More than Numbers

Highlighting new functionality

Your website is always changing. Obviously, not all changes you make are obvious to the user. There are countless non-UI changes to be made; improving the algorithms that run behind the scenes or adding new non-obvious functionality. You want to promote these changes for a few reasons. The first being that hopefully your changes will improve customer behavior so you want users to be aware of the changes and ultimately become happier users. The second being to reverse conditioned responses. Just as Pavlov showed us many years ago, it is feasible that users found some part of your site so broken that they conditioned themselves to no longer using it. To reverse that response you must show them that things have changed and that maybe they should give it a second shot.

So what is the best best way to inform your users?

One way I've always supported doing this is having a blog. There are so many successful examples of this that I doubt I'd really need to list off specific examples.

But there is a slight problem with this approach. Let's take a look at some assumptions: 1: your audience understands what a blog is; 2: your audience knows how to subscribe to a feed; 3: your audience actually does subscribe to your feed. Even assuming these clauses are all true, this does not necessarily imply that they are up to date reading your feed (heck, I'm scared to admit how many unread items I have sitting in my feed reader right now).

I think Linked In figured out a pretty cool way of highlighting changes to their site. Literally. With highlighting. As you use the site, tiny unobstrusive popups with information on new functionality pointing specifically to the change made. There is no ambiguity as to what has changed and they really don't get in the way of your interactive flow. A very elegant solution.

Short registration forms.

Designing registration forms is never anyones favorite task, especially for ad-supported social networks. For these situations, it often becomes a dramatic tug of war between interaction designers, usability folk, and ad sales. The interaction designers and usability experts obviously want as simple of a registration flow as possible in order to increase conversion but ad sales would love to add as many form fields as possible. Ad folk usually don't care about the user experience (which really doesn't make too much sense).

But wait. Isn't everyone just trying to get new users acquired?

If you asked someone in advertising they would say something like more users are OK, but what they really need are the demographics of their users in order to target better ads and get a higher click through rate.

All that being said, there are some sites that break the mold: like that of Squarespace. It'd be tough to make this form any easier. As far as blogging platforms go, it's the holy grail of usability and ease of use:

15 seconds! Compare this to any other social networking site, and you'll begin to see what I mean. Some sites even have the audacity to make you confirm your email address before you can sign up. Forget about multiple pages and an unknown number of steps-- we're talking about leaving your session and opening up your email! Why have the possibility for countless leaks in your conversion funnel? It makes no sense!

Although it might be better for advertisers, you have to draw a line between their needs and the needs and user experience of your users. As far as users are concerned, they don't see the reason for knowing what zip code they're in, how old they are, or what their gender is if all they want to do is start a free blog. Remember, happy users are loyal users. And even a smaller number of loyal users will be much more lucrative than a bunch of drop-off users. But my guess is you'll end up having a greater number of happy users if the experience is there.

Of course, what might make users WANT to fill out extra demographic fields would be some kind of incentive. Perhaps a revenue share? If users received a percentage of advertising revenue their site generated, then of course they'd want to do everything in their power to help increase revenue. Otherwise, it's all just more effort for little reward.

Awesome wireframe stencils

While looking for some great Wireframe stencils recently, I stumbled upon Michael Angeles' templates available on his website. The stencil set is wonderful and really makes creating wireframes quick and "easy" in Omnigraffle Pro.

Talking of wireframes, I remember a time when I didn't think they were necessary for smaller projects. Although this might be true, it's definitely not the path that I recommend. During any design process you're bound to make many changes. It's much easier to make these changes while in the design phase than after you started coding. You'll end up with a more streamlined result if you don't rush through the design phase.

You need to think about the user experience before any design elements are in place. Think of the flow. Does it make sense? Think about the intent of each and every page before you type your first line of code.

Take all the time you need.

I'm a huge fan of clever messaging within web apps. 404 pages and "down for maintenance" pages might be the first places one would think to revamp in a fun way, but I just noticed that twitter found a great way to make waiting a bit easier.

This message pops up when searching your gmail contacts for people already on twitter. I've seen people complain about the wait for processes like this to complete, but twitter found a way to make the wait seem worthwhile. Turning a negative (waiting) into a positive (you must be popular). After all, how can you be mad at that?

Bringing a smile or chuckle from a user interacting with your site (especially during an obstacle like waiting for a process to complete) is a great sign of a positive user interaction.