Subscribing to the podcast will keep you up to date with all of the new Flicker material as it gets released.The blog itself will contain all manner of things about music and user-experience design.
-
An informative and instructive article on the use of inline validation in web forms by Luke Wroblewski – covering the where, when and how. The research made some significant findings:'a 22% increase in success rates,a 22% decrease in errors made,a 31% increase in satisfaction rating,a 42% decrease in completion times, anda 47% decrease in the number of eye fixations.'
-
A helpful collection of screengrabs on Flickr, pulling together examples of various design conventions/patterns (tabs, pagination, footers, sign-up forms) etc.
-
A very helpful article – outlining specific metrics to effectively quantify the frequently dicussed (but highly elusive) quality of engagement on a website.
-
A useful selection of links covering multiple aspects of persona creation and use.
-
Some interesting research on 'front-loading' the copy in lists, links and calls to actions with specifics. When scanning a page, the first few characters of each list item get the most attention – so it is important to make every character count.# Use plain language# Use specific terminology# Follow conventions for naming common features# Front-load user- and action-oriented terms
-
An old, but no less relevant article by Jakob Nielson & John Morkes on the impact of brevity, focus and avoidance of hyperbole on websites. The test case wasn't an e-commerce site, but the data showing impact on scannability, usability and recall is very interesting and relevant:'A common thread between conciseness, scannability, and objectivity is that each reduces the user's cognitive load, which results in faster, more efficient processing of information.'
-
Andy Budd uses a simple, but powerful metaphor to stress the importance of focussing on retention of customers over acquisition of new ones. In short, don't value footfall over sales – or SEO over conversion.
-
An interesting post on leveraging limited budget to achieve effective results. The ideas aren't radical, but do lend credence to the notion of phased, incremental and prioritised development over 'big bang' re-designs. Realign rather than redesign!
-
Dave Shea on the optimisation of image use for calls-to-action and backgrounds etc. In a nutshell, put several images (such as multiple background states for buttons) into a single image, then use selective CSS to show only, the relevant part. This will dramatically reduce the number of http requests to the server when a page is loaded, as the main image need only be loaded once by the client.
This entry was posted
on Monday, May 2nd, 2011 at 2:01 pm and is filed under Links.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Subscribe to this blog