address feels like a heavy handed, ill thought out trend that creates more work for the user, doesn’t solve the problem it attempts to, goes against the websites business goals and causes untold pain and wasted time for many *slight exaggeration there perhaps*.

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