Design
For those of you who haven’t snuck off during work to browse Buzzfeed, an introduction is in order. Buzzfeed is a news aggregation site that collects content from around the web. Some of the news is provided by resident contributors or partner websites, but all of it is filtered by a community ranking system.
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UX Videos
This video post kicks off our new video channel, moderated by Tomer Sharon.
Tomer Sharon is a UX researcher at Google and author of the book It’s our research. In this video, Tomer introduces himself and the topics which will be covered in this channel.
We are very excited to feature this new category on our blog. Our heartfelt thanks to Tomer for sharing his UX insights with the Usabilla community.
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Design
Stories have always been a powerful tool to entertain, educate, and to teach people moral values. Back in the days when there was no mass media, stories were passed on from person to person, from generation to generation. Later, they were written down, duplicated, and easily accessible to the masses.
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Theory
With the advent of modern technology and new standards, the face of the Internet has evolved and so have our beloved websites. Websites are no longer limited to being informational portals for business firms that are in need of a communication channel for sharing information with their end-users. In order for a website design to be successful, you have to consider much more than this initial functionality: your visitors and the user experience of your site.
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Theory
Failure is unacceptable. Or so it seems in our success driven society. A meritocracy that has taught us to see and judge each other by our achievements. It has become a central aspect of our lives to be successful, or at least not to fail in what we do. But why is that? Is failure really something evil that we need to avoid by all means?
Personally, I think there is more to failure than the obvious. Failure also bears a lot of potential and chances for improvements and even greater success. If we can stop to project failure on to ourselves, and instead see failure in our actions and decisions, maybe we can learn to embrace failure as something good.
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Design
Sometimes, it’s very easy to convince us. Be it in a discussion with friends, when buying a new pair of shoes, or when searching for a web service on the the Internet, if our intuition tells us to go for it, we feel confident that we are making the right decision. Then, other times, it seems like our intuition deserts us and it takes a lot more convincing to win us over for something.
It’s not a secret that our brains are capable of two different types of thinking. While the “left brain” can be considered rather objective, focusing on logic and analytics, the “right brain” is more subjective, emotional, and intuitive. Whether we use the left or the right part of our brain does not only affect our decision making, but also the way we perceive a website and how we interact with it.
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Design
Visuals are super important in web design. We just talked about images last week and how they can help to improve the user experience of your site. A while back we discussed how infographics can help you to inform, engage, or even entertain your website visitors. And our guest author Nikolaj explained how icons can improve your web design.
But why is that? Why are visuals so important for how we perceive information and why do they have such an impact on the user experience of a website? It’s simple. Visuals deliver the context you need to communicate your messages effectively.
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Design
Web standards rise continually, changing our expectations towards a website. We want to find information quickly, we want to socialize, we want to get entertained, and we want all of it to happen on a personal level. The key to designing efficient, attractive, and personal websites is the use of a wide range of engaging media.
What kind of media? Basically anything you can use on your website to convey a message, such as videos, audio, graphics, or images. While any of these can help to improve the user experience, the media you choose should be appropriate for your main target group with all their expectations, abilities and limitations. Also consider the devices people will use to access your site and technical limitations that come with it.
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Links
Again, an incredible month of increasing awareness for the user experience is coming to an end. While many of us were on vacation, others did an extraordinary job in providing the community with lots of insightful and entertaining articles on the UX.
I’d like to take the opportunity to thank you all for sharing your knowledge and experiences with the community. Together we are creating a shared platform for marketers, designers, usability and UX experts, and everyone who is eager to learn about designing websites for users. Let’s keep it up!
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Demo UX Cases
The impending 2012 US presidential election looms closer every week, and offers an excellent opportunity to take a good look at the home pages of the two primary candidates: Democrat incumbent President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney.
We created a visual Usabilla survey to benchmark the home pages of the two presidential candidates against each other. We focussed on the user experience and usability similarities and differences of the candidate websites. The feedback of our test participants led to interesting findings and helped us to understand how the home pages of the two leading candidates for the 2012 US Presidential Election differ from other websites.
Read on for the highlights of this interesting UX case study, or download the full report.
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