ExperienceBlogger

Ok, maybe not the end of the mouse, but certainly the end of the remote control.

I don’t know a lot about this technology yet - I don’t even know if this is a concept  video or what - but this is one hell of an impressive demo for a touchless gesture-based UI.

I used to argue that tactile feedback was an important (almost essential) part of a successful HCI user experience, but the iPhone proved me utterly wrong there.  So I think at the right price point, something like this could really get some traction.

It’s accurate, small, elegant and doesn’t require finger sensors like some of the other touchless solutions out there.

My friend and Director of Search Marketing, Adam, sent me a link the other day that warmed my heart.

Not only does Adam handle all of our PPC work, he also does our SEO.

We recently redesigned our article pages for our newsletter companion site and there was a bit of a debate throughout the process over the design of the page.

Some of us argued from the basis of creating a page that spoke more to the Direct Response marketing principles we’ve built our business upon - in other words, “Eliminate this visual element because it distracts and doesn’t speak to the single primary goal of the page” (and yes, I believe there should be a single, primary goal of every single page you design…more on that another time).

Others argued from the, “Well, this is how everyone else’s articles look…and there really isn’t a “conversion goal” for an article page like there would be for say a lead capture page” perspective. I fucking hate this argument…even though I’ll use it myself from time to time (the hypocrite that I am).

EVERY SINGLE PAGE SHOULD HAVE A GOAL — and that goal MUST be measurable.  Otherwise, how the hell do you know if changes you’re making are actually improving shit?

So I obviously pitched a tent when Adam broke out this article: Conversion Optimization for Content: Publishing site decreases bounce rate 43% 

It’s a great article for a bunch of reasons, but it’s even better when our marketing guys are helping to inform design decisions that our design team would normally have control over!

Not sure how I feel about this company (link at bottom).  They create website walk-through assistants for “complicated web pages” (think Microsoft Office’s little paper-clip assistant).

I’m sure there are applications out there that are extremely complex and very difficult to figure out…but shouldn’t that be a challenge for the design team?  Isn’t it there job to make the complex seem simpler?  Isn’t that what great designers get paid to do?

And taking this to another level…what if there’s a web app that’s difficult to use, but only because the UI sucks?  Does this site give those apps a pass?  Do they now get to shirk the responsibility to build elegant interfaces for their users?

Thoughts?

Help Gratefully Received: On-Screen Web Guidance System WalkMe Picks Up $1M+ From Mangrove

I could write a looooong post on this and cite a bunch of examples, but I think that because I’m posting this using Tumblr, I’ll just stick with their masterful execution of this design concept.

“Back to the Top” Button

If you use Tumblr for your blogging needs, I’m sure this looks familiar:

It’s the helpful button Tumblr displays after you’ve scrolled too far down on your dashbaord and want to get back to the top of the page.  You click it, and “wooooooosh!”, you’re back at the top (side note:  they actually force the scroll to occur, versus anchoring you back to the top — here’s a great site about using motion graphics in the user interface I posted about a few weeks ago:  UI-Transitions.com).

Why is This Worth Writing About?

Think about it, how many times do you scroll all the way down on a page and there’s no “back to the top” link, and you waste several seconds scrolling back up?

Multiply that several seconds out for the thousands (or tens of thousands) of times you do that in a given month or year and you’ll see that you’re wasting valuable time (7 seconds x 10,000 scrolls per year = 70,000 seconds or almost 19 hours!) — I could’ve watched 2 seasons of The Wire in that amount of time!  Some things in life are just more important than scrolling  ;)

Tumblr’s implementation of this button is also really slick…

It’s not a permanent fixture on the page - it only appears after you scroll down.  And it doesn’t appear until you’ve scrolled down past a certain point on the page, otherwise, it probably would just be faster to scroll back up (as opposed to moving your mouse cursor to the upper right corner and clicking the button).

Look for ways to implement features like this in your app — try to discover what seemingly simple actions your users execute most frequently and try to streamline them.  It’s obviously not going to be a game changer for your product, but it’s one of those things that if done often and consistently enough, will improve the overall experience and perception of your product dramatically.