Discover the secrets of a great landing page How do you persuade someone to visit your web page? And how do you persuade them to purchase your product or sign up for your newsletter? Landing page optimization is the answer. What's the difference between a landing page and a home page? A home page provides information about your site. The landing page is more specific. In the words of "America's Greatest Marketer" Seth Godin (according to American Way Magazine) a landing page is there to initiate only one of five actions: Get a visitor to click (to go to another page, on your site or someone else's).Get a visitor to buy.Get a visitor to give permission for you to follow up (by email, phone, etc.). What benefits will you gain from an optimized landing page? 1) Like a needle, you'll get found more easily in the haystack that is the internet. 2) More people will convert when they arrive at your website (ie, take the course of action that you intended them to take). 4) You'll learn about your customers' likes and dislikes. Your headline
Login Screen – behind the scenes Here at GoSquared, we love to obsess over the little details that make the real difference in your experience of the site and Dashboard. The new login screen design and experience was no exception. We wanted the login screen to feel personal and for our customers to feel comfortable and familar with signing in. Getting personal. We decided to use Gravatar to show an image relating to the users email – which updates every time the email changes. Quick fades between the GoSquared logo and the Gravatar, depending on whether a Gravatar is found or not, make the transition natural. BREAKING! When have you ever gone to “Forgot your password” without entering an email first, or having guessed a password? 25+% of customers use Gmail. Mistyping your email address is easy, and infuriating. And then there’s the final touch, as soon as you submit the form, the box shrinks away into the background, leaving a loading spinner. Check it out for real now!
How To Design Mental Models That Create a Superior User Experience “Much of this article is adapted or excerpted from the book Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with User Behavior by Indi Young (Rosenfeld Media, 2008).” Designing something right requires that you completely understand what a person wants to get done. You need to understand how a person uses something if you’re going to get the design right for them. You also need to know the person’s goals and the procedures she/he follows to accomplish those goals. Mental models give you a deep understanding of people’s motivations and thought processes along with the emotional and philosophical landscape in which they are operating. Let’s begin with a simple mental model that might be used by a company like Procter and Gamble to determine the needs of its market on a typical work or school day. Click to enlarge Mental model of a typical morning for people who commute to work or school. They can also act as a road map, ensuring continuity of vision and opportunity. Affinity Diagram Grocery Store
The Code Side Of Color Advertisement The trouble with a color’s name is that it never really is perceived as the exact same color to two different individuals — especially if they have a stake in a website’s emotional impact. Name a color, and you’re most likely to give a misleading impression. Even something like “blue” is uncertain. To be more precise, it could be “sky blue”, “ocean blue”, “jeans blue” or even “arc welder blue”. Descriptions vary with personal taste and in context with other colors. Code Demands Precision When computers name a color, they use a so-called hexadecimal code that most humans gloss over: 24-bit colors. Breaking Hexadecimals Into Manageable Bytes Pixels on back-lit screens are dark until lit by combinations of red, green, and blue. The first character # declares that this “is a hex number.” The higher the numbers are, the brighter each primary color is. Each pair can only hold two characters, but #999999 is only medium gray. #000000 is black, the starting point. Shortcuts In Hex (il)
No Such Thing As Perfect Q: Is it possible for a designer to look at their designs from a brand new user’s perspective? Over the years, have you learned how to do this even a little bit better than when you began? Sometimes I feel like I can, and that with more practice I’ll be even better, but people keep saying that I should suck it up and have other people test my designs for me. I learn something new every time, but I wonder if I’ll ever reach a point where user testing reveals what I made is “perfect” and doesn’t need to be fixed. A: First off, let’s deal with this idea of “perfect”. And no, it’s not possible for a designer to look at their work from a brand new user’s perspective. You’re also conflating two very important concepts here. Before you design anything, you need to research the users you’re designing for. Once you’ve done the research, and have a design solution that you think works to solve the problem, then you test it. You will only ever know what you know. You will get better with practice.
Download | FF3300 – Blog - Part 2 You can, if you want, see Mark Zuckerberg’s social network on Facebook . Here is his profile . But while those might be the folks that Zuck hangs out with on weekends, what’s potentially more important is are his work connections, the web of people who serve on boards and invest in the five major social web startups: Twitter , Zynga , Facebook, LinkedIn , and Groupon . These companies are creating so much stock value, whether real or imagined, and are becoming the major drivers in our economy (the city of San Francisco just gave Twitter an enormous tax break so the company won’t move its headquarters). [Click to download a PDF] Facebook is the belle of the ball in the tech world right now, and you can see that from its central position in the chart, with 17 notable investments from everyone from banks (like Goldman Sachs), important VC funds (like Greylock Partners), and individuals (like Sean Parker, i.e. And then there are board seats. Related Posts: Is Twitter Showing We’re Depressed?
12W MAT 259 Visualizing Information Data visualization consists of the visual representation of abstract data. In this course Students explore conceptual, cultural and other issues specific to data visualization. Through presentations, Texts, and discussions, the class introduces concepts and methods of a) data mining, b) data analysis and aggregation, and c) information design and visualization. This data is representative of titles of books, DVDs, CDs and other media checked out by the general public since 2005 and has been collected with the intent to study changes in the circulation as libraries are transforming themselves due to the increasing influence of the Internet as a as information source.
twitter data visualization | m e d u l . l a / b l o g 3D data visualization for the last twitter messages containing a certain term or group of terms. the visualization was made in processing, using a ‘compact’ version of the twitter4j library and the twitter API. this was proposed as an exercise for the workshop datajockey, that took place in the Museum of Image and Sound of São Paulo, Brazil, from may 17th to 31st, 2011. it searches for a term in the last tweets stored in twitter database, and shows those tweets in a 3D space, the position and the color are given according to the time of the post. if two or more posts are close in time, a line that connects them in the space, forming structures. the size of the cubes are given by the minute of the post. Users love simple and familiar designs – Why websites need to make a great first impression Posted by Dave Thau, Senior Developer Advocate Google's GeoEDU Outreach program is excited to announce the opening of the second round of our Geo Education Awards, aimed at supporting qualifying educational institutions who are creating content and curricula for their mapping, remote sensing, or GIS initiatives. If you are an educator in these areas, we encourage you to apply for an award. To celebrate the first round of awardees, and give a sense of the kind of work we have supported in the past, here are brief descriptions of some of our previous awards. Nicholas Clinton, Tsinghua University Development of online remote sensing course content using Google Earth Engine Nick is building 10 labs for an introductory remote sensing class. Topics include studying electromagnetic radiation, image processing, time series analysis, and change detection. Declan G.
1.3.15 demo - jQuery Window 1 I am plumbed with a Bezier connector to Window 2 and a label, with Blank endpoints. Window 2 I am plumbed with a Bezier connector to Window 1, and a Bezier connector with Rectangle endpoints to Window 3 Window 3 I am plumbed with a Bezier connector and Rectangle endpoints to Window 2, and a Bezier connector with Dot endpoints and a label to Window 4. Window 4 I am plumbed with a Bezier connector with Dot endpoints to Window 3, and with a Straight connector with Image endpoints to Window 5. Window 5 I am plumbed with a Flowchart connector to Window 6, between our two centerpoints, which are drawn below, and larger than, the window element; I am also plumbed to Window 4. Window 6 I am plumbed with a Flowchart connector to Window 5, between our two centerpoints, which are drawn below, and larger than, the window element. Window 7 I am plumbed with State Machine connectors to Window 3. Connection One
Idan Gazit · UI/UX and Subjectivity Because design is often confused with art, designers must contend with the (mistaken) opinion that design is purely subjective. UI/UX is purely a matter of taste in much the same way that cooking is just a matter of taste. There are a many cooks who can prepare delicious food. They have an instinct for the art, and often these instincts are rooted in very different approaches. The difference between these people and professionals is that the professionals can articulate the why of their choices. Sadly, UI/UX is a field full of guesswork hams trying to pass for the real thing. Cognition, perception, psychology, physiology. So if you meet a fellow who claims that design is subjective, tell them that they’re right, if they choose to work with the little-league practitioners. If they’re developers, simply tell them that people who can’t explain their design decisions are like developers who don’t write documentation and tests. Discuss this on Hacker News.
Why Your Qualified Leads Refuse to Sign Up: The UX of Plans and Pricing Every SaaS application has a funnel. Landing page, maybe a demo or pricing page, and then sign up. Qualified leads will stop by your “Plans and Pricing” page to make an informed decision. If you owned a car dealership, would you fill your showroom with stray dogs and blasting loud music? Well, too many startup founders, product managers, and user experience designers are letting the dogs and loud music run wild. Your landing page and “Plans and Pricing” are your showroom. Talk with your prospect. Plenty of SaaS applications have either “Plans” or “Pricing” links throughout their site navigation. Based on reviewing a range of SaaS providers, following a certain set of common best practices around language often leads to positive customer affinity and more likely action. Let’s look at some actual SaaS providers to see these user experience practices at work. Box Take Box for example. The Box main navigation bar: notice what to bold for emphasis and consistency Key Takeaways: Shopify Jobvite
Get Your FAQs Straight: Convert Your Curious Customers Your FAQ page represents one of the most valuable moments in a conversion funnel. Nowhere else does a visitor so deliberately indicate that they want to know the details of your product or service. Are you guilty of neglecting this important page? Well if you are guilty of neglecting this aspect, then here is the short answer: You can improve your FAQ pages by… Streamlining navigation through questionsPrioritizing clarity over precision in languageConnecting the answers in FAQs to other steps in the sales funnel so that no visitor goes uncaptured But as we all know, the devil is in the details. Make Navigation Through Your Questions and Answers Frictionless. Most FAQ pages fail simply because they are hard to use. Batch questions together by category to increase efficiency and answer user questions before users even realize they need to ask. When it comes to the UX for FAQs, users’ sole goal is to get the answer to their questions. Your answers will only raise more questions.
Don’t Use Automatic Image Sliders or Carousels, Ignore the Fad 553inShareinShare I’m sure you’ve come across dozens, if not hundreds of image sliders or carousels (also called ‘rotating offers’). You might even like them. So if they’re not effective, why do people use them? Some people think they’re cool. What the tests say I’m not alone. We have tested rotating offers many times and have found it to be a poor way of presenting home page content. Chris Goward, Wider Funnel Rotating banners are absolutely evil and should be removed immediately. Tim Ash, Site Tuners Jakob Nielsen (yes, the usability guru) confirms this in tests. Notre Dame university tested it too. Product design guru Luke Wroblweski summed it up like this: . There’s a discussion about automatic sliders on StackExchange UX. Here are some of the things different people who tested them said: Almost all of the testing I’ve managed has proven content delivered via carousels to be missed by users. Adam Fellows Here’s another one: Lee Duddell And the last one: Craig Kistler That’s good, right? Adobe: Gap: