UX Magazine

Content Maintenance: Keeping up appearances

Melissa Rach — Wed, 23 May 2012 10:40:31 GMT

Unlike its functionality and design, the content of a website can be changed quickly and easily. Anyone with a CMS login and an idea has the keys to the castle. When web content is developed and maintained effectively, it’s a huge asset to the user experience, but poor content maintenance is the quickest way to wreck the whole thing.

We’ve all been there. You launch something big—a website or a ground-breaking app. The business is happy. The users are happy. You sit back and look at your work; it’s pristine, perfect. Or, at least it’s the best it could be considering the ridiculous timeline, budget, and requirements.

Fast-forward six months, and things have changed. A bunch of new content has been added in awkward places. Other things are exactly how you left them, but they were supposed to be updated regularly. You ask yourself, “Why did they add an entirely new category of information just six months after launch? Why is the ‘help’ text different? What’s the deal...read more
By Melissa Rach

Your Logo Is Making Me Sick

Jonathan Anderson — Tue, 22 May 2012 11:25:43 GMT

Years ago, my mother got a nasty case of food poisoning from an order of chicken tikka at a restaurant. For years after that, if I’d sneak up behind her and say, “Chicken tikka!” she’d crumple into a bout of dry heaves.

Translating that into biz-speak, any brand affinity she had for chicken tikka was obliterated by a critical failure event in the meal’s service delivery. Her reaction to the two words “chicken tikka” altered radically from, “Delicious in my mouth!” to, well… something opposite.

That incident has been on my mind a lot ever since I purchased a Vizio television. One of the strange signs of the times is that televisions, being increasingly computerized with apps and image correction features, occasionally crash and have to reboot. This might be evidence that we’re reaching the limits of the convergence...read more
By Jonathan Anderson

Midwest Readers: Free ticket available for Conversion Conference - Chicago

UX Magazine Staff — Mon, 21 May 2012 11:08:44 GMT

The organizers of the 2012 Conversion Conference: Chicago have generously offered up a free two day full conference pass (worth $1,995 onsite) to the conference to UX Magazine readers.

The full pass includes: breakfast, all educational sessions, all keynotes, presentation slides, roundtable lunches with speakers, speakers and sponsor special offers and discounts, evening receptions, expo hall pass, and conversion Conference bag and show guide.

The conference is June 25-26, so time is short. If you're interested attending, you can enter to win via Twitter by answering this simple question:

What's one of the unique challenges/opportunities in the midwestern UX job market?

How to Enter

Make sure you're ...read more
By UX Magazine Staff

UX Sessions at Conversion Conference’s First Midwest Show

UX Magazine Staff — Mon, 21 May 2012 11:05:43 GMT

UX Magazine (via Jeremiah Cohick) attended Conversion Conference San Francisco last March, where the program included presentations from experts in UX-related fields, including BJ Fogg, Steve Krug, Jared Spool, and Roger Dooley, among others. This June, Conversion Conference (ConvCon) is arriving in Chicago for the very first time on June 25-26. We combed ConvCon’s two-day agenda for UX-related sessions to help attendees prioritize their time:

Tim Ash, SiteTuners CEO and author of Landing Page Optimization, will give a keynote presentation on Monday the 25th on “understanding the brain’s need for novelty and shortcuts,” which will emphasize the neuroscientific aspect of human motivations and behavior. Psychology, neuroscience, and persuasive design are all hot topics in UX now, so this...read more
By UX Magazine Staff

Designing Search: As-You-Type Suggestions

Tony Russell-Rose — Wed, 16 May 2012 10:48:23 GMT

Have you ever tried the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on Google? It’s meant to take you directly to the result you want, rather than return a list of results. It’s a simple idea, and when it works it seems like magic.

But most of the time we are not so lucky. We submit a query and review the results, only to find they’re not quite what we were looking for. Occasionally, we review a further page or two of results, but in most cases it’s quicker just to enter a new query and try again. In fact, this pattern of behaviour is so common that techniques have been developed specifically to help us along this part of our information journey. In particular, three versions of as-you-type suggestions— auto-complete, auto-suggest, and instant results—subtly guide us in creating and...read more
By Tony Russell-Rose

Taking Mobile Global:Tips for Aligning Mobile and Global Web Strategies

John Yunker — Tue, 15 May 2012 10:56:08 GMT

With more than 55 million iPads in use around the world and more than 400 million smartphones sold in 2011, companies are increasingly thinking “mobile first” when developing their web and mobile app strategies.

Hotels.com, for example, offers not only a mobile-optimized website but mobile apps specific to both the iPad and iPhone.

Unfortunately, as companies rush to go mobile, they often overlook the importance of maintaining their global reach. That is, their mobile...read more
By John Yunker

6 Key Questions to Guide International UX Research

Liang Zhang, Pamela Walshe, Elizabeth Shelly — Thu, 10 May 2012 10:43:05 GMT

Are you worried about how customers in other countries will react to your product or service? Not really sure who your international customers even are, or what they want and need? To find out, it might be time to pop outside the domestic market and conduct an international user research study.

Understanding international customers is more critical than ever as emerging market economies continue their rapid expansion. With Internet and mobile usage in particular, the recent adoption rates have been astonishing. China reported 513 million Internet users by the end of 2011¹—an increase of 30% since 2009—with nearly 70% of them accessing the Internet using handheld devices. Meanwhile, in the next decade seven emerging economies including China, India, and Brazil, are on track to...read more
By Liang Zhang, Pamela Walshe, Elizabeth Shelly

Combining In-Person and Remote Research

Sabina Idler — Tue, 08 May 2012 11:11:26 GMT

In the early 90’s, Jakob Nielsen declared in-person user research as state of the art. “User testing with real users is the most fundamental usability method and is in some sense irreplaceable, since it provides direct information about how people use computers [...]”.¹ Sometimes in-person user research can be logistically impractical or cost prohibitive, so remote user research is often employed as an alternative. As well, companies that specialize in user research often combine both in-person and remote user research.

In-person user research has been around the longest, and is still widely used as a great way to gather feedback on websites, advertisements, or software. In-person research usually involves letting users perform tasks on a computer while asking them questions,...read more
By Sabina Idler

New Design Practices for Touch-free Interactions

Brian Pagán — Mon, 07 May 2012 10:50:24 GMT

Touch interaction has become practically ubiquitous in developed markets, and that has changed users' expectations and the way UX practitioners think about human–computer interaction (HCI). Now, touch-free gestures and Natural Language Interaction (NLI) are bleeding into the computing mainstream the way touch did years ago. These will again disrupt UX, from the heuristics that guide us, to our design patterns and deliverables.

HCI Is Getting "All Shook Up"

With touch, people were given a more natural, intuitive way to interact with computing devices. As it moved into the mainstream, it opened up new interaction paradigms. Touch-free gestures and NLI, while not...read more
By Brian Pagán

Content as Conversation

Ginny Redish — Fri, 04 May 2012 09:42:21 GMT

Every use of your website is a conversation started by a site visitor.

Think about it: why do people come to your site or app?

IA, Search, Design, and Technology All Support the Content

Site visitors and app users come for the content. Of course, the information architecture (IA) and the site search must make that content easy to find. The design must be attractive and usable. The technology must work.

But IA, search, design, and technology are all there to support the content that people come for: the words and images that make up the conversations between your visitors and your site or app.

Planning Successful Conversations

Planning is critical for successful conversations. I find that answering these three questions helps greatly for everything I write (even...read more
By Ginny Redish