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?
EBAN | The European Trade Association for Business Angels, Seed Funds and other Early Stage market players 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
And The Next Web Startup Rally Winner is... SILK #TNW2011 - TNW Europe At The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam, 16 startups competed over two days in our annual Startup Rally. Just moments ago, the winners were announced and the champagne is out! And here they are, the 2011 Startup Rally champions are as follows… The Next Web Startup Rally Overall Winner: Silk Silk is an app for the web that helps you collect, sort and view the information that you need without making you comb through the data yourself. See our story full story of SilkApp’s launch here and our video interview with the founder here. (Last year won by Next2News) Best B2C startup: Kuvva Kuvva connects fans to brands through online advertising. See our story full story of Kuvva’s launch here. (Won by Rapportive in 2010) Best Mobile startup: Onavo Onavo launched today to help smartphone users regain control of mobile data usage and save money on data charges by reducing the amount of data that’s transferred over their network. (Won by Double Dutch in 2010) Best B2B startup: Cleeng
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?
semanticweb.com - The Voice of Semantic Web Business 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.
Google Maps Mania 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
Google Maps: 100+ Best Tools and Mashups Most people think of Google Maps in terms of finding a place or business, or getting directions from one point to another. Others use the satellite images and terrain mapping features. But there are tons of other uses out there for Google maps. From mapping the weather and news to mapping things that aren't maps at all, like paintings or magazines, Google Maps has a lot to offer. And there are free tools available out there for those who want to use the Google Maps API without doing a bunch of coding. Have a favorite Google Maps tool or mashup? Travel and Transportation Mapness - An online travel journal that interfaces with Google Maps to show where you've been. The AA Route Planner - Plan trips around the UK. Montreal Metro Map - A complete map of Montreal Metro stations. TubeJP - A London Tube journey planner using Google Maps that also incorporates a search function to find local businesses. Dublin Public Transport Advisor - A trip planner for public transportation in and around Dublin.
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