Next Thursday, November 11th is World Usability Day 2010, there is a great free event at Michigan State University, not too far from Pure Visibility, and there’s still time to register! This is a great opportunity to learn more about designing mobile applications. Read More
It’s been a few weeks since Google made changes to the user interface of its search results. In putting more advanced search options more firmly in front of the user, Google has broken with one of the factors that is widely credited for their success – keeping it simple. Read More
Pure Visibility is working with a company that sells engineering codes and standards to engineers, librarians, and technical professionals to conduct a usability study for their website. We’re interested in learning about how people shop for and purchase standards.
If you are an engineer, librarian, or technical professional that has purchased standards at your current job, we’d like to sit down with you for an hour to talk to you and look at our client’s website together. Our findings will remain confidential and will only be used for this project. We can meet with you during the business day or after work, either at our downtown Ann Arbor office or at any other location in the Ann Arbor/Detroit area that is more convenient for you.
If you are interested, please give us a phone number where we can reach you during the day (and let us know if there are any restrictions on when you’re available to talk). We’d like to get in touch with you for a 15 minute call to ask you a few questions and make sure that you match the profile we’re looking for for this study. Participation in this study will be on a paid basis.
Changes are coming to the Pure Visibility website! In the not too distant future, we will unleash a new site architecture followed by content changes and a visual redesign.
As this effort got underway, we knew it was important to employ the same skills that we bring to our clients – to eat our own cat food, you could say. We did user research and captured that information as personas and then used those personas as the basis for our information architecture work. We then took our early website prototype out to real users to gather some data about how it worked for them. Read More
UXmatters is a great resource for (unsurprisingly) UX-related articles, such as information architecture, usability, and user research. An article from February 22nd, “Review of Information Architecture Evaluation Tools: Chalkmark and Treejack,” provides a great overview of two user research tools from Optimal Workshop.
The first, Chalkmark, allows unmoderated testing of static mockups. You can put up a mocked up page, ask people where they would click to find information about something specific, and then Chalkmark tells you where users clicked.
The other tool that this article discusses is Treejack, which lets you test an organizational scheme, abstracted away from the actual interface. In Treejack, you build a tree that reflects how information on your site is organized into categories and sub-categories (or how you want to organize this information in the future). Again, you ask people to tell you where they think they would find a specific piece of information, but with this tool, they can click around in the tree and think about it before giving you their final answer.
The article on UXmatters goes into further detail about the analysis capabilities that both of these tools provide, and they sound pretty exciting.
Do you have a page on your website that you know could be better? Do you need help showing how subtle changes can have a big effect in conversion rates?
I came across a great site recently: ABtests.com (via The Interaction Designer’s Coffee Break). It consists of the results of A/B tests. It shows two different designs, side by side, points out which one had a higher conversion rate, and presents a theory about why one design did better than the other.
Testing designs is an important part of getting your online sales engine running. It takes advantage of the unique strengths that online marketing offers – the ability to collect lots of data and test ideas. There are free tools out there for doing it, such as Google Website Optimizer, but trying out a new idea can be as simple as rolling out a new page, using it for a while, and comparing the results to the previous design.
When you control the defaults in your product or website, you have the power to shape human behavior.
We touched on the matter of how you can influence users’ decisions on a form back during the presidential campaign, when we looked at the John McCain contribution form. If you were to make a form where the default contribution is $200, you imply that it is the amount that normal people donate. People will probably contribute less, but they’re bound to contribute more money than if you had set the default value to $10.
The recent story on Mashable, “Facebook Founder on Privacy: Public Is the New ‘Social Norm,’” reminded me of the power and responsibility that comes with being able to design choices for people. Mark Zuckerberg stated that the default settings on Facebook would be to share your data on the open web rather than restricting it to your friends. They changed the default with the expectation that most people would simply accept the default of sharing their data, and thereby increasing the value of Facebook.
Whether you agree with it or not, this is a reminder that design choices have consequences.
We’ve all been there: You go to a website, you like what you see, and when it comes time to get in touch with the company and tell them you’re interested or ask for help, all you see is an email address.
That website just left you hanging.
In his March 31st Alertbox newsletter, Jakob Nielsen wrote that “Facebook and the current generation of social networks are trying to replicate the walled garden strategy that failed ten years ago. It’ll fail again.” He points to an article he wrote 9 years ago, “Metcalfe’s Law In Reverse,” about the futility of trying to achieve dominance by cutting your network off from the rest of the Internet (for example, AOL’s Instant Messenger).
I’m just not sure Nielsen really “gets it” with regard to things like Facebook, for example. “Walled garden” is an oversimplistic characterization. If Facebook is a walled garden, then it is a poorly built wall. Content from Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, LinkedIn, and more can be integrated into Facebook. You can find friends in Facebook by having Facebook search through your Gmail, Hotmail, AIM, etc. contact lists for people that have accounts.
Interconnectedness is essential to this generation of web applications, and Facebook gets this. Their entire system is based on that assumption. In fact, Facebook’s explosive growth only started after they opened their system to plugins through the API late last year.
It might be better to think of Facebook as a rich hub with some native content, almost like a USB hub, into which other applications can be plugged if someone has the proper communication protocols (also known to geeks as an API). An open API is at its very core a measure of interconnectedness and community, because it is the technical glue that makes it possible.
By that measure Facebook is one of the most interconnected tools currently available on the web.
When writing copy for your website, good calls to action matter. These are the links (or even navigation items) that steer your users toward what you want them to do. It’s important, though, to not lose sight of what your website’s users may actually want to do.
Just because you want your website’s users to buy something or fill out a form, it doesn’t mean that your users are ready to. You must recognize that users go through a process of gathering information first, and if you try to rush them to the end of the process, you risk clashing with their mental models.
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