Better First Impressions Through Design. Much of UX for the Web focuses on the experiences users have while they’re interacting with a website or web application.
But that focus neglects a key part of the user experience: the first impression visitors have when they initially discover a product or company. Whether it’s through a Facebook ad, banner ad, or landing page, these first impressions either help bring in new customers or they can result in lost revenue and wasted advertising dollars. Unfortunately, the design of banners and landing pages for customer acquisition is typically neglected, with much of the time and effort instead going toward the optimization of the ad distribution, not the creative.
This practice hurts conversions. The Most Important Design Real Estate on Your Site. This is a guest post from Anthony Licari – a sponge that’s regurgitating information and data in a functional manner on his amazing blog.
Your site is full of real estate and almost all of it is trying to grab the visitors attention as quickly as possible. It could be argued that all real estate on your site is important, if you feel like being a pedantic whiny face. There are some areas, one in particular, that deserves extra love. Over there in the right hand sidebar near the top. That’s one of the main focal points for directing traffic around your site. . … Why? I realize you might have paid for a big fancy logo and installed some nice jQuery menu to direct visitors but this little piece of real estate is as valuable. “Cool, I know the definition of asymmetry, so what?” I used the same overlay for both images and yes both are landing on white space or inbetween elements.
Coping with Over Four Hundred Devices: How Netflix Uses HTML5 to Deliver Amazing User Interfaces. Note: Every so often, we’ll be publishing a “feature”, an in-depth posting on a topic we care about that involves much more effort than we’re able to invest on a regular basis. Time will tell how often we produce these; probably will be monthly or bi-monthly. Please let us know what you think of this one and what other areas you’d like to see us explore in the future.
Thanks! Today’s fragmented browser and device landscape make yesterday’s cross-browser incompatibilities look like a walk in the park. It’s one thing to adapt a site that was originally tailored for Firefox to look decent on IE6, but creating a high-quality software experience for today’s array of mobile browsers, desktop browsers, and native platforms is an even bigger challenge. But for a company like Netflix, dealing with this issue is the least of their worries. Surely Netflix must have partnered with some kind of software consulting shop or platform vendor to accomplish this, right? The PlayStation 3 “Really?” Social Design Strategy. Great products and services depend on their users having great experiences.
But it’s not about what users do or how they do it, but rather why. Why they do what they do, why they keep coming back, and why they tell their friends. And social design aims to explain the why behind great experiences. I’ll tell you a quick story. Strand Book Store in NYC is apparently very famous, but I had never heard of it (and I’m from the New York area, too) until earlier this year when I was walking around with a friend and she pointed it out to me. That story in and of itself is not a big deal. In these cases and when we are faced with more subjective questions such as, “Where’s a good Italian restaurant?”
Communities are very useful. And though we have all kinds of relationships in our lives—with coworkers, neighbors, or brands, and long lasting or short lived, formal or intimate—it’s with our strongest ties that our trust lies. Trust is built through this conversation. Building Conversation Listening. How Users Read on the Web. User Centred Design - Infographic Poster by Pascal Raabe. What’s this all about?
The central premise of user centred design is that the best designed products and services result from understanding the needs of the people who will use them. Lean Strategy for UX Design. Last Fall, we were working on a product for a client whose industry was undergoing substantial disruption.
The project involved a robust upfront discovery piece running the full gamut of customer insights, competitive analysis, and even business model exploration. We undertook lots of primary and secondary research, thoroughly analyzed the data, and generated a nicely synthesized plan. When we presented our carefully crafted strategy to the client, they were happy and agreed to have us go ahead with the design phase. Then circumstances caused the brief to change.
Massively. Huddling together as a team, we decided to try something that seemed bold at the time. This time around, there was no PowerPoint deck. In retrospect, what seemed at the time to be an almost reckless attempt to salvage a project in distress turned out to be the right course of action.