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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
Everyone else is doing it, but I’ve only got the one. Well, one and a wish. My prediction <drum roll…> In 2011 websites will become more produced. By ‘produced’ I mean something like ‘using time based effects to engage the user’. Two powerful and extreme examples of this trend are: http://benthebodyguard.com/ And http://agirlstory.org/ If you’re [...]
In a vain attempt to try to get myself writing on this blog more regularly, I’m going to start a weekly series about interfaces that have caught my eye. It’ll be originally titled ‘Interface of the week’. I’m not going to look at things too deeply, but rather just point out the interesting, inspiring, or [...]