Don’t Forget your Audience
I recently started a project for a jewelry artist. Basically a portfolio site with events, a bio, and a thumbnail gallery.
I knew the majority of her visitors wouldn't be very tech savvy, but I may have still over estimated their abilities. The site has a page with a thumbnail gallery of her work, you click a thumbnail and through jquery the photo enlarges to a full view. Unfortunantly the client came to me and said many of her friends visited the site and couldn't figure out why the pictures of her art were so small and or cutoff. What was happening was they didn't know to click on a thumbnail to make it bigger.
I figured most people would see a grouping of small photos in the context of a gallery page and realize they are thumbnails and you can click them to make them big. I mean everyone knows what a thumbnail is on the web and what to do when you see one, right?
Wrong. We can't assume people have even close to same level of comfort on the web as we do. This was a bit of a wake up call to keep in mind those who have zero level of web understanding.
I fixed this simply by adding a line of text that says Click image to enlarge photo. It may seem silly to have to state that, but some people may not know. Designing for the web, always keep the audience in mind and assume they don't know a thing about the web.
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