Group items tagged

The first wave: Experience design

The modern design challenge is to define a great experience for a consumer comprised of a range of touch points, in various cases composed of interactions with several devices, retail experiences, personal contact points, software interfaces, physical mechanisms, data, and software intelligence.

We are systems designers now.

“If you’re designing a website and not thinking about the user experience on mobile and tablets, you’re going to disappoint a lot of users,” he warns. Designer Tom Muller thinks big brands getting on board will lead to agencies “increasingly using responsive design as a major selling point, persuading clients to future-proof digital marketing communications”. When doing so, Clearleft founder Andy Budd believes we’ll see an end to retrofitting RWD into existing products: “Instead, RWD will be a key element for a company’s mobile strategy, baked in from the start.” Because of this, Budd predicts standalone mobile-optimised sites and native apps will go into decline: “This will reduce the number of mobile apps that are website clones, and force companies to design unique mobile experiences targeted towards specific customers and behaviours.”

During 2012, the average site size crept over a megabyte, which designer/developer Mat Marquis describes as “pretty gross”, but he reckons there’s a trend towards “leaner, faster, more efficient websites” – and hopes it sticks. He adds: “Loosing a gigantic website onto the web isn’t much different from building a site that requires browser ‘X’: it’s putting the onus on users, for our own sakes.”

Designer and writer Stephanie Rieger reckons that although people now know “web design isn’t print,” they’ve “forgotten it’s actually software, and performance is therefore a critical UX factor”.

Many mouseover interactions are completely dysfunctional on a touch device

Instead of buying a state of the art monitor, buying a cheap monitor and several low-end devices to test your work on might be a better investment.

Hiding content and showing it on mouseover was considered to be a decent design pattern

Design thinking, however, is a slightly murky concept that means different things to different people. At heart, though, it is about fusing the creative and open-ended with the analytical and operational

For us, there are two broad skill sets--strategy and design--with no buffer in between to organize them and tell them how to work together.

a lot of organizations take a slightly patronizing view of design and creative types, assuming they can’t really be expected to understand and manage things like budgets. We assume the opposite--that everyone can and should be a good businessperson.

77% of mobile searches take place in the home or at work where a PC is readily available. Whether you call it lazy or convenient, the simple fact is smartphones and tablets are quickly becoming the go-to computing devices for consumers.

In the post-PC era, customers expect companies to provide experiences aligned with their needs and abilities, in the right context, and at their moment of need.

Today, content is the interface and navigation is performed directly through gestures and voice commands. As a result, interactions are becoming multi-modal, engaging users through multiple senses.

One of the most common mistakes made when designing social applications is focusing immediately on rich, heavyweight interactions rather than lightweight ones. All the best social experiences online map closely to how offline social experiences work: offline, people build relationships slowly, one lightweight interaction at a time.

Every now and again we have more heavyweight interactions, such as family dinners, big nights out with friends, birthdays, anniversaries, family vacations and so on. But if we hadn’t built the relationship through many lightweight interactions over time, we’d have no interest in the heavyweight ones. The aggregation of many lightweight interactions is very powerful. It builds deep relationships, and helps people curate parts of their identity.

It takes months and years to build relationships with people, and they all are built on many lightweight interactions over time. And people build relationships with brands in the same way as they build relationships with people: slowly, one interaction at a time. Just as we don’t suddenly become best friends with someone, we don’t suddenly fall in love with a brand – so build products that support lightweight ways for people to interact and show the aggregations of those interactions over time.

The parallax style has excited web developers and inspired any number of hype lists. It's also triggered a backlash among critics who feel its bells-and-whistles approach detracts from actual content. Pitchfork creative director Michael Renaud recently told the Atlantic Wire he expects people to "tire" of the trend within a year or two.

the parallax site was only superior in one sense--fun. None of the other survey measures indicated a significant difference in user experience between the two sites. Parallax didn't even edge the standard site in questions about visual appeal (although participants did think it looked slightly more "professional"). Frederick also discovered one critical disadvantage of parallax: test participants who suffered from motion sickness found the style disorienting.

Sobering as this first careful study of parallax might be to web designers, Frederick still believes it's a fad with a future. He cautions developers to think more carefully about the context in which parallax is applied. Text-heavy sites that employ parallax scrolling seem more likely to disorient users, he says. Sites that emphasize visual elements--images, infographics, or data visualizations, in particular--are probably a better fit for the style.

In a 2013 survey by Econsultancy, 55% of marketers globally are planning on increasing their digital marketing budgets this year, with 39% of them planning on reallocating existing budgets toward digital channels.

This is a permanent shift, not a passing trend. Products and services must deliver value while telling engaging stories through a multitude of digital devices and within a network of multiple brands, services, and platforms.

Marketing and product teams need to work more closely. Copywriting and story teams must collaborate with user experience teams.

differences in screen size, device resolution or text rendering don’t matter in and of themselves, but only because they influence how someone will read our content.

Typography carries the literal message, and its legibility and readability impacts not just the audience’s understanding of the content but how easy it is for them to hear the brand’s personality.

Typography’s role in imparting the implied message is just as profound, and we can see its impact most clearly on mobile devices. Here, the design is often stripped back to its simplest form. Gone are the graphics, gradients and pixel-perfect details. It is the aesthetic personality of the type and the colour palette that influences our emotional response as readers and defines the experience.

Digital advertisers and publishers may also want to consider using a responsive design strategy to ensure that their sites deliver consistent, high quality digital experiences across desktop and mobile channels

the usage of a single URL improves site analytics and SEO performance, and sites can easily be resized for new viewing formats.

These include longer time required to develop individual responsive pages, the need for code workarounds to account for older legacy browsers, the need for live device testing, non-compatibility with many existing e-commerce and CMS platforms, the need for a front-end rewrite, the need for a phased development approach in large enterprises, and the extra effort required to provide unique experiences for each form factor.

A recent study (PDF) found that more than 80% of people are disappointed with the experience of browsing Web on mobile devices and would use their smartphones more if the browsing experience improved.

A recent study (PDF) found that more than 80% of people are disappointed with the experience of browsing Web on mobile devices and would use their smartphones more if the browsing experience improved.

64% of smartphone users expect websites to load in 4 seconds or less, while the average website takes more than twice that amount, at 9 seconds.

Addictive technology creates “internal triggers” which cue users without the need for marketing, messaging or any other external stimuli.  It becomes a user’s own intrinsic desire. Creating internal triggers comes from mastering the “desire engine” and its four components: trigger, action, variable reward, and commitment.

A company that forms strong user habits enjoys several benefits to its bottom line. For one, this type of company creates “internal triggers” in users. That is to say, users come to the site without any external prompting. Instead of relying on expensive marketing or worrying about differentiation, habit-forming companies get users to “self trigger” by attaching their services to the users’ daily routines and emotions. A cemented habit is when users subconsciously think, “I’m bored,” and instantly Facebook comes to mind. They think, “I wonder what’s going on in the world?” and before rationale thought occurs, Twitter is the answer. The first-to-mind solution wins.

A multi-screen world, with ad-wary consumers and a lack of ROI metrics, has rendered Don Draper’s big budget brainwashing useless to all but the biggest brands. Instead, startups manufacture desire by guiding users through a series of experiences designed to create habits

Couldn’t the NYT just know what I’d want to read and serve that up to me via algorithm? “Hell, yeah!” Adelman responds to that last question. “The fact that we continue to reflect that organization structure is not a statement about how we think things should be consumed. It is a statement about, there are some very natural ways for people to look for things.” Those “natural” ways of looking at things really come down to, again, user expectation. While the redesign does incorporate some algorithmically suggested sections within navigation, Adelman stresses that the NYT simply can’t remove the option to predictably click on particular topics, lest their audience question the publication’s transparency.

“There’s an element of trust that’s important in any relationship, whether it’s with the NYT or another publication, or a tool or experience you’re accustomed to,” Adelman says. “You don’t want to feel like things are moving under your feet." They also can’t merely fill the NYT homepage with articles they think someone might like to read, because then they cease to be what they are--the world’s news, presented without assumptions or bias. “I don’t think people want a customized version of the NYT homepage. They might benefit from some amount of material focused on their interests, but people come to the NYT because they want the NYT’s take on things.”

I contend Pinterest as a service is best conceived of as a mood board for the company image. It isn’t a place to broadcast specifics or a way to run contests. It’s not that these are impossible, but Twitter and Facebook are better suited. Pinterest is a forum to communicate a brand’s identity, values, and personality. A place to build trust and affinity with consumers. Surprisingly, it might be the best single channel for communicating brand essence that exists today.

Opt for fewer, broadly categorized boards rather than many narrow ones. I have 5 boards total, and just one called "designed," instead of art, product design, graphic design, typography, advertising, and logos. Broad categories give your boards greater variety, and variety equals engagement.

In my experience, following people doesn't really get you followers on Pinterest. This is anecdotal, but I don't think many users do the auto-follow-back thing - that’s more of a Twitter phenomenon.

The new laptop, which Apple unveiled last week, already has Web designers and developers trying to figure out how they're going to create sites and Web apps that look good on the new machine without leaving the rest of the Web's population behind.

One of the key advantages of these high-resolution displays is their crisp, highly readable rendering of text. That particular buck stops with the Web browsers, which are much more varied on the desktop than on mobile devices. Naturally, Safari supports retina-friendly text, but Chrome is still working on it, and other browsers will presumably follow.

For image-heavy sites, swapping out higher-resolution images can have a substantial impact on page load, which in turn affects user experience and even search engine rankings. 

Tumblr blogs tend to lack the glossy, professional, high-minded design of other social networking sites, including the behemoth that is Facebook and the SMS-inspired Twitter. If anything, these teenaged Tumblrs harken back to earlier web days where users built their own pages on AngelFire and Geocities, with atrocious backgrounds, upgraded cursors, and dancing GIF images galore. GIFs, in fact, are so hugely popular on Tumblr that the company even began experimenting with GIF-based ads.

According to Pew Internet’s study from earlier this year, 13 percent of Internet users ages 18-29 use Tumblr, while only 5 percent of those 30-49 do, 3 percent of those 50-64

Demographic data from Quantcast further drives home just how youthful a site Tumblr has become. 21 percent of its audience is under 18, 30 percent is 18 to 24, and 22 percent is 25 to 34

Guber argues that humans simply aren’t moved to action by “data dumps,” dense PowerPoint slides, or spreadsheets packed with figures. People are moved by emotion. The best way to emotionally connect other people to our agenda begins with “Once upon a time…”

Is “telling to win” just the latest fashion in a business world that is continually swept with new fads and new gurus pitching the newest can’t-miss secret to success? Or does it represent a real and deep insight into communications strategy?

I think it’s a real insight. I’m a literary scholar who uses science to try to understand the vast, witchy power of story in human life. Guber and his allies have arrived through experience at the same conclusions science has reached through experiment.