Category: User Experience
UX blog: Expected objective fulfillment
Posted onNavigation – it’s about what the visitor wants
Posted onNavigation. It is the make or break of any website. It can be your strongest asset or your weakest link.
If people are coming to your website and they struggle to find what they are looking for, they will abandon your site. This means that all the work, time and effort – hours, days, weeks, and months working to have a website put together goes down the drain for that individual. Those hours have little to no ROI, except as a potential metric of “under 10 seconds” visitor. These visitors could be your most powerful visitors, but because they couldn’t find the information which is valuable to them, they left and you missed out on the opportunity to win them over.
Creating stuff with HUMANS in mind
Posted onI’ve been pretty quiet around these parts. Busy – REALLY busy. As in, last night I thought that going to bed somewhere just before 11 so that I can wake up and be AT THE OFFICE by 5am to be a pretty good night’s sleep compared to other nights. THAT busy. What the heck have I been doing? Well – it seems that there are a lot of complex business problems which need to be solved, and a lot of it centers around figuring out how to connect with a company’s users on their level. Now, these places have a great number of users, but as many things go, over time, the way stuff has been done isn’t really working out in the long term. A lot of it comes down to business and customer growth. Just to note, business and customer growth is GREAT! But these things also introduce new challenges both internally as well as externally. From personal experience, when I am so very deep in knowledge, it can be tough to see clearly about how to solve some of these seriously intricate problems, and I’ll end up having to pull in someone who isn’t “infected” with the in-depth knowledge to keep the high level view in frame of mind. I can only imagine how this could be even more so for individuals working inside of a company facing these challenges.
UX, same thing as Interaction Design (IxD)?
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A lot of the work I’ve been doing lately is under the heading of “Expert in User Experience” or “Information Architect” – which depending on who is in the room, depicts which title I’m being referred to as.
My brain has autocomplete wrong
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Let me paint the scene
The other day, I was walking down the hallway with a few of my coworkers to get a cup of coffee. One of the people I was with said something, and I responded back, but one of the words that I said was a bit off. The beginning of the word was right, but the end… not so much.
… and then, a theory walked in.
I’ve found myself doing this quite often as of late and it seems to be occurring more and more frequently. In my head, I find that I am already thinking of something else by the time I speak and so I am losing track of what I was trying to say. After talking to my sister about this phenomenon, she came up with a pretty solid theory.
She thinks that it’s autocomplete’s fault… and I think she might be right!
Autocomplete – its being used more and more everywhere, from typing on my iPhone, to generating search result terms. Even facebook and twitter use autocomplete.
So where does this lead? I can’t imagine that I’m the only person who has experienced this. What I do wonder is if this is even more of an issue for individuals who are glued to their devices more so than I am. I do search a lot and use my phone, but I am also off the computer often enough to have meaningful conversations with my husband and to play with my kids… daily(I know… I know… I need to cut them off, right? But I can’t! Their faces… they’re just so darn cute. How can a person say no to those faces?!). I even cook and exercise! So what about those other… more normal computer and device users? Did they somehow get an upgrade? Or… oh, I have a better theory. Maybe they just don’t talk any longer. Maybe they mind meld with each other. That’s got to be it.
Progress!
Either way, it’s an interesting issue to have. Does anyone know when “they’re” going to upgrade the autocomplete scripts in my head? They seem to be pulling up the wrong words lately. I wonder if the project lost its funding…