When I say intuitive design, I don’t mean just visual design or user interface work, I’m referring to a more general process of the design of all user interaction, be it look and feel or the written word, crafting your creative or message to appeal to a user’s intuition. Something that speaks to us at a level deeper than logic.
Not to start off too cliche or anything but, the dictionary defines intuitive as “knowable by intuition” and intuition as:
the immediate apprehension of an object by the mind without the intervention of any reasoning process
Intuition is kind of like instinct. It doesn’t come from your logical conscious, but rather from…
It used to be an easy target to warn against only thinking about search engine friendliness after a site was built, every few weeks another “seo expert” would come out and tell stories of entirely built sites that had to be re-engineered to allow spiders the best possible access to its content. And while, at least in my little corner of the web world, that lesson has been learned and is starting to sound redundant and obvious, those who refuse to learn from past mistakes will repeat them.
These days I’m finding it very common that things like conversion and usability based on real user testing and analytics data are only being thought of after a site is built. Often…
Forrester Research recently released a report, that I’ve been lucky enough to read, entitled Social Technographics that profiles adult US web users and their level of engagement with social media:
“Site features can also influence participation profiles. Not all Social Computing/Web 2.0 sites are created the same — the profiles for MySpace.com and YouTube differ significantly, given the activities available on those sites.”
The report describes 6 levels of web users who engage in social media activities, they’re described as a ladder of increasing involvement, starting with spectators and ending with creators. According to the report, myspace is more popular with the joiner segment and while youtube is more popular with spectators.
This means that sites…
I heard a client say recently that trying to make changes to an established site to increase its conversion rate was just haphazardly guessing, and they were corrected by someone who said that the right way to do it would be to guess and then test with multivariate tests. I disagree.
The scientific method says we should study the subject first, then make a hypothesis and test it. Study the site visitor’s current behaviors first through analytics or user testing/surveys. Then you can begin to make assertions about what problems said site visitors are having on the site and you can make the necessary conversion enhancements and test them.
Email me if you want to talk about…
Let’s say you’ve got a website. Consumer e-commerce. You get lots of visitors and you have lots of pages. Most of your traffic is from search engines, and your keyword range is wide, with a natural head-tail power law curve to it. Some of these people buy things, most do not and like any other business owner, you want to figure out how to make more people buy stuff from you. Nothing on the site is broken, or screams for help, like broken search or poor navigation and the site does sell a few things, just not a lot.
For me, the key has been segmenting visitors into behavioral cross sections. Like I’ll first look at the keywords the…
