Killer User Onboarding Starts With A Story Want more people to adopt your product? Make sure you know what progress looks like in your user’s life, not just on their screen. Having a stellar user adoption rate is a beautiful thing. The secret to getting there? Ensuring your new users get that experience is a responsibility put on onboarding, but onboarding itself is rarely designed to deliver it. This is a shame, because in order for an onboarding experience to answer its higher calling, it has to go beyond moving people through a product tour. Setting the Stage for Successful Onboarding When you boil it down, onboarding is really all about changing people’s behavior. Onboarding experiences, when working well, are less like instruction manuals for weight benches and more like personal trainers: they don’t stop at merely showing you how the equipment is used, they make sure you get all the way to attaining your fitness goals. Why are people “hiring” your product? Who should be interviewed, and when? Why is the timing important?
Big List of Usability Testing Resources :: By Amberly Dressler, Managing Editor :: Website testing has recently come in the spotlight when Facebook was criticized for experimenting with its news feeds. Some prominent website owners came to Facebook's defense, most notably one of dating website OkCupid's founders who, in summary, said that most website owners don’t know what they are doing, and they experiment on human beings to find the answers. “But guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site,” wrote OkCupid Co-Founder Christian Rudder. “That’s how websites work.” Rudder is only partly right – website owners do not do ENOUGH testing. By the same token, the average site conversion rates are below 1 percent for 35 percent of the companies surveyed. Tools Optimizely Optimizely offers A/B testing software “you’ll actually use.” Companies using Optimizely include: Starbucks, FOX, 99designs, Salesforce, MTV, ABC, TRUSTe and more. UserTesting Applause
User Experience Is More Than Design—It’s Strategy By Christopher Grant Ward Published: August 5, 2013 “Most technology companies and digital agencies don’t consider UX design roles to be part of strategic decision making. UX designers usually get hired to execute strategy decisions that others have already made.” User experience concerns much more than the design of elegant, usable products. By UX design , I’m referring to a broad range of skills, including creating personas, wireframes, specifications, information architectures, interaction flows, high-resolution comps, and prototypes; conducting user research, doing usability studies, and organizing content. UX design is typically the kind of work for which UX professionals get hired. Don’t believe me? Table 1 —Common elements of User Experience and Product Management job listings In a nutshell, the pattern is something like this: Product Management defines ; User Experience refines . Why? This is not an issue of corporations’ putting roles into silos. More Than Design What’s Next?
What’s the difference between iOS and Android users? What does your choice of smartphone platform say about you? Do you crave the security and polished user experience Apple offers iPhone users, or do you dig the variety of devices you’ll find on the Android landscape, as well as the freedom to run software from whomever you choose? All these differences between the platforms end up attracting different kinds of users, and today we look at one survey that attempts to reveal some of the traits that are more likely to apply to iOS users than Android fans, and the other way around. According to this study by Battery Ventures, iPhone users seem to have more white collar jobs, travel by air, and enjoy wine. Android users, on the other hand, are more likely to be blue collar, rely on public transportation, and prefer beer. But for those differences, the groups still share some commonality. Notably, when this user data is filtered to only compare iOS and Android users of similar income levels, many of these differences start to go away.
UI Patterns For Mobile Apps: Search, Sort And Filter Advertisement As I was waiting for a table at a local restaurant the other day, I flipped through a couple of the free classified papers. I was shocked to realize how dependent I’ve grown on three simple features that just aren’t available in the analog world: search, sort and filter. AutoDirect and some of the other freebies are organized by category (like trucks, vans, SUVs) but others, like Greensheet, just list page after page of items for sale. I would actually have to read every single ad in the paper to find what I wanted. But after taking a look at Craigslist mobile, it became obvious we could all benefit from some best practices around mobile search, sort and filter UI design. Search Patterns Before you ever try to design a search interface for any platform, buy and read these two books: Search Patterns: Design for Discovery by Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender, and Designing Search: UX Strategies for eCommerce Success by Greg Nudelman. Explicit Search Auto-Complete Scoped Search
Ultimate guide to table UI patterns Check out this excellent article by Janko: Ultimate guide to table UI patterns. It is full of great examples and suggestions. After reading it, I just had to add three more scenarios: 1. Inline Editing Quicken Online allows simple editing with a pull down for more advanced editing. Mint.com does the same. The Ajax framework Ext JS and Ext for GWT offers a pre-built Grid row editor component. For heavy data entry, use a design like Harvest. Google Docs is an online spreadsheet application with inline editing. Implement tab navigation when you create a table with inline editing.Consider how to handle errors, such as highlighting rows or cells with errors in a way that is easy for a person to correct the issues. Swivel is an app that acts a lot like Excel and provides cell specific error messages. 2. I received an email last week asking me about super wide tables. Use a summary row to chunk the data if appropriate. Swivel example 3. Example from Zenoss Open Source Server and Network Monitoring
Mobile UI: 30 Well-Executed Search Bar Designs Search box has always been the best tour guide on the internet as well as on your own website or blog and so having a nice, well-executed search bar design is a big advantage because it will let your readers find it easily and avoid them going out of your website. Sometimes, people fail to get what they are looking for on a certain web page and the first thing that they probably look for is your search box. Whether you have a modern or retro user interface, it is very crucial that all web elements can be distinguished. Of course, there are lots of free UI kits on the internet which you can incorporate with your projects, however, it sometimes doesn’t meet the quality and suitability. Sure it is easy to make your search box popped up on your website by using some web design techniques; but how about on mobile version? To find out whether you’re doing it wrong or right, we have collected a set of well-executed search bar designs in mobile user interface. Mobile Search UI Search Options
Groupon Getaways UX: 2 easy ways to eliminate frustration Best Tools to Build Your App Prototype in a Day I have been writing about why you should start in mobile business, how to craft a beautiful and usable mobile app and a top hit – an inspiring story of Matt Loszak of JamCam. There are numerous of problems to solve or apps to improve and opportunities are endless. You might feel like getting into the mobile industry but you lack skills, knowledge and experience. To create a prototype is easier than you think. Many people keep asking me where to start designing mobile apps. Creating a working prototype with the tools listed here will take you no more than 1 hour or 1 day depending on how much of details and graphics you want to include. No designing or coding knowledge required to use these tools and finally put your idea into a tangible and testable product. In this collection you will find 15 different tools and services that will let you quickly create working and testable prototypes for your mobile targeted products. Flinto InVision Proto.io Marvel Codiqa UXPin FluidUI Skala Preview MockingBot
10 Usability Tips Based on Research Studies We hear plenty usability tips and techniques from an incalculable number of sources. Many of the ones we take seriously have sound logic, but it’s even more validating when we find actual data and reports to back up their theories and conjectures. This article discusses usability findings of research results such as eye-tracking studies, reports, analytics, and usability surveys pertaining to website usability and improvements. You’ll discover that many of these usability tips will be common sense but are further supported with numbers; however, some might surprise you and change your outlook on your current design processes. 1. The idea that users will get frustrated if they have to click more than three times to find a piece of content on your website has been around for ages. Logically, it makes sense. But why the arbitrary three-click limit? In fact, most users won’t give up just because they’ve hit some magical number. Source: User Interface Engineering Sources and Further Reading 2.
10 Rock Solid Website Layout Examples Keeping It Simple Page layout is equal parts art and science. Creating something that’s visually attractive and unique takes an artist’s eye. However, there are several very easy to follow guidelines that you can use to create solid layouts that work for any number of cases. These principles include choosing and sticking to an alignment, structuring your whitespace properly and highlighting important elements through size, positioning, etc. Designers often stress out far too much about the layout process. In this article we’re going to take a look at ten very common layouts that you can find on countless sites across the web. If you’re a web designer, bookmark this page and come back the next time you get stuck laying out a page. Three Boxes This is probably the most simple layout on the list. The three boxes layout features one main graphic area followed by two smaller boxes underneath. This design is ideal for a portfolio page or anything that needs to show off a few sample graphics.