Four tips for improving website personalisation. Today’s savvy web visitors are increasingly looking for that ‘little something special’ and are flocking to websites that treat them in unique and targeted ways.
To keep your content fresh, engaging and relevant to ensure a visitor returns time and time again, investment in an effective personalisation strategy is key. I previously blogged about the five principles to consider for online personalisation, which covered the basics of what you need to know before you get started. This post moves on to discuss the practical steps you should take before getting stuck into the execution phase. Develop personalisation personas Personas are detailed descriptions of a typical kind of website visitor. Think about different visitors that are likely to visit your site, for example, existing customers, prospects, partners, job-seekers or even the press, and consider what each visitor group will be looking for on your website.
Use what you know Clearly this is an organic process that needs to be tested. Web Design Elements: Examples And Best Practices. This overview features a hand-picked and organized selection of the most useful and popular Smashing Magazine’s articles featuring various building blocks of a website and published here over all the years.
Call to Action Buttons: Examples and Best Practices Call to action in web design — and in user experience (UX) in particular — is a term used for elements in a web page that solicit an action from the user. The most popular manifestation of call to action in web interfaces comes in the form of clickable buttons that when clicked, perform an action (e.g. "Buy this now! ") or lead to a web page with additional information (e.g.
How can we create effective call to action buttons that grab the user’s attention and entice them to click? Read more… Image Caption Design: Techniques and Trends Image captions are an often-overlooked element of Web design. But image captions are a great place to add a bit more style to your website or to give some unique insight into the subject of the image. Usability & User Experience. This overview features a hand-picked and organized selection of the most useful and popular Smashing Magazine’s articles related to Usability and User Experience and published here over all the years.
Persuasion Triggers in Web Design How do you make decisions? If you’re like most people, you’ll probably answer that you pride yourself on weighing the pros and cons of a situation carefully and then make a decision based on logic. You know that other people have weak personalities and are easily swayed by their emotions, but this rarely happens to you. You’ve just experienced the fundamental attribution error — the tendency to believe that other people’s behaviour is due to their personality (“Josh is late because he’s a disorganised person”) whereas our behaviour is due to external circumstances (“I’m late because the directions were useless”). Read more… Why User Experience Cannot Be Designed A lot of designers seem to be talking about user experience (UX) these days. Read more… Read more… Where Does Good User Experience Come From? We all know that when it comes to developing enterprise solutions, good user experience (UX) doesn't happen by accident.
In fact, it can be downright elusive. The interesting thing about UX is that the better it is, the less likely you are to notice it — when is the last time you thought, “Wow, that was such a satisfying digital experience!”? It is far more likely that you can recall a variety of frustrations — thousands of irrelevant results returned in a simple search or a site navigation that you’d have to be psychic to maneuver.
Why do so many enterprise solutions get UX wrong? And how can you make sure you get it right? It’s Harder than it Looks While there are some universal principles of good UX (design should be simple and intuitive; similar objects should be grouped together; designs and navigations should be consistent; etc.), you can do all of these big things right and still miss the mark on the overall UX. Why? You Don’t Have to Guess An Ounce of Prevention.