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Matthew’s www.nicholaspatten.com Review

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Matthew Kammerer

Published

November 28th, 2008

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When I first visit http://www.nicholaspatten.com/ I reach a page that seems to be a video player. A video is playing, but what is it? My first impression of the site makes right click, and sure enough… it’s flash! I am sure UX Booth will feature a post on the usability of flash sites later.

First Impressions

The site does not answer many questions on first view. What is this site? What is its purpose? I see a few words at the bottom, “editor – director of photography – web designer”. I guess this is who Nicholas is? I would REALLY appreciate the modern trend of a one to two sentence mission statement at the top of the website. Even it if was only “I’m Nicholas, an editor, director of photography, and web designer. Welcome to my portfolio”. This would answer a lot of my questions and help me understand why all these videos are here.

Key Questions

My next question is how do I contact Nicolas? I see a white email address at the bottom, it must be a link! Oh, no… when I click it nothing happens. This is just white text in the flash site? Frustrating! Now I am getting annoyed, how am I going to contact Nicholas if I want his work? I will just highlight it maybe, copy it into an email, and contact him. Oh, crap. I forgot, this is a flash site. Do I REALLY want to take the time an effort to retype that?

So now that I have looked around this page a bit the same video is playing. Let’s click around a bit. I do like the structure of the playlist feature. I am still a bit confused as to how all of these videos fit together though. I will also say that the play button on hover of a video thumbnail is a great feature as well. When exploring videos while watching a video I find more frustration! I was in the middle of rocking out to this rap music video and click on reels and it closes the music video and opens a video from the reel. Why can’t I look for other videos while watching a video?

Conclusion

In conclusion, I am leaving this site wondering if Nicholas is a video producer or what? Is he trying to sell his work to others or just show off? The video work featured here is high quality; maybe you just need help with your web presence. If I were more of a video man myself maybe I’d email him and drop him a line, but seeing as that is more effort than I’d like to put forth I think I’ll just go on to the next site.