Are the Product Lists on Your Site Reducing Sales?  

You can increase sales on your site as much as 225% by offering sufficient product information to your customers at the time they need it. One way to do this is to develop product lists that don't require shoppers to bounce back-and-forth between the list and individual product pages.

User Interface Engineering (2004). Design>Web Design>Usability>E Commerce

Are There Users Who Always Search?

Web designers often tell us that they spend a great deal of their limited time and resources working to improve their on-site search engines because, they believe, there are some people who always rely on the search engine to reach their target content. They find further support for this assumption from Jakob Nielsen who, in his book, 'Designing Web Usability,' asserts that more than half of all users demonstrate 'search-dominant' tendencies by going right to the search engine when they first visit a web site looking for content.

User Interface Engineering (2002). Design>Web Design>Usability>Search

The Art of Being Human

Site visitors crave the sense that someone is there, within and behind your Web pages, your emails and newsletters. Dealing with the bare technology of online interactions is a cold experience for many, or even most of us. It makes us feel anxious. Technology isn't warm. It has no heart. It neither understands us, nor cares for us. For many Web sites, whether for businesses or organizations, we simply plug in and play the bare technology - the super-duper means of information delivery. All the site visitor sees and feels is the design, the interface, the links and the clicks. The experience is about as warm and human as banking with an ATM machine.

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2002). Articles>Web Design>User Centered Design>Usability

Branding and Usability

Many web sites exist primarily to create or strengthen the brand for a product or service. We’re finding that a site’s usability can dramatically affect branding. And the graphical aspects of the site — such as logos or evocative pictures — have much less effect on branding than we expected.

User Interface Engineering (1999). Articles>Usability>Web Design

Bridging Conceptual Gaps

Many usability problems are instances of what we call 'conceptual gaps.' A conceptual gap arises because of some difference between the user’s mental model of the application and how the application actually works.If the gap is large enough, it can stop the user’s work. For example, a user who wants to search the web for free local concerts may not know how to formulate a query that will yield this information. The gap between the search engine’s syntax and the user’s understanding of that syntax may prevent the user from accomplishing their goal.

User Interface Engineering (1996). Articles>Usability>User Interface

The CAA: A Wicked Good Design Technique

Discusses Category Agreement Analysis, a card-sorting technique to help create usable information architectures.

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2003). Articles>Information Design>Content Strategy>Card Sorting

Crappy Personas vs. Robust Personas

If you're just going to guess on the personas, why bother? Just design for yourself, like the 37Signals team does. However, when you do the field studies, you create relationships with the people in your research. You can return to those people and ask them questions. You can learn about the things they do.

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2007). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas

The Customer Sieve

We've learned that using a web site is a progressive process. Each user transitions from one stage to the next, as they work to accomplish their goal. The most pronounced transitions we've seen are on e-commerce sites. When we watch shoppers focusing on buying a product, we can clearly see each stage and when the transitions fail or succeed. By understanding the stages and how they work, we can learn a lot about building better sites.

User Interface Engineering (2002). Design>Web Design

Design for Community: An Interview with Derek M. Powazek

Derek M. Powazek has worked on community features for Netscape, Nike, and Sony, along with creating the community sites, {fray}, Kvetch!, and SF Stories. Christine Perfetti, a consultant at User Interface Engineering, recently talked with Derek about his experience. Here is what he had to say about creating effective online communities.

Perfetti, Christine. User Interface Engineering (2002). Articles>Web Design>Community Building

Design Patterns: An Evolutionary Step to Managing Complex Sites

When your organization's web site or intranet has hundreds of contributors, how do you ensure that every page is high quality and extremely usable? Especially, if these contributors have never designed a web page before? This is a problem that many of our clients are facing and they've tried a myriad of solutions, such as centralized approval processes, standardized templates, and style guides, all without success. However, the one solution that really excites us is now gaining a lot of attention -- design patterns.

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering. Design>Web Design>Information Design

Designing A New Information Architecture: An interview with Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path

Last year, Adaptive Path, working with interactive media agency Lot21, took on a challenging project -- the redesign of three PeopleSoft sites. The redesign involved over 40,000 pages as well as 40 divergent opinions from stakeholders! After four and a half months, the site's information architecture and navigation were transformed to the accolades of both PeopleSoft and their users. We recently interviewed Peter about this project.

User Interface Engineering (2002). Design>Information Design>Web Design

Designing Embraceable Change

It's not that people resist change whole-scale. They just hate losing control and feeling stupid. When we make critical changes, we risk putting our users in that position. We must take care to ensure that we've considered the process of change as much as we've considered the technology changes themselves. Only then will we end up with changes that our users embrace.

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2005). Design>User Interface>Redesign>Usability

Determining How Design Affects Branding

Designers often tell us part of their responsibilities is to enhance the branding of a site, product, or organization. In recent years, we've focused our research on understanding how design can have a positive effect on a brand. In our research, we've learned that brands are an investment instrument. With a savings account, money is deposited so that interest accrues -- the investment grows over time.

User Interface Engineering (2002). Design>Web Design>Branding

Do Links Need Underlines?

During our recent Virtual Seminar on home page design, several people asked about whether it makes a difference if links are underlined or not. It's a good question and one we get frequently.

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2006). Design>Web Design>Usability>Interaction Design

Docs in the Real World

In two recent consulting projects, we worked with online documentation developers who wanted to understand the problems users encountered and how their documentation helped solve those problems. To find out, we went and observed users in their own work environments. Although the clients and their software differ significantly, we found similar issues.

User Interface Engineering (1998). Articles>Usability>Documentation

Driving Innovation and Creativity through Customer Data

This article explores the foundations of designing for innovation. Karen Holtzblatt has created contextual inquiry, a practical, customer-centered approach that helps designers develop creative solutions that dominate the competition.

Perfetti, Christine. User Interface Engineering (2002). Articles>Usability>Methods>Contextual Inquiry

Evolution Trumps Usability Guidelines

'Use a Search Box instead of a link to a Search page.' This is one guideline from the plethora of recently created usability guidelines to help designers produce more usable web sites. It makes sense. After all, there are more than 42 million web sites on the Internet. It should be simple to study these sites and put together a list of 'do's' and 'don'ts' that, when followed, will produce easy-to-use sites. Designing a web site, either usable or unusable, is hard work. There are many details that designers need to take into account, such as browser differences, content management, information architecture, and graphic design. Providing proven guidelines to developers can reduce their already overburdened workload, making one aspect of design that much simpler. However, we are assuming the guidelines actually result in more usable sites. This is where things start to get murky.

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2002). Design>Web Design>Usability

Field Studies: The Best Tool to Discover User Needs

The most valuable asset of a successful design team is the information they have about their users. When teams have the right information, the job of designing a powerful, intuitive, easy-to-use interface becomes tremendously easier. When they don't, every little design decision becomes a struggle. While techniques, such as focus groups, usability tests, and surveys, can lead to valuable insights, the most powerful tool in the toolbox is the 'field study'. Field studies get the team immersed in the environment of their users and allow them to observe critical details for which there is no other way of discovering.

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering. Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Usability

Five Paper Prototyping Tips

Prototyping is a quick way to incorporate direct feedback from real users into a design. Paper-based prototyping bypasses the time and effort required to create a working, coded user interface. Instead, it relies on very simple tools like paper, scissors, and stickies. Even in applications where new technologies are deployed, paper provides maximum speed and flexibility.

Klee, Matthew. User Interface Engineering (2000). Design>Usability>Prototyping

Five Survival Techniques for Creating Usable Products

When we ask designers what stage they spend the bulk of their time in when launching a product, the majority of designers answer, the Implementation Stage. However, our research shows that the teams launching the most usable products on schedule and on budget spend the bulk of their time in the Measure and Learn stage.

Perfetti, Christine. User Interface Engineering (2007). Design>Usability>User Interface>Methods

Five-Second Tests: Measuring Your Site's Content Pages

On your site, the content page is the user's most frequent final destination. This page contains the information the user came to the site to find. Sites often have hundreds, if not thousands (and in some cases, millions) of these critical pages. How can design teams be confident their content pages are understandable to users? How does a team ensure they've designed content pages that communicate the essential information effectively?

Perfetti, Christine. User Interface Engineering (2005). Articles>Web Design>Usability>User Centered Design

Flash + Information Visualization = Great User Experiences

By combining tools like Flash and information visualization, designers can dramatically improve how users work with large, multidimensional data sets.

Klee, Matthew. User Interface Engineering (2002). Design>Web Design>Interactive>Flash

Flash Strikes Back: Creating Powerful Web Applications

Flash is a powerful tool that offers developers huge capabilities. Until recently, developers mostly utilized Flash's strengths to create complex animations or fast-loading movies. However, the most recent versions of Flash offer developers power that's far beyond the tool's original scope. With the advent of Flash MX, we've seen that developers have the power to create web applications with more sophisticated client- and server-side interactivity. When integrated with sophisticated server-side software like ColdFusion Server and JRun, Flash delivers the power and flexibility to become a serious contender in the web application space.

Perfetti, Christine. User Interface Engineering (2002). Design>Web Design>Interactive>Flash

The Freedom of Fast Iterations: How Netflix Designs a Winning Web Site

The designers of Netflix.com have a smashing success on their hands, but we didn't find them resting on their laurels. They want to get even better, and for them that means iterate, iterate, iterate. Netflix isn't the only company using a fast iterative design approach. Google has also gained attention for their unorthodox design methods, with many people complaining that they have a huge stable of products, but only a few they've designed well.

Porter, Joshua. User Interface Engineering (2006). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Workflow

Galleries: The Hardest Working Page on Your Site

Galleries -- the list of links to content -- are your site's hardest working pages. They are the final page that separates those users who find the content they are seeking from the users who won't. A well-designed gallery page will drive users to success every time. A poorly-designed site will only serve to drive users away.

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2005). Design>Web Design>Usability