Group items tagged

I reviewed 47 wordpress templates for a competition earlier this year. 98% of them used a "flat" design approach. Of course, we're seeing this style of design pervade websites.

Is this a good thing? Nielsen Norman Group says we can use flat designs if we follow some smart guidelines.

Designers, THIS is your job on a landing page, not creating "engaging Web experiences."

I've always wondered why copywriters don't get involved in the visual presentation of their stories. I've not met one yet. Designing around Lorem ipsum copy, or writing copy without understanding the visual limitations of a page is crazy. So, yes. Please hire copywriters and start a new generation of writers that get the visual component of their craft.

There are sevreral items in this list that are important for conversion optimizers to take note of, things to try. Mobile-first design: I surprised to learn how many leads and sales are now coming from the mobile web. Skeleton screens: Far better than some spinning animation for decreasing both load times AND percieved load times. Photo-cenric Menus: Try these for ecommerce sites. Scroll-triggerd animations: ONLY FOR STORY TELLING! Animated Call-to-action Buttons: Try those that shimmer without interaction. Hand lettering: Be careful not to make things hard to read. AI for design: I just have to try Grid.

A great list for designers of experiences, as designers of live.

 @ashocka18 has written an article for designers working on landing pages. In the process Heidi has linked to some very helpful posts.

I was struck by the way she laid out the article, perfect for those of us who scan. Your landing pages should be designed to help scanners find the salient points of your copy... like where the link to my post is.

I especially love the banner images for each topic. Very fun. Boring Call to Action Button Lame Logos Inconsistency Too many fonts Random colors Spacing fails Cheesy stock photos (I call this "Business Porn") Overuse of photoshop effects Icons from everywhere Readability issues Navigation Check it out.

This is a great illustration of the tension between performance marketers and designers, data vs. intuition, left- vs. right-brain design. It doesn't settle anything, but some of these we can certainly agree on.

.@ConversionXL: The best UX designers are using low-cost behavioral tools to make better decisions about design on business websites. Here, we learn that the trend in "Ghost Buttons" is probably bad for sites that want conversions.

This is a good overview of design trends from 2016. Not all of these trends are good ideas from a conversion optimization standpoint.

Scroll Animations, Large Thematic Images, Animated Micrinteractions, and Brutalism are probably hurting conversion rates.

The author makes a very important point: "this sort of experiment requires thorough research and in many cases the final result comes via several iterations tested and analyzed in terms of usability and visual perception."

 @KISSMetrics - David Ogilvy is experiencing something of a renaissance these days as his experience and research in offline marketing are proving true in online marketing. And we need him. Images are an abused medium on the Web, and this article points out mistakes that you are probably making.

There are some real nuggets here, such as "Captions under images are read on average 300% more than the body copy itself" Ask your designer what research he has for his decisions.

This is an important article, and you should read it before you blindly follow the advice of lazy designers.

Here's a nice story about how data can be used to drive design and content decisions. Click tracking (heatmaps), session recording and user polling are all tools we put to good use here in the lab for our clients.

And if you want a fantastic example of using storytelling to educate and entertain, this post is just such a thing.

Great outline of the role design plays in conversion.

by @chiefmartec It's time to stop making excuses. Most interesting to me is the UX Fund, that invested in companies commited to design and user experience. They outpaced the market by over the past five years. Scott also puts a nail in the excuses: "We want to be simple, like Google", "It pays to be cheap," and "The CMO doesn't get it."

 @getelastic Linda Bustos sees what I see: that the state of mobile websites is like the state of desktop websites circa 1995. What will we look back at and laugh at in five years?

I think we'll laugh at the "hamburger" menu, what Linda calls the Adidas menu.

I also think we'll laugh at responsive designs for small screens, like phones. Small screens need a custom design.

The good news is that we have better tools for testing, and I expect Mobile 1.0 to have a short life relative to Web 1.0.

Linda's article is full of examples for you to not emulate. It will be seen as a harbinger of change in mobile.

I've always argued that wireframes should come later in the web design process after copy and persuasive elements have been established.

Zakary Kinnaird argues there may be no good time for wireframes.

I can't test wireframes, esp. if they contain Lorem Ipsum copy. So wireframes lock in design elements before we even know what visitors prefer. Good comments as well.

Even experienced research groups like Nielsen Norman can get testing wrong by adding too many variables. The author argues that too many variables changed in these tests

And he's right.

Why do business owners rely on the "expertise" of designers when designers repeatedly fail to improve websites? Because the errors in the system get lost in the blame game. This is the gift of complexity. "People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones." Let data provide some simplicity.

I love it when designers talk about hypotheses and tests. "I use this process to help teams frame their work as a business problem to solve (rather than a solution to implement) and then dissect that business problem into its core assumptions. We then weave those assumptions into hypotheses. Finally, we design experiments to test our riskiest hypotheses."

One of the things we rely on our designers for is their knowledge of how font typeface, size and color work on our pages. This is a nice primer for marketers and business owners who want to understand this skill a little better.

When users look for information, they have a goal and are on a mission. Even before you started to read this article, chances are you did because you either had the implicit goal of checking what's new on Smashing Magazine, or had the explicit goal of finding information about "Navigation Design".