This morning Jared Spool tweeted:
Conversion rate’s big crime is it focuses purely on pressing the purchase button, independent of the quality of the experience.
And:
It’s easy to optimize for conversion rate while sacrificing a great experience. Conversion [does not equal] Delight.
This mildly irritated me and we ended up exchanging tweets (shown below), but it rapidly got the point where I couldn’t explain things in 140 characters.
Thought one: The distance that a traditional button on the screen appears to depress is the same distance that a mouse button depresses
There is a school of thought going around saying that buttons should be avoided in interface design. This makes a lot of sense for touch interfaces, but before we get rid of them we should try to understand reasons buttons on interfaces are so successful in the first place. Until recently we’ve (mostly) only been able to interact with computers using physical buttons, so building digital interfaces out of skeuomorphic buttons works well- the UI is a direct metaphor for the input mechanism. Creating a button-less interface on a non-touch screen is likely to be more challenging.
Now responsive design is the new black, I’ve been doing a lot of browser resizing to check how the pages behave at various device widths. But it’s frustrating to have to guess at the screen width your aiming at. Yes, there are browser plugins that resize your browser accurately, but they are slow and cumbersome if you need to test a variety widths.
So I’ve put together a cutting-edge technical solution consisting of a desktop background image with width guides marked on it. Instructions for using it are:
This is a very interesting:
When the product was one for which public consumption is desirable the presence of the Facebook and Twitter icons made people 25 percent more likely to purchase. But when the product was more private in nature the icons suppressed purchase intentions, also by 25 percent.
Conventionally we see social media icons as enabling customers to spread the word about products, invaluable word-of-mouth direct from our marketing pages. Twitter and Facebook buttons provide a channel that allows visitors on our sites to influence their network, but this study shows that this channel can work in both directions. Social media icons make visitors feel exposed to the approval or disapproval of their network—even if they don’t share anything.
There’s something that’s been bugging me for the last few months and I think I understand it now.
Resistance to disruptive technologies is common. But why can’t we see progress more clearly? Paraphrasing a million conversations going on in 2011:
“Kindles are nice, but I’d never get one as I like the feel of a book in my hand.”
Then 6 months later:
“Kindles are so easy. I can’t believe I used to carry a heavy book to work every day.”
The new look BBC website homepage has it’s links as just gray text. Not blue, not underlined and with only the faintest of hover effects. As a result, tired and at the end of the day, I found myself reading the headlines as absurdist poetry:
Sarkozy warns of disintegration,
Inquiry into unfair exam advice,
Child killer Black gets 25 years,
Lodger quizzed on double killing,
Dying woman calls for law change,
Double decker destroyed by fire,
Twitter did not incite rioting.
Something I’ve been doing more recently is modelling user journeys as a conversation between the website and the user. I’m not sure if anyone else uses this technique, but I find it useful—it involves simple imagining the website can talk to the user:
“Hi”“Hi, I’d like to buy doodad”“Great, here are the doodads we stock, we think this one is especially good.”“Thanks, I’d like more details on that one”…. etc.
Recently I was asked to redesign the order journey where a customer had come to the site to make a specific change to their current service. The requirement was to up-sell the customer some additional services while they were making the change to their existing service. This has obvious potential to irritate the customer when all they want to do is what they came to the site to do.
I looked for it but couldn’t find it so I made it. Here’s an Axure library of callout widgets:
It’s not exactly rocket science but hopefully someone might find it useful. Callouts are probably an oddity in the Axure world, as Axure is more based on prototypes rather than wireframes. But at work we use Axure more for traditional wireframes than prototypes so need callouts for on-page documentation. In this environment Axure’s killer feature is it’s SVN based system for collaborating on a shared file. (Try getting three people to successfully update a 100+ page Visio document at the same time without errors…)
(Warning – rambling, fairly unstructured and inconclusive thoughts ahead.)
I was recently reminded of a thought that’s been knocking around in my head for a while: when will we stop learning to write? When will children stop being taught to write with a pen? Will, in the not-too-distant future, pens and pencils become quaint antiques, as we see cassette tapes or non-digital cameras? If you where a toddler today why would you bother learning to write? It’s hard, messy, frustrating, slow and largely irrelevant to everyday life. Signing my name is about the only time I write anything now. If I have to write something longer it takes a few lines for my fingers to remember what they’re doing—it’s surprisingly easy for us to forget even skills we take for granted.
Belated links and inspiration and stuff I found interesting this week, decorated with some thoughts:
..but this video, from last year, of Bill Buxton talking about touch interfaces is worth a look: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/TechTalk-NUI-Whats-in-a-Name
People asking for directions to location can be seen as a ‘vote’ for that venue: http://glinden.blogspot.com/2011/05/value-of-google-maps-directions-logs.html. There’s probably a lot in it but the semantics of “I need to get to … ” are quite different to “That place was great!”. Not least as one happens before the event and one after.