UIE

The "science" is quite dubious: https://articles.uie.com/net-promoter-score-considered-harmful-and-wha… The reason why NPS exists is because it's an easy number to calculate that sounds convincing, and manager-types love numbers without having to think too hard about how they got them.

The classic example of a redesign done right is with eBay. eBay's background used to be a (very) bright yellow, which looked pretty bad even for the web in 2009. When they initially changed it to the current white, the designers received enough complaints to change it back for fear of loosing parts of their userbase. They still wanted to change the background to pave the way for other websites, so slowly, over several months, they lightened the shade of yellow until it became white. [a] This concept has been applied by many other "big" websites - Amazon, Dell, Google, and Yahoo come up as examples. [b] [a]: https://theuxblog.com/blog/redesigning-user-experience [b]: https://articles.uie.com/death_of_relaunch/

There is a fantastic article https://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/ and followup http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/10/17/the-back-story-for-the-300-m… about the $300 million button. They showed just how much forcing people to register actually costs, and stats on how many accounts people had, how often they remembered which one was used etc.

That's a hard one. When there's no standard it's always tricky to be the canary in the cage. I'm guessing a word is out of the question. Whatever icon you go for, be sure to test it. In my experience, many discovery problems come down ambiguous or vague icons Jared Spool has 3 short rules about icon choices: http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2009/06/28/old-news-about-icons/ worth a read.

Jared Spool's article "Market Maturity" [1] published in 1997 is a very good way to understand what kind of experience is required for success. He argues that success depends on market maturity which roughly follows four stages: 1. Basic deliverability war, 2. Feature parity war, 3. Productivity / "ease of use" then finally 4. Price war. Stage 3 is generally where UX becomes a priority. For a consumer web product or startup this generally makes sense as a marker for market maturity as delivering technology and shipping features has become easy and cheap. Crafting UX is difficult but probably won't be for long. For example Twitter Bootstrap seems to be lowering the cost of boilerplate UI which in turn lowers the cost of UX in general. [1] http://www.uie.com/articles/market_maturity/

> I'm wondering how so many reviews get written on a site like Amazon I'm sorry to burst your bubble. The well-respected consultancy User Interface Engineering has come up with the magic number of 1 review for every 1,300 purchases. "While only one in 1,300 purchasers of the product writes a review, the number who indicate a review was helpful is even fewer. For the Harry Potter volume, which is Amazon's best selling product ever, it was about 0.0014% or about one in 7,300 purchasers of the product. The most helpful review garnered only 566 votes, even though it was written on the first day the book was released and Amazon has sold more than 2,000,000 copies since." http://www.uie.com/articles/magicbehindamazon/

> I would be curious to know if there is some credible A/B testing showing that for a relatively unknown new product blocking Mailinators and it’s kin somehow results as a better conversion? Well, there's always this: https://articles.uie.com/three_hund_million_button/ -- trigger warning: that page has annoying delayed-by-few-seconds modal popup that begs you to subscribe and, incidentally, hand out your email address; the irony must have been lost on their marketing folks. Unless your business is REQUIRED[×] to have user details on file, putting any kind of friction on the user's action path is equal to voluntarily giving up sales. No, I don't want yet another account on your shitty website, no matter what it sells to me. If I end up coming back often enough, then I may, voluntarily, create an account. But if your site requires to create one up front, I'm incentivised to take my business somewhere else. The worst offenders try to do email domain TLD matching against country of residence. I've seen it only twice, but it's such a user-hostile pattern that it has seared itself to my memory (while mercifully having relieved me of the memory of where I ran into it). ×: cough gambling, financial services, insurance, etc.

I respect the fact that you asked. :) There are lots. Not to be self-serving, but I post all the best links I find on www.thehipperelement.com, if you feel like scanning through them. But a few, off the top of my head are: - www.alistapart.com - http://www.uie.com/articles/ (run by Jared Spool, I think) - www.smashingmagazine.com is a bit hit and miss, but what they lack in quantity they make up for in quantity. - www.unbounce.com - www.goodui.com is a good, quick, visual reference for best practices. You could make a career just from enforcing some of those, haha. And these two books would lay a good foundation in general: - "Web Form Design" by LukeW (his blog is also interesting) - "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug If you only spent a few hours on those you'd be ahead of the game. And if there is anything you feel is missing from the world, let me know on Twitter and maybe I can write something about it. @HipperElement Hopefully that helps.

I liked this old take on intuitiveness, which focuses on which user(s) something is intuitive to and why: https://articles.uie.com/design_intuitive/

This sounds like Jared Spool's Market Maturity model.[0] He breaks up your gen 3 into two separate stages: Stage 1: Raw Iron Stage 2: Checklist Battles Stage 3: Productivity Wars Stage 4: Transparency [0] https://articles.uie.com/market_maturity/

Oh yes, this stuff drives me nuts. A good takedown was written about the Net Promoter Score[0], but the principles are generally applicable to any one of these idiotic schemes. [0] https://articles.uie.com/net-promoter-score-considered-harmful-and-wha…

"No matter how much you try, you can’t stop people from sticking beans up their nose." https://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/07/08/beans-and-noses/

>The people who never look into the settings probably didn't install the ad blocker themselves in the first place. Not true. Even most people who install an AdBlocker will not change their settings. If you change your settings, you're part of a very small minority. Businesses often use this to increase tips. Imagine two settings: 1) Enter your own amount (default of $0.00) 2) Four options: 15%, 20%, 25%, Other If you use #1 you'll receive fewer tips. Many people will leave it to $0.00. If you use #2, most people will tip and of those tips most will be 15-20%. [0] https://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/09/14/do-users-change-their-setti… [1] https://www.fastcodesign.com/3022182/how-square-registers-ui-guilts-yo…

Seen a few comments focus on the "redesign" and comparisons to Digg, and wanted to add a few comments: 1. People may forget, but Reddit was a (the?) major winner in the Digg exodus. 2. I don't think Digg every got the subreddit style discussion boards down. I think the reddit "homepage experience" vs. the typical subreddit experience to be very different. Should be interesting to see which way they slide for the redesign. 3. The influx of new capital and the focus on the redesign sort of telegraphs that they want to grow reddit, which is a very large but idiosyncratic community. If they do it right, the change will be very transparent and very incremental, ala the ebay background color change [1]. Should be an interesting thing to watch! [1] https://articles.uie.com/death_of_relaunch/

Github should have used the eBay approach where you gradually alter your look to avoid triggering revolt. Fade the banner from light gray to dark gray over the period of a few months! https://articles.uie.com/death_of_relaunch/ > At eBay, they learned the hard way that their users don’t like dramatic change. One day, the folks at eBay decided they no longer liked the bright yellow background on many of their pages, so they just changed it to a white background. Instantly, they started receiving emails from customers, bemoaning the change. So many people complained, that they felt forced to change it back.

Just like the "$300m button story" popular in UX circles: https://articles.uie.com/three_hund_million_button/

I agree with both of these and would only add a #3. "No matter how much you try, you can’t stop people from sticking beans up their nose." https://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/07/08/beans-and-noses/ The earlier you accept this, the farther ahead you'll be.

Considering case studies like "300 million dollar button" [1], they are likely losing insane amounts of money. [1] https://articles.uie.com/three_hund_million_button/

There's more to this that we've talked about. I wrote a post in 2011, talking about the back story a bit: https://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/10/17/the-back-story-for-the-300-… And this is a more recent presentation on using metrics in design. I talk about the $300m button starting at 44m:45s - https://www.uie.com/jared-live/#design-opposed The important thing here isn't that a company implemented guest checkout. It's that when they did it, because we could see the problem in our research, they found $300m in revenue. Guest checkout won't work for everyone, but doing research like this likely will. - Jared

This reminds me of the $300 million button: http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button They significantly increased their revenue by simply allowing customers to purchase without having to create account.

The article you're looking for is here: https://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/

Be very careful when adding too many features, because if you ever want to take them away (to simplify the site / UX) your users will hate you. Just changing the look of a page will usually make people go crazy. Ebay's yellow background story is something that developers can learn from: http://www.uie.com/articles/death_of_relaunch

Remember when the American Airlines employee got fired for giving feedback to an unsolicited re-design? Also, here are some other examples of airline website re-designs [2]. I can't find it now, but the AA designer's response discussed the challenges of re-designing these sites, would be appropriate to relate that here. [1] http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091106/0337536829.shtml [2] https://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2010/08/02/please-let-me-redesign-your…

Besides being amazed that website authors still title sites "Welcome to ACME Widgets", so when I bookmark the site "ACME" gets sorted down to the "W's". Clearly these sites with modal overlays have not read this article: http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/

Good work, sir. People know about the Three Hundred Million Dollar button < http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/ >, right? Right?

Don't forget Amazon's $300,000,000 button: http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/

I like Luke Wroblewski's advice a lot (http://www.lukew.com/ plus his two books on form design and web usability) I have to worry about form design mostly, so two links I liked were http://www.uie.com/articles/web_forms/ and http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2006/07/label-placement-in-forms.… I also stole some ideas from here: http://developer.fellowshipone.com/patterns/ Those are the ones I've read and somewhat followed. I also bookmarked this framework to try out: http://gantry-framework.org/ There are also several eyetracking services (some provided by Ycombinator companies I believe) - I'd love to have eyetracking studies on the company website, but the current management doesn't mind that it looks like crap since it will be outsourced anyways.

The article was very interesting and I was also interested in the "Removing a Button" article they linked to: http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/ I recently bought something from the website of a company that does that exact same thing wrong and made me hesitate a long while before purchasing. I sent the article to them and hope they change their setup, I really want them to succeed.

"I'm of the idea that one of the biggest problems is asking people to register before they checkout. Do you think this is the case?" yes. http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button