Group items tagged

Gaze patterns users commonly exhibit and accommodating these behaviors F-pattern Layer Cake Pattern Bypassing Pattern Spotted Pattern Commitment Pattern Scanning vs. reading, why people do it, and how to drive user behavior with your design

Kick effect: People look at the last result on a SERP before leaving the page. (The tenth organic result, on a page of 10 results, is the lowest result looked at in 12% of cases versus 7% combined for the seventh, eighth, and ninth results. In 59% of cases people looked no farther than the third organic result.)

Other patterns such as skipping, backtracking, love at first sight, zigzag, re-acclimating, and bypassing

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.”

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.

79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word. (Update: a newer study found that users read email newsletters even more abruptly than they read websites.)

Web pages have to employ scannable text, using highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others) meaningful sub-headings (not "clever" ones) bulleted lists one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph) the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion half the word count (or less) than conventional writing

Flat design has spread its levelling influence all over the tech industry and its interfaces in recent years

content-out design4 — the concept of determining how your design should shift for varying displays by focusing not on screen sizes, but on where your content naturally breaks down.

if you want to ready your content to be more flexible and adaptable, then you can’t just look at each page individually. You need to start finding patterns in the content.

Each bit of structure you add gives you options: new abilities to control how and where content should be presented to best support its meaning and purpose.

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

“We are now looking at how we display and order content differently from screen size to screen size,” said Jeff Moriarty, Boston Globe VP of digital properties in an interview last year. “This ‘responsive content’ concept is emerging and we are starting to see in data that users want different types of content depending on their context and the device they are on. We have to now think about how content performs differently from the biggest screens to the smallest, how that content is organized and even how headlines are written from platform to platform.”

The first thing to think of when building a responsive site is simplicity.

some website builders may over-design for the desktop, making some websites fun to play with but absolutely impossible to navigate.

Only 34% of websites use a serif typeface for body copy.

Two thirds of the websites we surveyed used sans-serif fonts for body copy.

the most popular font sizes ranged from 18 to 29 pixels, with 18 to 20 pixels and 24 to 26 pixels being the most popular choices.

This dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F and has the following three components: Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F's top bar. Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F's lower bar. Finally, users scan the content's left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F's stem.

The F viewing pattern is a rough, general shape rather than a uniform, pixel-perfect behavior.

Users won't read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. Exhaustive reading is rare, especially when prospective customers are conducting their initial research to compile a shortlist of vendors. Yes, some people will read more, but most won't. The first two paragraphs must state the most important information. There's some hope that users will actually read this material, though they'll probably read more of the first paragraph than the second. Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content in the final stem of their F-behavior. They'll read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words.

Authorship photos might cause people to assume that the page is an article or a blog post rather than a product page.

most pages can be optimized by including images that serve as visual cues for where visitors should look next.

Relying on the screen above “the fold” to do all of the heavy lifting is one of the biggest usability mistakes you can make. The idea that it is the only place web users will browse is a complete myth.

Right now, we're at a turning point. Whatever we do it’ll be wrong, either in the short term or the long term. Looking to the future and not using hover will cause pain to the majority of users today or cause pain to the increasing touchscreen user base. Offering hover interactions to only those using desktop/laptops we could consider to be a progressive enhancement. But what about hybrid devices like the Microsoft Surface that offer both touch and mouse/keyboard? Can we accurately know what input method is being used? Simple media queries are not enough to know what interaction is possible.

We want our designs to be device agnostic. If we build a website we want to do the minimum to make sure it works across device. We can tweak designs at different sizes to meet needs but changing an interaction style by device seems like old-fashioned thinking.

Facebook's new commitment to "mobile first" design

Now that nearly half of Facebook's users are accessing the network from their mobile phones every day — and soon, more than half will — Facebook is beginning to prioritize that experience first.

In print design, we’re told that serif fonts are considered the most readable. The serifs purportedly serve as aids to the eye, moving you from one letter to the next in a smoother fashion.

The bottom line is that the fewer details a font needs to convey a character clearly, the more readable it will appear on a broader range of screens.

the current consensus–at least as close as anyone can get to one–is that sans-serif fonts are still superior for screen body text, and serif fonts are best used for headings. For many users with newer displays, though, the difference is negligible.