05.08.09
this week in UX
From around the Web
- IxDA posts videos from a recent conference Very Useful
- Frog Design’s Robert Fabricant: Designers are in the Behavior Business (Design is not just about “making stuff”.)
- WordPress invites users to perform usability testing
Nick Fincks’ top UX books.
I own two books on his list already (Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things & Dan Brown’s Communicating Design). To Nick’s list I would add two books: Nudge by Thaler & Susstein and Designing for People by Henry Dreyfuss.
From the twitterverse
- Make your commerce website usable by breaking it into three steps.
- Cheapskate’s Guide to Usability
- A 14-point usability checklist. A Tweak a Day Convinces Visitors to Stay
The concept of User Experience is becoming pervasive and ways of creating better usability are accessible to people in all fields. A UX pro goes above and beyond what’s here by advocating for usability in the toughest of design environments. A UX pro knows how to work under the constraints of a tight budget to make quick tweaks, but they can also seamlessly integrate usability through the entire development life-cycle.
When I was obsessed with poker, I visited discussion forums to improve my game. In a highly competitive environment, the last thing you want is for someone to help your competition, which they called “teaching the fish”. In a way they are right: by bringing people’s competencies up, the skill gap narrows and your competitive edge shrinks. More work and more knowledge is required to eek out profits.
The best thing professionals (in poker or in UX) can do is to read up on what’s now “common knowledge” and stay ahead of the field. It’s what I do everyday.
05.06.09
its tough work, but don’t blame the recession
You just suck. << An awesome article. Read it first.
How am I dealing with the recession? (excerpts from article in italics):
You want to ‘survive’ this recession? Stop talking about Oprah and do the following:
- Learn something new.
I studied cognitive science and am now a user experience designer, with a modest programming background and no artistic training. Yeah I guess you could say I’m doing something new… For the last year and a half I’ve been tackling one learning curve after another. At present, I’m working on getting my CSS/html razor sharp. I’m trying to be a better consultant through networking. I’m expanding on ways to get my name out there. I’m taking better photos and creating stronger visual assets through practice. - Work harder than everyone else.
Well, there’s always someone working harder than you. So really this is an impossible feat. Yet knowing that the competition is fierce makes me all the more motivated to work to my limit. - Do the leg work.
Make myself available. Never drop the ball. Always give a genuine response. Show people I care. Solve problems, don’t make them. These are principles I’ve heard on many occassions. Now’s a good time to apply them. - Surround yourself with fighters.
Who seems to never stop working? Who faces challenges and surmounts them? Who’s a fighter? I won’t let you know when I find them, I try to hold on to them for myself. - Take risks.
If you know me personally you know I have no problem with this one. - Shut up.
*silence* No but really who am I to whine? I’m one of the luckiest S-O-B’s alive. I hear it’s better to be lucky than good, so I better be doing something worthwhile with my good fortune.
05.05.09
ITS A TRAP: surveys and designing for increased completions
Yesterday I rolled out a survey to get to know potential readers of UX Hub. As an editor to the site, I’d like to know whats important to readers. Because there is an absurd amount of UX content out there, so it’d be nice to slim down what types of content are pertinent to readers.
At the beginning of the day I launched the survey. At that time it was a survey of 7 questions in a single page, with a submit button at the footer. I tried to make it as simple as possible.
I spread the link around, tweeting it around the internets. It got a decent amount of clicks, but few completions. woe is me.
I later noticed a tweet (on my Tweetdeck) about a different usability survey. The tweeter claimed to get 23 responses in the first two hours. WTF MATE? could their design really be that much better than ours?
I checked out the other survey to compare designs. I saw the following (details are blurred intentionally)
one question! then a next button!
Theres a lesson to be learned here. The initial survey question should be so easy to answer, that no person will have trouble or be baffled. “Are you familiar with such and such website?” is a question that a reply of yes or no easy to provide.
Then (and heres the important part) a survey would do well to leave the rest of the questions on a separate page; by allowing the survey taker to click the “next” button early on, you get them to make a psychological commitment to the survey. This is GENIUS!
It plays off the foot in the door effect. 
This technique is employed by salesman and studied by social psychologists and experts in persuasion. Here’s how it usually works in practice:
*doorbell*
Salesman: Hi ma’am, I hate to bother you today but could I have a glass of water from your sink?
Resident: uhhh.. sure. (I’m a decent person)
*resident leaves and returns with a glass of water*
Salesman: *gulp* Thank you. And my isn’t that a difficult stain on your rug over there??….
He starts his salespitch and the resident, having already done a favor for the salesperson, feels obliged to continue his pattern of (good person) behavior and is more likely to buy his product and help him out. When a person is asked for a small request, followed by a large request it is more likely they will comply with the large request than if the large request is made alone.
Answering the first survey question is the small, easy request. Once completed, its like a foot in the door and cognitive dissonance kicks in (‘I already gave the survey writer this much of my time, it wouldn’t be THAT much more to continue’). By agreeing to a small request, it would be a form of contradiction to disagree with a larger request.
Although clicking the next button reveals the hidden questions (which are potentially more complicated and time-consuming), the user has already made an action that is buying what the survey-writers are selling.
Comparing the two surveys, the OTHER survey takes a lot longer to complete (and even includes a re-direct to another non-survey page — a usability no-no) which would seem to indicate it would get less completions than our quick, simple survey. However, it was more successful because our original survey design was a wall of text. Theirs is brilliant in their deceptiveness – KEEPING IT SIMPLE ON THE FRONT PAGE.
Well, I improved the usability of our own survey to reflect this.
Please fill it out if you have a minute and you’re interested in User Experience or Usability. Thanks very much
btw, in the writing of this post, I got a pop-up request to fill out a survey (from Insight Express). No. joke. Here’s their survey (ITS A TRAP).
— update —
It’s come to my attention that there is an opposite phenomenon called door in the face.
examples of Door in the face include:
Will you donate $1000 to our organization? [Response is no].
Oh. Well could you donate $10?”
Can you help me do all this work?
Well can you help me with this bit?”
so which is more effective?
05.01.09
this week in UX
Nielsen and Twitter traffic numbers
Nielsen reports that Twitter’s retention rates are low. The micro-blogging site can’t keep their members for longer than a month before they stop tweeting, says the study, which debunks some of the claims highlighting Twitter’s insane traffic (Mashable quotes it as 1382 traffic growth in March).
Commentors pose the possibility that the study omitted Twitter API calls (functions used in many popular tweet aggregators such as tweetdeck, monitter, and ). Nielsen’s reply: actually not so. APIs included, Twitter’s retention rates are not so hot.
Web Design Conference
New Riders, the publishing company responsible for Voices that Matter, held Web Design Conference 2009 in San Francisco. From April 27-30th, people gathered, web nerdiness ensued. People present include Steve Krug, Christina Wodtke, Dan Saffer and Jesse James Garrett (who presented this video to illustrate User Experience). You can check out the conference hashtag (#vtm_wd) for some chatter from the event. You can also view a selection of presentation slides from the conference.
A Review of UX collaboration software (UXmatters)
Review Google Docs and (way) beyond – for UX collaborators and telecommuters. I especially am digging the lovelycharts app; that is one sexy-free collaborative documentation tool.
LovelyChart (courtesy of UX matters)
UX & engineering
Bill Buxton explains that when engineers try to perform design, and come to designers for advice, the conversation doesn’t always run so smoothly. From the article:
A typical question might be something like this: “Can you please share guidelines for maximizing user experience while designing a UI? For instance: When should I use radio buttons instead of drop down bars [to minimize clicks] and so on?”…
Let me explain by paraphrasing your question, but with the professions reversed.
“Can you please share guidelines around supporting concurrency, while avoiding deadlock and race conditions, while designing a real-time system that has optimal performance and minimal code footprint?”
I’m glad that I have not a clue how to answer that question.
Sexist usability
Should websites be designed differently for men and for women? Maybe so, a Southern Illinois study claims that men prefer speed in their website transactions and women prefer easier navigation. The findings coincide with the popular body of marketing findings that stress gender differences in consumer behavior. Here’s a good summary of gender trends in e-commerce. My thought is, why not design for both?
What is User Experience Design
I’m always interested in new confusing ways to describe this craft.
37signals web re-design
Highly praised for their interaction design, 37 signals launched a new homepage with no interactive elements. Maybe they fired their resident JS guru. The re-design was noted by Think Vitamin.
