Shopping for clothes online can be tricky business.  It’s not always easy to know if standard sizes will fit and there is no way to try on the article. There have been some online applications over the years that allow you to do some custom fitting but you still risk whether or not the overall cut of the clothing is right for you. As a result, the likelihood of a return is higher and the customer walks away with the feeling that they can’t rely on the e-tailor’s online experience.

I recently came across an online clothier that has managed to offer tailor made shirts for their customers. Shirts My Way is a website that allows the customer to custom design every part of their shirt. You can mix and match from a catalogue of fabrics to get exactly what you want. In addition, you can choose the buttons, the style and enter your own measurements for the perfect fit. They do a great job of tutoring the customer through the process with online videos and step by step fitting.  Considering the complexity of designing your own tailor-made shirt, they make the experience quite painless. In playing around with the custom fitting application, it really only took about ten minutes of my time.

Best of all, it’s a smooth, non-flash experience that gives you the option to download your work in progress if you need a second opinion from a friend.  Overall, I think this is a clean user experience that will draw repeat business.

Check it out for yourself: http://www.shirtsmyway.com

Users are being given more and more control over how they consume content on a website.  Apple’s latest version of the Safari browser, Safari 5, is a great of example of how we’re evolving in this direction. The new reader feature built into Safari, allows the user to consume content in an easy to read format that subdues all the advertising on a website along with all other extraneous elements.  In an attempt to make the web a more readable experience, the Safari reader presents content to the user in a very elegant and simple format. This is clearly part Apple’s well planned strategy with a view to giving users yet another reason to buy an ipad and let go of print products.  If you never download a single app for your ipad, although I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t, you will still get a clean pleasurable experience reading your favourite content on the Safari browser that comes native with the device.

Of course, it goes further than the ipad. Any device that can run windows will also have access to this version of Safari and the new reader feature. It makes me want to read more online and it’s as easy as clicking one button. It just works – no configuration required.

Being a user experience professional in the digital publishing industry, the first alarm that goes off is, “what happens to our ad impressions?” The initial web page still has to load before the reader button is available so the impression should still register. Although animated ads that string through a number of animations or elaborate take-overs may suffer from this new feature. There is some relief for advertisers however; the reader feature is not available on index pages and other lead pages. In the case of an index page, the reader button is replaced by an RSS button. Only once you have selected an article, will you see the reader button.  Perhaps reader will strike a nice balance between the commercial experience and better web design.  Overall, I think its step in the right direction. This new feature underscores the need for UX designers to employ a simple, clean design approach. If we don’t do this, browser developers might do it for us.

Try it out – Download the new Safari Browser

People are quitting Facebook.  Though it seems the cyber-crack of our Internet age is proving difficult for millions to let go of. If you’re embracing the concept of quitting facebook and giving up your daily check-ins on your newsfeed, I have a question for you: Why stop there? I ran a little experiment about a year ago on Twitter. A co-worker of mine with a sharp mouth had a bad habit of tweeting before thinking. In fact, one of her opinionated tweets brought some legal problems to the agency I was working for at the time. She didn’t change her ways however, and continued to tweet whatever came to mind. She posted a tweet one day that was private corporate information and not suitable for public consumption on Twitter. She was told to delete it and did so promptly. The tweet was only on her Twitter page for a few hours. I had previously subscribed to her Twitter feed via RSS and was able to read the stream on Google Reader without having to go to Twitter. Knowing the post had been deleted, out of curiosity, I scrolled through her previous tweets to discover that even the tweets she had deleted from her Twitter page were still available on the RSS feed.

There’s a lesson in this story. Your posts, your info, your pictures and your videos are out there and they’re staying out there. You can delete all you want. You can migrate your whole web life to another web app with a better privacy policy. Just remember, whoever wants it already has it and in some cases, it never really goes away. It reminds me of that line from the original Fast and the Furious movie when Vin Diesel’s character – Dom says, “…I had Jesse run a little background check on you, Mr. Brian Earl Spilner. He can find anything on the web, anything about anyone. So, why bullshit?” Truer words were never spoken Vin.

Don’t post anything that you don’t want anyone out there to know. Think twice about posting those bikini pictures from Cancun and please don’t drink and post.  By all means, if you want to join the group that has made a commitment to quit Facebook by May 31^st, you should definitely do that. The privacy debate that has circled around Facebook in last few months really just underscores the “what” more than the “where”.