Presentation by Clark Wimberly
Links/slides from presentation here: http://clarklab.com/talks/user-experience
Pros and cons of common UX blunders
What is UX?
- What a user experiences
- study of rules
- guiding emotions
- worth their time
UI vs UX
- UI = User interface – what the user interacts with. Buttons, etc.
- User Experience – how the interface makes them feel
- Married but not the same
Paywalls – generally a bad user experience
- Pros:
- Registered user
- who can we spam
- Cons:
- another registration for a user
- they can spam me
- Business goals can go against user experience
- Can cause users to leave
Having a page with a slideshow/multiple pages/lots of content to click through
- Pros:
- pageviews
- Cons
- no one likes clicking
- users won’t see content
- harder to author
- Solutions:
- Don’t do it
- View as one page
- if you want page views, force reload
- Lazy load plugins to help with bandwidth-heavy sites
- Sub-navigation/table of contents – can work, but make sure it’s apparent what it is
Social lockers
- Idea: hold desirable content hostage for likes, subscriptions, etc.
- Pros:
- Fans! Followers
- Cons:
- Annoying
- Look like an awkward shill
- Hit and runs
- Solutions:
- Generate value with social
- Interact with followers
- Treat it like a subscription service
- share with @mentions and #hashtags and +names
- Look for organic activity
- Keep social interesting and then market to them… don’t market 100% of the time
- If you use a lot of hashtags you’re probably doing it wrong
Newsletters
Idea: get a bunch of emails and get inside their inbox
- Pros:
- Pageviews! Opens!
- Connect with fans – Great way to give fans an inside scoop
- Cons:
- Possibly annoying
- Look like an awkward shill
- Breaking the law if you do it wrong
- Solutions:
- Be useful
- Easy to unsubscribe
- Respect method of email collection
- Don’t buy lists (or sell, or transfer)
- Use the email list for what you tell subscribers it’s for – don’t change it up on them
- Build trust and you might get whitelisted
Accessibility
Idea: make sure that everyone that wants to use your website can. Can be both dealing with physical impairments, but also can mean devices
- Pros:
- No one is left out
- Impaired users = 14% have some sort of impairment
- Pageviews/sales/conversions
- Cons:
- Development time
- Solutions
- Do it!!
- Plugins
- Meetups/community
- Alternate content
- Environments for Humans
- Knowbility
- Austin Accessibility and Inclusive Design meetup
Responsive design
- Solutions
- Use a responsive theme
- Use a responsive plugin (Jetpack)
- If neither of those are an option, at least make sure your desktop site isn’t broken so the site can be zoomed in and out, avoids flash
- Gotchas
- Readability
- Image/page weight
- Performance
Storyboards
- Visualize the customer/user experience
- Pros
- You can get in the user’s head
- Optimize the flow
- Concrete goals for planning and arguments
- Cons
- Hard truths – learn what doesn’t work
- Takes time
- Go nuts
- Hyper optimize steps
- Google analytics goals at key steps
- Make storyboard-based decisions
Personas
- Who’s using the site
- Age
- Gender
- Interests
- Skills
Guerilla testing
- Over the shoulder testing – just watch people use your site
- Sentiment testing – which of these versions do you trust, find easiest, etc.
- Drunk user testing – actually watch people test a site when they’ve been drinking. Drops their guard, scattered
- usertesting.com
- peek.usertesting.com
- verifyapp.com
Tools of the attack
- Analytics (Google, Jetpack, others)
- InVision
- UXPin
- Balsamiq – wireframing
- Mockingbird – wireframing in the browser
- Omnigraffle
Doggie bag – what you’re leaving with tonight
- Think of the user
- Think ahead of the user
- React to the user