TV isn’t what it used to be. Once the cornerstone glowing screen in households around the world, television sets now jockey for attention with tablets, smartphones, desktop computers, and even some refrigerators.

The television experience of yore—flipping through the channels and settling on whatever is reasonably entertaining, or tuning in at a specific time to watch your favorite show—has almost faded completely. Now we DVR our programs of choice, or binge watch them through our preferred streaming service. In a race to keep fresh content rolling out, odds are that service has added “production house” to its repertoire.

These are truly strange and glorious days for content providers and consumers alike. Forty years ago, if you wanted to watch the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards, you had to tune in at a specific time. Things changed in the late ‘70s when VCR technology entered the mainstream (though programming a VCR was confusing enough that you often felt the need...read more
By Dallas Sargent | Design for Experience

             

There are few things as tricky as a good prototype.

Prototyping is done with equal parts ambiguity, research, design, and courage, and enough technical know-how to push the boundaries of what’s possible. Some see prototyping as a “preliminary model”, something to tweak and get right (i.e. the materials, the code, the processes, etc.) before productizing or mass-producing. But I like to think of a prototype as a poem. Doubts and assertions and serendipity are all wrapped up in the making of a prototype. It’s a tangible question you pose to the world.

I’ve worked on a variety of software and hardware prototypes over the last 15 years, but I’ve been writing poems for more than 30 years. Write poems for that long and it doesn’t just color the way you see the world, it becomes a kind of framework, a reflex. I remember the first poem I wrote in college—not what it was about or how it sounded (I’m fairly certain it was...read more
By Matt Yurdana

             

"Don't you love the way companies find you and spam you daily the moment you make a sideways glance towards one of their products?" Indrani Stangl asks us. It's a good question. It's all too easy to get sucked into a newsletter situation. Some of them are good, many of them are all kinds of blight. Here, Stangl goes deeper into the unsubcribe dilemma.

My inbox, like everyone else's, is brimming with newsletters, offers, coupons, and other nonsense. Why I would take the time to read a newsletter by a staffer at 'Nothing Bundt Cakes' (don't get me started on ridiculous company names) or the place I purchased dog poop bags from, is beyond me. Generally speaking I filter these directly into my trash file, but every once in a while, enough is enough. I take the time to click the 'unsubscribe' link that is in .00001 type at the very bottom of their message.

Then starts the drill....read more
By Josh Tyson | UX Magazine

             

Big data is all the rage. It’s discussed at heavily conventions all over the world and written about on blogs across industries. Big data is starting to look like an inevitable mechanism for doing business in the always-on, ever-connected, Internet-of-Things era that is upon us. Big data is here to guide our corporate decisions, save our business’ money, and direct our experience design initiatives in every way.

When it comes to UX, before we jump on the big data bandwagon, we need to challenge its predominance. UX professionals cannot create an experience for figures in a database or tracking systems, and designers must keep focusing on real people rather than on numbers. Online experiences must remain geared toward real users and their interests, goals, and desires.

What About the Numbers?

Many companies and their marketing departments have...read more
By Maya Nix

             

Coffee and running are addictive in their own unique ways. Each provides a buzz that keeps people coming back for more. In kind, Runkeeper and Starbucks don’t just help people feed their addictions; these apps are as habit-forming as the behaviors they supplement.

Due to its goal-based reward system, Runkeeper’s users don’t feel like their run “counts” unless it’s tracked within the app. And due to Starbucks’ loyalty-based reward system, customers feel compelled to purchase with the app because they don’t want to miss out on the rewards and VIP status that come with being a regular customer.

When apps aren’t addictive, users open them one time, explore for a few minutes, and promptly delete them from their devices. Depending on your industry,...read more
By Bobby Emamian

             

As an industry, we’ve worked to established many new practices and tools for nimble design teams, from A/B testing to measuring bounce rates and CTR performance. But a lot of these methods require engineers or some amount of technical know-how to execute, and they take place only after something has been launched.

The judicious application of “dumb data” can streamline your workflow and improve your designs

What many people don’t know is that there are some unexpected applications of data to consider earlier in the design process, which you, the designer, can do yourself. They’re not fancy, and you don’t need to know how to write SQL queries. The judicious application of just-enough “dumb data” can streamline your workflow and improve your designs in surprisingly useful ways.

Here are...read more
By Jocelyn Lin

             

When I compose a document—any document, in almost any application—I can choose a font size in increments. But Google has decided what sizes are appropriate for me. It's like the Starbuck's approach to fonts: Short, Tall, Grande, Venti.

​

In my opinion, "small" is too small, and so is "normal." Plus the term "normal" makes me feel shame for my old eyeballs. "Large" is too big, and "Huge" is just completely ridiculous.

Why can't Google be "normal" and give us more choices?

​wtfUX ​Google!?

Keep these coming. Send them to us via Twitter or Facebook using the hastag #wtfUX or email them...read more
By Indrani Stangl

             

Good design in any discipline usually carries a structure of order and harmony. Since the Renaissance, artists and architects have used a strong understanding of proportions to create aesthetically pleasing architecture. Many of these classical design principles have followed us into modern times and can be found today in effective web design.

Take an A4 piece of paper for example. If you take it and halve it, the resulting size is A5 with the same exact proportions. No other proportion has the same properties. 16th century architect, Andrea Palladio knew this well. It is believed that because, fundamentally, most architects—like Palladio—use a similar system of proportions to plan and design spaces, buildings can look very different while remaining similar at their cores.

Structure and Beauty

It’s in human nature to...read more
By Ling Lim

             

Paying roadway tolls is a taxing experience by its very nature. And while the frustration of waiting in line to throw a handful of coins into a basket has been mitigated by the implementation of RFID transponders that let people pay fees without stopping, replenishing funds on online can start to feel purgatorial in its own right.

As reader Ben Mackie points out: "The North Carolina toll website is maddening. They give you five different dollar amounts and they don't store your CC/preferred payment method"

This is already confusing

...read more
By Josh Tyson | UX Magazine

             

By their very nature, heuristics offer a hands-on approach to discovery, where knowledge is culled through trial and error. They are rules of thumb that give us a framework as we move through the research and design process.

In service design, this kind of framework is also valuable for assessing completed projects to find the weak links. A heuristic can apply to a single interaction as well as to the overall service eco-system. Heuristics can be applied to a single moment in time or to a user’s entire long-term relationship with a service.

This conceptual approach to design recognizes that experiences are coproduced, and that human interaction is a key component of many, if not all, services. As systems grow ever more sophisticated and interconnected, designers will continue to face new challenges. Service design heuristics can help us to frame and think about...read more
By Usability Matters

             

One way of determining that is with a customer journey map. Being able to visualize the path a customer takes while interacting with your product is a powerful thing.

A few weeks ago I interviewed Marc Stickdorn on this topic. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:

The journey map is as good as the data we use to create it. When we talk about journey mapping and getting everybody on the same page, we also need to make sure that the customer has a word in there. That means that we either have data about the customer, solid data, not so much talking about content of data, but rather qualitative research methods, ethnographic research, to really understand, “What is their experience?” from a customer perspective, step-by-step throughout the whole journey. Then based on this data, we can start to redesign or improve it.

Listen to the full interview with Marc or read the transcript.

In Marc Stickdorn’s workshop, Service Design: Creating Delightful Cross-Channel Experiences, you’ll learn how to:

• Redesign the service experience using journey maps as the starting point
• Map customer satisfaction and engagement throughout the customer journey
• Sketch possible solutions to improve on top-priority problem areas in the journey
• Make cheap, fast prototypes to test in the context of the service situation

See what else you’ll do during Marc’s full day workshop at the User Interface Conference, November 2 in Boston.

The optimization industry is plagued most by a  poor acronym: CRO. Here is my reasoning for changing this damaging moniker.

The Importance of Acronyms

The three letter acronym (TLA) used to define an industry or organization is crucial to its success.

We all know of organizations who’ve been carried by their TLA. IBM comes immediately to mind. Here is a company that is universally recognized by its TLA. More recently, the search engine optimization industry has enjoyed significant success with the SEO TLA.

Industries with poor TLAs have fared much worse. Remember the WOM industry? Neither do we. In fact the entire social media industry has fallen on hard times due in part to the lack of a compelling TLA. SMM? Please! It’s basically a mumble.

Several industries have even consolidated their TLAs in an effort to get traction. Social media teamed up with local search and mobile to create Social Local Mobile, or SLM. When this didn’t work, they tried to slip a few more letters in. Hey, SoLoMo people, lower-case letters are still letters! This is really an acronym haiku.

Today, the TLA for the conversion optimization industry is CRO, or Conversion Rate Optimization. This is a sad moniker for a set of disciplines that offers so much promise. The conversion rate is the number of transactions or leads generated divided by the traffic for a given period of time. It is a metric of optimization, not the thing we are optimizing. Anyone can easily increase the conversion rate of any ecommerce site by cutting all prices in half. This would bankrupt almost any business, however.

Why Conversion Rate? It’s like naming our industry Bounce Rate Optimization (BRO) or Revenue Per Visit Optimization (RPVO). No, we don’t optimize conversion rates alone, so CRO is fundamentally flawed.

CRO Alternatives

Despite the cool allusion to a black carrion bird, it cannot stand. We can say we optimize for conversion, and could call the industry “CO”, but a quick letter count reveals that this is a two-letter acronym (TA). We spend most of our time optimizing websites, so website optimization, or WSO would work. But we have to come clean and admit that “website” is just one word, and “WO” is a TA. Furthermore, WSO is owned by the World Safety Organization, so the Association of Three Letter Acronym Selection and Transfer (ATLASt) likely wouldn’t grant it to us.

We can upgrade our TAs to TLAs by adding ancillary words. Online Conversion Optimization gives us OCO. Since we’re really optimizing for revenue, we might embrace Online Revenue Optimization, or ORO. We could use the SoLoMo approach and call it OReO, but the makers of a certain sandwich cookie may take issue with this.

Submit Your Ideas to ATLASt

We request that you submit your ideas for a new TLA to ATLASt. This organization is basically the ICANN of three-letter acronyms. Please note that it is an official MUO.

Submit your ideas on behalf of your organization or you as an individual. It doesn’t matter to the application process.

If we get enough conflict generated, ATLASt will have to do a poll to determine the proper TLA for our industry.

DON’T DELAY. SUBMIT YOUR TLA TO REPLACE CRO.

Join the Cross-out Protest

In addition, I recommend that you write CRO with the “R” crossed out anytime you use it on the web. This is our visible protest. Here is the HTML:

C<strike>R</strike>O

or

C<span style=”text-decoration:line-through;”>R</span>O

Use this in your blog posts, marketing or anywhere you want people to know that YOU DO NOT OPTIMIZE CONVERSION RATE ALONE.

Brian Massey is the Founder and Conversion Scientist at Conversion Sciences. He is the author of Your Customer Creation Equation. His rare combination of interests, experience and neuroses were developed over almost 20 years as a computer programmer, entrepreneur, corporate marketer, international speaker and writer.

The post A Call to End CRO Forever appeared first on The Conversion Scientist.

David Eagleman wearing the sensory vest

Jason is 20 years old and he’s deaf. He puts on a special vest that’s wired so that when it receives data, it sends pulses to his back.

The vest is connected to a tablet. When I say the word “book” into a microphone that feeds into the tablet, the tablet turns the word into a signal that is sent to the vest. Jason now feels a pattern on his back through his sense of touch. Initially, he can’t tell you what the word is. I keep saying words and he keeps feeling the patterns. Eventually, he’ll be able to tell me the words that he’s hearing. His brain learns to take the pattern and translate that into words.

The interesting thing is that this happens unconsciously. He doesn’t have to consciously work at learning the patterns.

This describes an actual project by David Eagleman, a neuroscientist from the Baylor College of Medicine.

Sensory Substitution — Eagleman calls it sensory substitution. Information comes into your body and brain from your eyes, ears, touch, and so on. But did you know that the brain is actually quite flexible and plastic in this regard? When data from the environment comes in, from any of the senses, the brain figures out the best way to analyze and interpret it. Sometimes you’re consciously aware of the data and its meaning, but most of the time your brain is analyzing data and using that data to make decisions, and you don’t even realize it.

Sensory Addition — Eagleman takes the idea of sensory substitution a step further, to sensory addition. He has people (without hearing impairments) put on the vest. He takes stock market data and uses the same program on the tablet to turn the stock market data into patterns, and sends those patterns to the vest. The people wearing the vest don’t know what the patterns are about. They don’t even know it has anything to do with the stock market. He then hands them another tablet where a screen periodically appears with a big red button and a big green button.

Eagleman tells them to press a button when the colors appear. At first they have no idea why they should press one button versus the other. They’re told to press a button anyway, and when they do, they get feedback about whether they’re wrong or right, even though they have no idea what they are wrong or right about. The buttons are actually buy and sell decisions (red is buy, green is sell) that are related to the data they’re receiving, but they don’t know that.

Eventually, however, their button presses go from random to being right all the time, even though they still don’t know anything consciously about the patterns. Eagleman is essentially sending big data to people’s bodies, and their brains interpret the data and make decisions from it—all unconsciously.

Engaging the unconcsious for big data — Big data refers to large data sets that are combed for predictive analytics. The idea is that if you can collect massive amounts of data, even disparate data, and analyze it for patterns, you can learn important information and make decisions based on that information. Data sets of Internet searches, Twitter messages, meteorology, and more are being collected and analyzed. But how do you convey the information in a way that makes sense? How can you get the human mind to see patterns in what at first seems like meaningless data? The conscious thought process is not very good at this task. The conscious mind can handle only a small subset of data at one time, but the unconscious is great at taking in large amounts of data and finding patterns. If you want to see the patterns in big data, you have to engage the unconscious.

A Sensory Room — Other scientists are also working on the idea. Jonathan Freeman, a professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Paul Verschure, a professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, have created the eXperience Induction Machine (XIM). The XIM is a room with speakers, projectors, projection screens, pressure-sensitive floor tiles, infrared cameras, and a microphone. A person stands in the room and big data visualizations appear on the screen. Freeman and Verschure monitor the response of the person in the room through a headset. They can tell when the person is getting overloaded or tired, and then they can make the visuals simpler.

Go direct — When you work with big data, consider the idea of bypassing complex visual analysis and how to represent the data analytically. It’s probably better to feed the data directly to sense organs and let the brain do the analytics.

For more information — Here’s a great TED Talk by Dr. Eagleman

If you liked this article, check out my new book, which covers this topic and 99 others! It’s shipping any day now.