Ux News & Articles

One of the final sessions from last week's Gilbane conference (see our coverage here) in San Francisco focused on Personas, Market Segmentation and User Experience design. Strong assertions were made (e.g., "data without segmentation is crap") and key lessons shared. Here are the highlights and take-aways.

Customers crave speed on the Web, and they reward organizations that make things fast and simple.

The history of social interface design can be divided into two periods: Before Flickr and after Flickr. In the first period, any social interface functionality was added as an afterthought to the design—something to layer on top of the core functionality. In the after Flickr period, teams were now considering social components as core to their design's value.

Recently, we did some extensive task testing with a technical audience. 70 percent started the task by clicking on a link, 30 percent used search.

More and more customers are going straight to specific pages on your website, rather than the homepage.

Here in Paris at the Content Strategy Forum 2010 put on by STC France, the first question that comes to mind is: What exactly is content strategy. Plausible responses are not in short supply, and keynote speaker Rahel Anne Bailie opened the event with a bit of what and a lot of why it's time to prioritize and evolve content strategy.

Talking about customer goals is the biggest mistake a website can make. That's how you lose the impatient customer.

The most important thing a webpage can do is be crystal clear about exactly what you can do on that webpage.

As we all drown in today's unparalleled access to mostly disorganized information, the holy grail for many has become to perfect search. O'Reilly Media (news, site) has released a new book to help those following this path.

Your website is your primary communication tool, so you give it plenty of love. However, research says this is not sufficient as more than 70% of U.S. Internet consumers are now using multiple channels.

Examples include:

• Call centers
• Direct mail
• Mobile apps and interfaces
• Social networks
• In-store displays

Today's ruthless consumers expect a seamless cross-channel experience. Unfortunately, consumers often report that their cross-channel experience are poor -- A.K.A., you have work to do.

With this problem in mind Forrester Research is teaming with CoreMedia this Thursday at 11am EST/4pm GMT to present a webinar titled: The Role Of WCM In Cross-Channel Customer Relations.

Forrester analyst Tim Walters says you can maximize your online presence to create the optimal cross-channel user experience. And further, that your web content management system can play a key role in the process.

If you're responsible for optimizing your customers' cross-channel experience this webinar may be just what you need. Skip on over and register here.

TechRadar recently delivered what they and top experts consider to be key trends for the next 12 months in web design. At the core, is an increased focus on usability. Smashing Magazine sought to promote better user experiences with storytelling, encouraging designers to capitalize on users' emotions. The bottom line: by focusing on usability, a better website can be built.

For more than seven years, I’ve been teaching and coaching design teams on how to conduct usability tests and gather user feedback early on in the development process. One of the questions that comes up time and time again from clients is, "How can we get buy-in for usability tests from management and other team members?"

Somewhere, right now, there's a team creating a new design with some amazing, never-before-seen functionality. And to take advantage of that awesome, groundbreaking functionality work, their users will need to login.

Login functionality isn't new. It's not awesome. It's not very challenging to develop. Teams are designing this functionality as if it's never been built before.

But it has been built before. Teams, all over the world, have built login functionality into their applications about a million times. And yet, here we are, doing it all over again.

All this re-creation and re-invention isn't just inefficient, it leaves the team open to problems. Because it's not the sexy part of their project, it's likely to get less attention, resulting in an unusable and frustrating experience.

This is where the Re-use Trinity -- Patterns, Components, and Interaction Design Frameworks -- comes in.

Recently, in a set of interviews UIE conducted with avid users of Netflix.com, the online DVD rental web site, we asked "What are the things you like best about the site?" Lots, apparently.

We recently told you about the upcoming goings on at UX Week 2008 in San Francisco in August. But there’s more to UX Week 2008 than just the user experience. The Subject to Change book fiesta, for example.

On Wednesday, August 13 from 6:30 - 9:30 PM (PST), the authors of Subject to Change (O’Reilly Media) offer registrants an opportunity to learn more about this innovative book, as well as to “dig deeper into the emerging field of experience strategy and design and meet some of the best in the industry”.