Simple Yet Effective UIX For Dummies

Let's get real for an instant. A website generalist is someone who knows less and less about more and more, until he knows nothing about everything. An SEO/UIX website guru gets to know more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing. They both end up in the same place.

When building a web site, all sorts of UIX experts tell me that I have to wireframe websites, and then use video to watch people using them to optimize the (sarcasm on) user experience (/sarcasm off). UIX is king.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I follow the Google sect of online design -- a super powerful website with minimalist design. When you abstract to the layer of why have a website, you come up with two answers: to sell and to inform.

The primary raison d'etre for a business is to sell. So never mind all of the booshwa design crap for a minute. Malcolm Gladwell tells us that people thin slice -- make a decision within the first thirty seconds. I was told that when I wrote for a major outdoor magazine. You have to capture them in the first thirty seconds. Your value proposition will do that.

So if I am a business, and the sole purpose of my website is to sell and inform, then the landing page of my website has to boldly proclaim my value proposition. Let me repeat that: the landing page of my website has to boldly proclaim my value proposition.

When my value proposition is accepted by the surfer, I have to account for two alternate possibilities. That is where UIX comes in. The first possibility is that I have made the sale. You have to get the customer to get to the buy zone quickly. The second possibility is that I have sold the value proposition, and now the consumer wants details. Simple. (There is a third possibility in the fact that my value proposition bombed, but then the surfer is off elsewhere and out of the equation).

So, I have to unambiguously give the consumer the immediate buy option or arrange the information to answer the putative questions in his/her quest for more information. I have to arrange it such that the most frequently asked question is answered first.

Psychologists tell us that we like a lot of choice when it comes to menu items, but more than 4 or 5 choices actually hinders the buy process.

So the navigation and usability of the website hinges on providing more information to support the value proposition. In a general sense you can't go wrong with W-5 - Who, What, Why, Where and When. When is always NOW, so HOW can be substituted. And of course, you need a call to action. If you don't ask, you won't get.

The above graphic illustrates these principles completely. You don't need to pay big bucks to a UIX expert to produce wireframes and usability reports. Most consulting work is applied common sense. When usability experts fail, is that they are not subject matter experts in whatever you are selling. They would tend to put the specs and fine print in the back, but if you are selling electrical couplings and such, those data sheets are what is required up front. Or they would spend $10,000 filming someone using wireframes to discover what you already know.

If you put considerable amount of forethought into the value proposition and how the user gets to the supporting information, then you have already mastered the Dummies Guide to Extreme UIX.

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The Most Disliked Things On A Website

One of the startups that I ran into this week, is clearmeter.com. They have an interesting concept where they have tools to break down a website into all of its constituent components, and then get feedback from a cadre of User Experience Raters. That way, they can tell what works and what doesn't work. From this, they get an overall rating of the usability of the web site as well as its appeal.

There was an eye-opener for me that has ramifications for user experience. I was being given a demo of a website, and the most hated thing on the website were the social media buttons:

This was a major surprise. Somehow one has to convey the fact that they can be found on social media without the gaggle of social media icons. Perhaps there may be a separate page or menu item called connect that hides itself unless invoked, or it uses a jQuery layer that goes away.

One would have never guessed that there is "fatigue" from social media buttons. Check out clearmeter.com.

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The Ultimate Web Page Design ~ The Perfect Web Page

I have seen the future of web design and it is pictured above. It is the ultimate in user experience and usability. It is perfect. It is compatible with every single web-browsing device possible. It has no Flash or fancy layer tricks. It is simple, clean and easily navigable. It has a movie (advanced media) embedded at the bottom. This is the design that all web designers should strive for.

The URL for this perfect website is:

http://web.streetauthority.com/m/tts/TTS05/12-companies-ob-vid.asp

Note: I am not associated in any way with the website, nor did I take a fee to tout this. I am simply in admiration.

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Smart Content Management -- Enhancing UX and Killing Manual Navigation

Many content management systems and content management web applications fall short of serving the client well. A central precept behind content management, is that documents, videos and all sorts of content that a corporation has, should be made available to the public when they seek to buy the goods or engage the services of that company. For example, if a company sells widgets, and they issue a service bulletin to their own techs, if they put it up on the web, a customer might find it, fix their own problem and be happy with the company. Letting the public in on content not only educates them, but the additional information may trigger more sales with less costs associated with those sales.

However as a tekky, I find that a lot of content management systems are just awful. What they do, is throw a whole pile of document links in a browser, and let the viewer decide what they want to read. The User Experience is horrible. I have been the victim of this type of system, and there was a lot of frustration where I finally gave up, and went to Google with direct search terms. It always took me to a site that was better marked with the content that I wanted.

So in what ways must content management systems improve? Manual navigation through the document repository must be eliminated. There must be an AJAX widget to select related material and the content offering page must be continuously updated as more information is gleaned from the user.

A methodology for smarter content management and enhancing the User Experience through unnecessary navigation could be implemented in many ways. One of the methods is to collect the breadcrumbs of visitors to the websites, and use the progression of links to scorecard the documents and determine the logical groupings of them.

One could also mine the meta data with the same result, and assign probabilities to related sets of documents, creating less manual navigation.

This has to be an imperative improvement to content management systems, because we are on an exponential curve of generating content, and he who handles it best, wins in the marketplace. Smarter is not only better -- smarter is richer.

Google has the right idea and they have the biggest content management business in the world. Their system has smart suggestions and a relevance rating.

Over-the-counter management systems must collect meta-data on user's searches, and use that data to improve the user experience

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Ding Dong, The Mouse is Dead -- Extreme UX

The computer mouse was one of the most innovative advanced inventions for inputing data and instructions to a computer. It was a stroke of genius that enabled the acceleration of the dominance of personal computers in our lives. But, like all things, the mouse is almost dead.

Prior to the mouse, one had to remember the entire command lexicon of the operating system, and then type in command with the appropriate switches and parameters. UNIX gurus still do this today, but they are born on a different planet of nerdom. I know, because I am one of them. The mouse enabled one to drop down one of twenty menus, fan out the sub-menus and make a selection. The mouse was a precision instrument, and the need for a scroll wheel was proof of the need to go through a plethora of menus.

The thin edge of the wedge for the death knell of the mouse was the iPhone. The thumb and forefinger became the chief method of selection of menu items. The iPad and plethora of smart phones sealed the deal for the death of the mouse. This is a trend that isn't going away anytime soon. As a matter of fact, there is now a phone that is your laptop.

So what does this mean for UX or User Experience. We have to be all thumbs -- or mouseless. This is a huge challenge.

A thumb-driven menu takes up a lot of screen real estate. And it is a mortal sin to give up functionality, just because you are using an application or a web page on your portable device. What is now needed is extreme UIX techniques, especially when it comes to menus.

We have to ditch the massive hierarchical menu model and be a lot smarter. Gone are the days when all you had to do was add the following to your code:

MenuItem *myMenuItemFile = new MenuItem(S"&File");    MenuItem *myMenuItemNew = new MenuItem(S"&New");

Tests in UX show that there are definite hot spots on the application or web screen where the human eye is drawn to first. Humans are highly adaptable and quickly settle into patterns that reflect brain function. Wireframes and testing shows that users look at screens in an "F" pattern. The first thing we look at is the horizontal bar of the F. In other words, we look at the very first bit of content. This does not include or mean that we look at the little menu items at the top of the page. It doesn't take long for our subconscious mind to figure out that those are bitty unimportant menu items that aren't necessary until we really need them.

If we are designing a User Experience that is engaging, we should let the content rule on the top bar of the F. After all content is king. People don't come for the menus.

However if actions are required on your web page or applications, the menu is an important function. So, original web designers got it right when putting a menu on the left hand side of the page. Thousands of views of a screen have taught our minds to look there.

As to the menu itself, we do not have the luxury of putting a gazillion menu items, drop down menus filled with options and choices galore on a menu. Even the concept of displaying only the menus you need is not productive in a thumb-driven environment, because the user doesn't know what she or he is going to need until they use it.

Psychologists tell us that humans are best with 4 to seven choices. So in Extreme UX, that is all the top menu or main menu will have. I can hear the gasps now. Imagine a program like Microsoft Word with only four top menu items. You can't, because Word is written by dinosaurs, exploiting the last bit of the 1980's that they can wring out for monetary gain.

So how would an extreme programming do it? With brilliance and envelope-pushing code. I would like to introduce a term to you: "Application Use Lifecycle". Huh?

Just like software development has a life cycle, the use of an application has a life cycle. When an application is invoked, and you are starting a new output of that application, you require a very different set of commands than if you open an object that has already had work done on it in that application.

Mapping out the stages of the Application Use Lifecycle will give you a good idea of what menu items are need when. The next step is to write some supervisor code to figure out where you are in the Application Use Lifecycle. By determining this, you will know what menu items are appropriate for that use.

If you want a tutorial on how to do this, you will have to wait for my book to come out on this -- or you will have to hire me to teach your programmers. However, I can guarantee you that with the death of the mouse, you will have to adopt something like this to accommodate the thumb-driven menus.

There are positives with the death of a mouse. If you see a dead mouse, then you know that it is safe to go ahead and score the cheese.

More on this topic to come.

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