Do you design wireframes without knowing who your users are? Knowing the type of user who uses your interface is important in designing a great user experience. The best way to do this is to create personas. Personas are fictional characters that are backed up by research and designed to paint a picture of your user’s needs and characteristics. Knowing these different needs and characteristics can help you create better products. A website or mobile app has thousands or millions of different users. However, most of them share similar needs and characteristics. It’s the UX designer’s task to find out what these are, and narrow down all the different users to the most common user types. Personas can help you communicate all of this to clients and stakeholders in a way that allows them to empathize with the user.
|
by anthony Label alignment on forms is a serious issue. How you place labels next to fields can affect how users fill out your form. Labels left aligned to fields often create large white space between the label and field. This creates longer eye movements for users when they’re scanning, and slows down their form filling process.
I’ve always appreciated Coco Chanel’s rule that, before you leave the house, you should look in the mirror and remove one accessory. It shows there’s almost always an opportunity to simplify. This is advice that should be taken to heart by anybody responsible for creating and maintaining websites, which are often overloaded with content and features that aren’t strictly necessary and damage the big picture. When your site becomes bigger and more complicated than it needs to be, this can be a real problem for your company. How Bloat Hurts Your Business The problem is that people can’t just tune out anything they’re not interested in. We have to process it on some level, even if it’s just to decide if we’ll give it more attention or not. And we all have a limited amount of attention we can give. Studies have shown that when consumers are presented with too many choices in products, they tend to freeze and choose nothing. A similar thing can happen when presented with too many choices on a website. by Todd Folllansbee Psychology researcher Lionel Standing found that the “average brain” can recognize over 10,000 images. In fact, several days after you see new images, you’ll recognize over 80% of them. Yet this same incredible mind can’t recall more than 7 random pieces of information within 30 seconds of hearing it. The implications of this for web design are profound and tell us why so many people are unable to buy or effectively engage with websites. Recognition and Recall are often confused. Learning the difference provides an important key to building great websites and understanding good User Experience (UX) design. The guidelines that drive User Experience design are based upon understanding how the mind functions.
If we could spend only a few minutes working together to optimize your website, we’d still get results starting with a process. When evaluating and improving any type of content or copy, there is a quick 10-step process you can use. 1. Headlines.
by Brian Massey
In and of themselves, none of the above statements are unworthy pursuits. But if your goal is to increase conversion and fill your coffers to the brim, you will fall woefully short if you believe that web design alone can do the heavy lifting of convincing your visitors to take action. So my lesson is this. Beautiful, eye-popping design and effective, profitable web design are two different things. And it always seems easier to mistake those eye-popping designs for profitable ones. by
As they inevitably learn, nothing in life or business is free. Facebook, especially, can be a time-suck and a business owner’s time is money. Without the budget for Facebook ads or a professional social media manager, it’s challenging to build a base of engaged local fans. Here are some strategy ideas: Make Friends in the CommunityGet Your Current Customers on BoardRun More Contests with Small PrizesBring Your Real World Online
Summary: You often hear design team members (or their management) say, “We need a fresh design.” This usually gets redesign projects off on a wrong footing, with the wrong goals and strategy. Typically, a fresh design will be a worse design simply because it’s new and thus breaks user expectations. A better strategy is to play up familiarity and build on users’ existing knowledge of how a system works.
Here then are the first 10 content ideas. 1. Content About Related Information |
|
|
Copyright © 2013 Web Yodel's Blog, Boulder, CO: Website Design & Development, SEO, Wordpress, Website Evaluation - All Rights Reserved - |
|
Small local businesses and many nonprofit organizations have unique challenges in online marketing, largely due to their restricted budgets. Facebook is a marketing platform many believe, at first, to be “free.”
