The objectives and usefulness of personas are disputed topics in professional HCI contexts. I’d like to reopen the debate, by suggesting that personas are based on at least one flawed assumption.
First, though, a quick definition of persona. Personas are narratives that describe hypothetical users of a website, typically through details about their background, their values, [...]
Category Archives: Design
Personas in HCI: Shocking Truths Revealed
June 23, 2009 – 3:59 pm
Pure Visibility Test Drives New Visualization by HCI Designers
May 8, 2009 – 9:24 am
Pure Visibility recently supplied a visualization challenge to several students in Professor Mick McQuaid’s Information Visualization 649 course at the University of Michigan School of Information. And the results, a visualization system design for SEO Word Market Analysis by HCI Designers Jasper Liu and Li Li, were fantastic!
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“Motion Charts are Hard”
April 15, 2009 – 11:33 am
Two months ago, Google Analytics Motion Charts were hot. Now, they’re not, at least if we trust the amount of traffic coming to this blog looking for information on the charts and the amount of new content being produced around this feature. Is this a natural consequence of time since the feature was released, or [...]
Great book on Landing Page Testing
November 24, 2008 – 1:20 pm
Have you ever wanted to be systematic about testing different versions of a popular page on your site, but felt overwhelmed by questions of how long a test should last, which traffic channels should be sent to the pages being tested, and how certain your results are? Landing Page Optimization by Tim Ash is [...]
Progressive Enhancement: It All Starts With Content
October 14, 2008 – 1:23 pm
Separate your content from its presentation. It is a best practice to keep the code on your website that controls of the appearance of your site separate from the actual content. It’s good for accessibility and it’s good for flexibility, in case you want to go back and change stuff on your site later. I [...]
Color in Web Design
October 6, 2008 – 12:44 pm
Color perception is a tricky business – the way a color makes a person feel, the colors we choose to wear and identify with, is about as subjective a topic as you can yet. But studies in perceptual psychology have also shown certain colors to have certain effects across subjects, albeit with sometimes contradictory results. [...]
Use Causation to Convert Leads
September 23, 2008 – 1:07 pm
Have time to read a blog post? What if I told you in just a few short minutes you could walk away with increased knowledge of persuasive design techniques?
B.J. Fogg, a well-known researcher in the land of web design and info architecture, who’s been influential in discussions of web credibility, is also the [...]
How can your landing page convert visitors that don’t care?
August 27, 2008 – 1:46 pm
Seth Godin posted a couple of thought-provoking blog posts recently about online ads: Ads are the new online tip jar and a follow-up, Beating the status quo.
What Godin proposes is, when you read a blog, “if you like what you’re reading, click an ad to say thanks.” If everybody engaged in this behavior, it would [...]
Is Your Website Too Hip For Search Engines?
June 11, 2008 – 3:39 pm
If you want search engines crawlers to find your content, design your site so your text is text, not images. By hiding subject matter from search engines, you’re creating obstacles to good website rankings. It confuses me that anyone would decide to implement their site in a way that gets in the way [...]
Cool Colors Boost Website Attractiveness
June 9, 2008 – 4:58 pm
Color Bars uploaded to Flickr by jigpu
The colors you choose for your website affect how much your visitors like your website. You probably could have guessed that, though. It turns out that cooler primary colors make websites appear more orderly to users, which in turn can lead to users thinking that your site is more [...]
