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Alertbox #200
Congratulations with Alertbox #200, Jakob Nielsen. This is an achievement worth celebrating. Keep on fighting.
September 29, 2003
Micropayment systems to watch
Three notable Scandinavian micropayment systems:
- CoinClick looks like a sure winner in Denmark (and Scandinavia?) since the system is fairly easy to use compared to alternative solutions and is backed up by dominating financial institutions such as PBS, Danske Bank, and Nordea.
- Payex accept Euro, Dollars, British Pounds, and all Scandinavian currencies which is a necessity to do business in the relevant countries. While most other micropayment vendors are web-centric, Payex focus more on mobile payment. Their user interface still needs to be translated into Danish and Swedish.
- Valus looks like a looser. It's a prestigious project supported by major media companies and created by Accenture, Den Norske Bank, and Netaxept. However, usability is horrible since users (and vendors) are forced to use a payment process filled with pop-up windows and text written with small fonts. I tried Valus using Windows XP and the "Pay now"-button wasn't visible in a pop-up window without scroll bars. That sucks.
October 9, 2002
Non-intrusive popups in radio browsers
It's considered a fatal usability error when online radio listeners close their radio browser by accident because it stops their musical experience ("Hey, the music stopped. What happened?"). Virgin Radio solved the problem by adding a JavaScript that warns the user upon closing the browser window or navigating away from the page:
"Are you sure you want to navigate away from this page? You'll stop listening to Virgin Radio if you do. Press OK to continue or Cancel to stay on the current page." See screen capture of radio browser window with pop-up
Listening to online radio, music, and other audio differs from all other online experiences since you don't need to look at the browser window. The browser can work in the background without the user noticing it. However, this also means that the user may not notice that he is closing a browser which he is actually using.
Future browsers could better support online listening by making it possible to move the icon for a particular browser window from the default taskbar to the system tray (lower-right corner on your Windows desktop). This would make it harder to shut down an active radio browser by accident.
More on pop-ups:
July 15, 2002
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