SkypeOut pricing and voice quality - Part 3

Tony Austin
Tuesday, 16 September 2008 09:07

Opinion and Analysis

Since I'm going to set out and offer Skype several recommendations for improving the design and content of their web site, I'd better lay some groundrules.

Every man and his dog, as the saying goes, will have an opinion about a particular web site, so how can we rationalize this process? Well, there are some industry notables whose writings and opinions are well worth considering.

Let me pick one such pundit, Jakob Nielsen, whose own site useit.com exemplifies his minimalist approach to web design. While this site is far too plain for some, you have to agree that its text-only pages certainly load very fast, that it's easy to navigate, and it's extremely easy to find the information you're seeking, all of which are prime site design characteristics espoused by Nielsen. His book Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity is one of the classics in this field.

Nielsen decries slow-loading sites that are riddled with pointless and resource-gobbling graphics or animations (such as Flash videos, as on Skype's home page), difficult or non-existent site navigation, and numerous other bad design features that nevertheless are popular with web designers. (His hard line on such matters causes some website builders to dislike his design philosophy with intensity.)

The other of Nielsen's various books that I'd recommend, for the purposes of this article, is Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed in which he and co-author Marie Tahir analyze and give ratings to the overall design, usability and content effectiveness of a range of home pages. Their guidelines can also be used, with variations, for the other pages of a web site.

Other software and web design gurus may place emphasis on different design aspects, but there's still a fair degree of consensus about what features make a good web site.

I'll use Nielsen's criteria for a quick critique of the Skype web site, insofar as getting to understand SkypeOut plans and pricing is concerned. I'll discuss mainly Australian examples, but on the whole my comments should apply for SkypeOut users in other countries.

One of my chief criticisms with the Skype site is that it makes statements here and there which apply to a specific country -- for example, the U.K. or the USA -- while entirely omitting the corresponding details for others, thereby being either irrelevant to the rest of us or liable to be misconstrued by us as applying to our own country.

In other words, in such cases Skype are not consistently careful in validating various and sometimes critical bits of the site content against a global audience. In other cases, they've left remnants of facts applying to an old service (such as Skype Pro) which don't apply to the replacement service (such as Unlimited Country).

Otherwise they have a tendency to simply fail to plainly define a service feature (such as whether or when a connection fee will be charged) in one central place, leaving you to hunt all over the main site or in the forums to see if you can find out what applies.

Be assured that I know from first-hand experience as a webmaster that managing the completeness and accuracy of site's content is a task that requires never-ending vigilance and close attention to detail. I reckon that Skype have done a less than stellar job in this regard, and their annoying failure to be consistent across the site has lowered its effectiveness and usability.

And the biggest impact is in the most crucial area, that of service plans and pricing: what the pricing options are, and what effect choosing one plan over another will have on your wallet. It all boils down to sloppiness or carelessness on the content management side of things, which is hard to excuse for a company like Skype with many millions of customers and large revenues.

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