Understanding Your Users

One of the most important things you need to do when starting to design is trying to understand who your users are. Resist if you are told to design “for anybody”, this way you design will be good for nobody. Choose a target population even if you think that other people will use your site as well. Find out everything you can about your target audience.

In addition, you can consider your users computer savvy. Generally people think of users divided into 2 groups: beginners (people who hardly use computer) and experts (people who are fluent). This is not a realistic division.

It’s better to think about it this way:

1. There are people generally computer savvy.

2. People that know how to perform particular task, for example HR work.

3. People that know the particular software, but not fluent in other areas.

This type of scale will help you to position your users more correctly.

Designing for Wide Audiences

There are couple of things to keep in mind when designing a UI for consumers. And one of the most important is an unfortunate fact that about 40% of general population has low literacy. Keeping that in mind, design most pages for 6 grade level. Some other tips:

1.Make navigation simple by placing main choices in a linear menu

2. Take care that search is tolerant of missplennings

3. Prioritize information

4. Avoid moving, jumping, changing text – it makes it harder to read.

What’s important for Homepage?

Users spend very little time on Homepage. If the user is experienced, it can be as little as 25 seconds. What do you need to show them in this short period of time? Obviously, users don’t read long paragraphs of text. Most of those precious seconds are spent on figuring out where to go next. So the time needs to be used very wisely. Here are the most important thing the Homepage has to accomplish:

1. The user has to see immediately what site they arrived at and what is the purpose of it.

2. What benefits this site offers to the user.

3. How to get to the most relevant part of the site.

4. Information about the company and new offerings.

All these things have to be accomplished in seconds!

What Is Usability?

“The term “usable” means more then just easy to learn. Ease of learning is an important component of usability, but it is the least important of three components. To be usable, the product also has to be quick to use and relatively error-free. Most importantly, you must do what the user wants… Usability refers to three different components: the product does what you need it to do, it does that quickly and safely, and, last, it is easy to learn…”
- From the book by Jeff Johnson “GUI Bloopers”

Typical Business Metrics for Website Success

For your website to be a success you need 3 components: a) new visitors coming to your site, b) these new visitors to become customers, c) the loyalty of your customers.

This is how it’s usually measured:

1. The number of the sells

2. Traffic numbers – page view statistics

3. Time needed for visitors to perform their tasks

4. Number of visitors that click on important links

Why use standard design elements?

In their book “Prioritizing Web Usability” Jackob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger make a strong case for using standard design elements. The book’s copyright is 2006, but this issue is still seems relevant. Here is a little box from the book that states the main points:

Seven Reasons for Standard Design Elements.

Standards ensure that users:

1. Know what features to expect

2. Know how these features will look in the interface

3. Know where to find these features on the site and on the page

4. Know how to operate each feature to achieve their goal

5. Don’t need to ponder the meaning of unknown design elements

6. Don’t miss important features because they overlook the design element that is not standard.

7. Don’t get nasty surprises when something doesn’t work as expected

5 Reasons Why Users Can’t Complete Their Tasks

Average users can’t always complete what they started and leave websites in frustration, never returning again. Why is it happening and what are the main offenders in UI of those websites?

Here are the top 5 usability problems that caused incomplete or wrongly done tasks:

1. Information Architecture – user doesn’t know where to go and what will happen when they get there.
2. Badly done search. Big percent of users go to Search to find what they need. If they can’t, they go to the other site where it would be easier.
3. Insufficient product info for the sites that attempt to sell something. If user doesn’t have all the information they need about the product to feel confident, they don’t buy.
4. Content on the site is too confusing and fluffy. When writing for the web, the content should be very short and to the point – users read just a few words out od paragraph on average.
5. Workflow – when user found what he though he was looking for, but the content doesn’t meet his expectations.

10 lessons for young designers

1. Be authentic. The most powerful asset you have is your individuality, what makes you unique. It’s time to stop listening to others on what you should do.
2. Work harder than anyone else and you will always benefit from the effort.
3. Get off the computer and connect with real people and culture. Life is visceral.
4. Constantly improve your craft. Make things with your hands. Innovation in thinking is not enough.
5. Travel as much as you can. It is a humbling and inspiring experience to learn just how much you don’t know.
6. Being original is still king, especially in this tech-driven, group-grope world.
7. Try not to work for stupid people or you’ll soon become one of them.
8. Instinct and intuition are all-powerful. Learn to trust them.
9. The Golden Rule actually works. Do good.
10. If all else fails, No. 2 is the greatest competitive advantage of any career.

John C Jay. Read more here - http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/design-journeys-john-jay

Apple’s iPad Cons and Pros

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TweetBoard Alfa

TweetBoard makes Twitter available right on your website. The window is dynamic and doesn’t get in the way. It seems to be very cool and usable way to facilitate your marketing efforts and may be even communicate with your customers. We are awaiting alfa testing approval and will let you know about integration process and usability of the product.

Tweetboard