Archive for the ‘Website Usability’ category

Focusing Web Design on Conversions

January 21st, 2009

Most of our clients come to us with a eye towards a redesign for aesthetic reasons, but we feel like it’s also an opportunity to foster an environment that supports them revisiting their business goals. In our Portland web design firm, we’re constantly pushing to take site conversions another step. We started with analytics and heat mapping, which are great tools, but lately are focusing more on web design itself.

One of the interesting parts of working in custom web design is creating specific calls to action that actually produce the desired results. We definitely haven’t nailed down the process yet, but we believe it is our obligation as a professional web design firm to give our clients the best possible return on their investment. We identify key site goals with our clients through our Discover and Define process, create unique calls to action to funnel visitors, while maintaining usability and putting the visitor experience first.

A recent example is our redesign of the Julie Lawrence Yoga Center site. By pairing images of the yoga classes to develop visitor interest, with large orange buttons that guide them through the site, we hope to maintain the design aesthetic our clients are looking for, provide the portals that the site visitors are looking for and turning that visitor desire into action.

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Posted in Advice, Web Analytics, Website Design, Website Usability

Usability Testing – Getting to Know Your Website's Visitors

October 19th, 2008

We have been getting a lot of questions about website usability testing recently from our clients, so I thought it would be good to explain how we use it and why it is so useful. In a nutshell, what usability testing refers to is sitting a user down in front of a computer and asking them to think outloud as they try to complete tasks on that website. Web design is no different than any other industry in one very basic respect: we fail to pay enough attention to how real human beings use our products. It is a lot more fun to sit around and come up with fun ideas that you or your client love than to deal with actual user feedback on how well your product works.

» Read more: Usability Testing – Getting to Know Your Website's Visitors

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Posted in Web Development, Website Design, Website Usability

Edward Tufte inspires Top Ten list

August 6th, 2007

I had the privilege of attending an Edward Tufte conference here in Portland. After the brain melt that is inherent in listening to or reading Tufte, I gathered my grey matter and compiled some thoughts on the day. One of our clients suggest that I distill this into a Top Ten list. Here it is:

1. There is no such thing as information overload, just bad design. Manage clutter by fixing the design. To clarify, ADD detail.
2. 90% of every screen should be content, NOT marketing, not including navigation. People generally don’t do a Google search for ‘pretty design’ or ‘marketing fluff.’
3. Get out of the dominance relationship with your audience�??let them use their own cognitive styles. The way you gain credibility with your audience is your demonstrated mastery of detail. Make the design about the content, not the design.
4. The lower the resolution, the longer the meeting: clarity is key!
5. Show your information at once, adjacent in space, rather than stacked in time. Known in powerpoint as ‘one damn thing after another!’
6. Start with the interface design and at as high a resolution as possible and let that drive the process.
7. Reduce design variation to allow the viewer to concentrate on evidence variation.
8. Be aware that your presentation will stand or fall on the quality, credibility, and relevance of its content.
9. A good test for a design is whether or not it evokes responses tothe content.
10. Grand principles of design:

* Show comparisons
* Show causality
* Show more than 1 or 2 variables-serious problems are multivariate, show multivariate evidence
* Integrate word knowledge and image: use annotations to pieces of content to help interpretation
* Document everything and tell people about it: documentation is a quality control mechanism and determines credibility
* Be aware that a presentation stands or falls on the quality, integrity, and relevance of the content. Good design cannot salvage failed content. Science is a content-driven enterprise.
* Use small multiples
* Don’t Dequantify: Thinking and designing are as one.

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Posted in Website Usability

Simplifying for greater usability

July 12th, 2007

“Elegance in design is achieved when you have removed everything possible, not when you have added everything possible.”

I love this observation found in Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick. When I first read this, it immediately made me think about usability testing – the process of observing users unfamiliar with a site as they try to complete specific tasks on that site.

New observers are almost universally struck by the divergence between expected and actual behavior. For me, it is a humbling experience to watch users ignore seemingly “can’t miss” parts of the page, to fail to complete the easiest tasks given to them, and become irritated with the features that were supposed to impress or help them. Running counter to the tendency and desire of most of us (designers, developers, clients) to add whizzy new features or innovative design elements, the results of usability testing constantly reinforce the importance of simplifying, clarifying, and focusing every page on a site for a specific purpose. Usability testing reminds us that design elegance is achieved by removing as much as possible, and that simple, focused sites are preferred by the only people who really matter: our customers.

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Posted in Website Design, Website Usability