Smashing UX Design

Category: UX Design

This extended category features quality articles on usability, user experience (UX) design and information architecture. The section contains practical articles and case studies written by professionals and experts in the field. Curated by Francisco Inchauste. Subscribe to the RSS-Feed.

Popular tags in this category: Usability, Design, User Experience, UI, Psychology, Process, E-Commerce, Content.

Getting Started With Defensive Web Design

Nothing ruins a great website UI like people using it. At least, it often feels that way. You put in days or weeks building the interface, only to find that a vast majority of visitors abandon it partway through the process that it supports. Most of the time, visitors leave because they’ve hit a roadblock: a problem that lets them go no further. They typed their credit card number wrong or clicked the wrong link or mistyped a URL. And it's not their fault.

A good design assumes that people make mistakes. A bad one leaves visitors stuck at a dead end because they mistyped one character. The best professionals account for this with smart, defensive design strategies (also known as contingency design).

Print Loves Web

A recent power cut highlighted the fragile and dated way I access content on the Web. I sit in front of a computer which has a number of hardware elements like a keyboard, mouse and monitor — all connected to a black box which houses a number of other smaller more complicated bits of hardware. To access content on the Web, I rely on all of these layers working, not to mention the parts outside of my control-like cabling and remote servers.

There was nothing for it but to pick up a book to try and satisfy my visual hunger. With all other distractions (the kinds that need juice from the wall) lying lifeless around my flat, I was able to really enjoy a book I’d been meaning to look at for some time. With many image filled pages the large hardback book (Supply and Demand by Shepard Fairey) was a real joy. Controlling the speed at which I let the pages flick with my thumb, the smell of the ink and paper and the subtle cracking noise of the spine as I opened the book wider, it was the best user experience I’d had in a very long time.

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Optimizing Emotional Engagement In Web Design Through Metrics

Think about what keeps you coming back to your favorite store, your favorite person or even your favorite website. It’s not just a mindless buy-go, hug-go or click-go relationship. It is a complicated, emotional connection. It is what makes relationships with people and brands intoxicating. User engagement must have an equally complex emotional connection. It must affect the user in mind, body and spirit. Anything less is a 1990s brochure website.

You can create strong storytelling strategies based on user personalities and segmentation. However, it seems almost impossible to measure those efforts, let alone know how to optimize them, without access to a neuroscience laboratory. In fact, emotional engagement can be optimized, and quite effectively, using something already at your disposal: performance metrics.

Innovative Techniques To Simplify Sign-Ups and Log-Ins

By Anthony T
May 5th, 2011
Captcha, Design, Forms
149 Comments

There are many ways to design sign-up and log-in forms. Most designers are familiar with the conventional ways. But understanding and applying a few innovative techniques could make your forms simpler and more efficient to fill out. In this article, we'd like to present a couple of new ideas that might be useful for your next designs. Please notice that before using these techniques, you should make sure that they make sense in the context in which you are going to use them. We'd love to hear about your case-studies and usability tests that affirm or dismiss the suggestions proposed below.

The purpose of every sign-up form is for users to complete it successfully and send it in. However, if the form is long and complicated, then the user’s excitement for your website could turn to displeasure. Here are a few innovative techniques that will make your forms faster and easier to fill out.

A User-Centered Approach To Web Design For Mobile Devices

For the past few years, we've heard pundits declaring each year as "year of the mobile Web"; each year trying to sound more convincing than the previous. Whether 2011 will be the real "year of the mobile" remains to be seen, but what is indisputable is the fact that the mobile usage of the Web is growing and evolving. As it evolves, so does the mobile user experience, driven by advances in mobile device technology — from better browsers on basic mobile phones (or feature phones — remember the Motorola RAZR?) to the increased adoption of smartphones and tablets.

The term "Mobile Web" (although often criticized) is commonly used to describe accessing the internet using a mobile device. This definition is broad enough to cover everything from using a browser on a feature phone, to using highly customized apps on smartphones or tablets.

Mobile Auto-Suggest on Steroids: Tap-Ahead Design Pattern

In contrast to desktop Web search, auto-suggest on mobile devices is subject to two additional limitations: typing avoidance and slower bandwidth. The new patent-pending design pattern, Tap-Ahead, uses continuous refinement to create an intuitive, authentically mobile auto-suggest solution. This helps dramatically reduce the amount of typing needed to enter queries, and utilizes slower mobile bandwidth in the most efficient manner. Using this novel design pattern, your customers can quickly access thousands of popular search term combinations by typing just a few initial characters.

As John Ferrara wrote in his November 2010 UXMagazine article, "Psychic Search: a quick primer on search suggestions", today auto-suggest is practically ubiquitous in desktop Web search. In contrast to desktop Web, auto-suggest on mobile is (at least for now) fairly rare. The only mobile Website that currently implements auto-suggest is Google.com, and a handful of mobile auto-suggest implementations that currently exist come from native mobile apps built by leading online retailers like Amazon and Booking.com.

Fundamental Guidelines Of E-Commerce Checkout Design

Here is the harsh reality of e-commerce websites: according to recent e-commerce studies, at least 59.8% of potential customers abandon their shopping cart (MarketingSherpa puts it at 59.8%, SeeWhy at 83% and MarketLive at 62.14%). The main question is why do customers abandon their shopping cart so often? Is there some fundamental mistake that designers of e-commerce websites do very often? Are there any common guidelines or rules of thumbs that make it more difficult for our users to purchase products? And is there some meaningful way to improve the conversion rates for our products?

Well, that's exactly what we wanted to find out. In 2010, we recruited a batch of Web users and conducted a usability study, focusing only on the checkout user experience, from “Cart” to “Completed order.” The study was conducted using the “think aloud” protocol and was documented by recording everything that happened on the computer screen. The behavior of the test subjects was then analyzed by scrutinizing these recordings at a later date.

Why User Experience Cannot Be Designed

A lot of designers seem to be talking about user experience (UX) these days. We’re supposed to delight our users, even provide them with magic, so that they love our websites, apps and start-ups. User experience is a very blurry concept. Consequently, many people use the term incorrectly. Furthermore, many designers seem to have a firm (and often unrealistic) belief in how they can craft the user experience of their product. However, UX depends not only on how something is designed, but also other aspects. In this article, I will try to clarify why UX cannot be designed.

I recently visited the elegant website of a design agency. The website looked great, and the agency has been showcased several times. I am sure it delivers high-quality products. But when it presents its UX work, the agency talks about UX as if it were equal to information architecture (IA): site maps, wireframes and all that. This may not be fundamentally wrong, but it narrows UX to something less than what it really is.