A few years ago, in a land not very far away, my commute to work involved cycling to work along a bike path that went over a bridge. As the bridge was shared with pedestrians there were “cyclist dismount” signs. Normally I didn’t dismount but rode slowly at walking pace. One day there was a [...]
I’ve just put up a new design for my homepage and blog. I’ll write some more about it when it’s finished – for now it’s probably about 90 percent done. Significant things that still need doing are: The mobile/narrow end of the responsive layout needs finalising. The basics are in place. The mid-range responsive designs [...]
There’s famous and cliched quote attributed to Henry Ford: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.” If genetic engineering had been around at the start of the 20th century faster horses would have been built. And the development of cars would be set back decades. There [...]
1. A good navigation design projects a mental model visitor. Menus let people navigate to other pages on the website (obviously). But they do more than that—a good menu describes the website to visitors even if they never go to another page. Imagine that you are asked to create a website for a pet rescue [...]
Some design improvements to a client’s order journey went live recently and they show some interesting statistics.* The first is that there was a 12% like-for-like increase in conversion, which totals about £7 million of extra sales per year. I’m obviously proud to have worked on a project that has results like that and it’s [...]
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), [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]