Matt / July 29, 2008, 12:38 pm
I came across a great metaphor describing why multivariate testing of ad campaign landing pages (with a tool such as Google Website Optimizer) makes for a much more effective use of the money in an advertising budget.
The traditional way to do this is as follows:
- Agree campaign budget
- Build and sign off creatives (PPC ads, key words/phrases, landing page, offer details)
- Take a sack of money
- Move to top of building
- Shake money out of sack
- Sit back and hope
The better way to do this:
- Agree budget
- Brainstorm all the things we’d like to test (buttons, text, call to action msgs etc.)
- Take 5% of budget and finalise *multiples* of these elements to test
- Spend the 5% sending traffic to a multi-variate test
- Find the ideal creative (based on conversion data)
- Put this live
- Spend the other 95% of the budget
Matt / July 22, 2008, 4:14 pm
“Layered Desktop,” by Gabriel Radic.
The desktop has been the primary GUI metaphor of operating systems for the last thirty years. Over that time, newer operating systems have stretched the desktop metaphor pretty thin, in the interests of better usability and faster task completion.
For example, remember when Apple’s System 7 would open each folder in a new Finder window, creating a cascade of windows that quickly became unmanageable? That was a literal interpretation of folders on your actual desktop. Fortunately, we now browse the contents of multiple folders within a single Finder window, an activity that doesn’t transfer to the stack of folders sitting next to me.
I found the wallpaper above really interesting: someone created a solution for organizing desktop icons which makes your computer screen look more like a desk, even though the design trend has been to move away from such literal interpretations. It’s not right or wrong—lots of people find it useful, judging by the comments—it’s a creative solution to a desktop organization problem.
Matt / July 17, 2008, 1:47 pm
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched my mom do this. From ReadWriteWeb:
More than 10% of the searches for the top 10 dating search terms were URLs (match.com, plentyoffish.com) and almost all of the queries were something that .com could have been added to for direct navigation. If mainstream users learned to navigate using the address bar instead of the search bar - what would happen to the search economy and innovation online?
Matt / June 25, 2008, 12:32 pm
Khoi Vinh on getting good ideas out faster by collaborating closely:
TimesPeople is the result of a tight collaboration between a small team of our technologists and designers and, for a new feature on our site, they managed to launch it in something like record time. It was actually a lot of fun bringing it to life, but the really important thing is the try-it-and-see approach that drove it. Rather than spend months and millions on creating the ‘perfect’ social networking addition to our site, we decided to take a good idea and get it out as quickly as possible. It’s certainly not perfect, but we’re hoping to learn as much as we can about how social networking makes sense in the Times environment.
From “People Wanted” (subtraction.com)
Matt / June 9, 2008, 8:46 am
Courtesy of the Google Analytics blog, an introduction to website optimization and how (and when) you should use it on your site.
In summary, here’s how to optimize a poorly performing page on your website:
- Find your high value landing pages
What pages on your site have high entrances and high bounce rates? These are the “high value” pages that are begging to be optimized.
- What’s the desired goal (or conversion) for the site?
In other words, what is the ideal outcome of a visit to your site? Some common online conversions include account signup, new lead generation, joining a mailing list, or purchasing a product.
- Set up a goal in Google Analytics to track how well your landing page is funneling people toward your desired conversion
- Create a new design for the landing page you want to test
- Test it!
We were told at the LunaMetrics training session that you can expect actionable results within about a month, depending on the traffic to the page being tested. You could see statistically significant results in as little as two weeks in some circumstances.
Talk to Caleb or me if you want to know more about website optimization or if you have questions about the jargon. We’ve been scouting a few pages on our sites in need of optimization and could always use more practice.
Finally, the Website Optimizer team has a blog that’s worth a look. I recommend starting with this case study, in which conventional wisdom about the use of imagery on the homepage is tested.
Matt / May 23, 2008, 9:51 am
I’m very curious.
My off-the-cuff prediction is that casual Facebook users will see this as just one more piece of clutter and heavy Facebook users will embrace the flexibility. But just because it makes things messier or less consistent visually doesn’t necessarily mean its a bad design idea. It seems like a clever way to allow users to experience the page layout freedom they had on MySpace, but within the constraints of a rigid Facebook UI. Whether that’s what Facebook users want remains to be seen—Facebook has had more than its share of problems pushing unwanted features out to its user base.
Matt / April 23, 2008, 9:42 am
From Khoi Vinh’s ongoing Q&A session:
Over the past two-plus years, as The Times newsroom has embraced blogging with tremendous alacrity, we’ve created over 150 blogs, and over a third of those remain active today.
The challenge is even more complex when you consider that, though each blog has its own needs, the vast majority must be based on a single template (within WordPress, our Web log publishing system) that manages all of the blogs together. As you can imagine, that requires that the template be very versatile and that our designers be very nimble.
So by virtue of the fact that we’re constantly launching new blogs, we’re also in a perpetual state of revision and refinement. We’re fine-tuning the typography, adding new features to the right-hand column, incorporating new kinds of media content into the articles, etc. All of which is work that may then be reflected back on the other blogs.
I find this really remarkable. I can’t help but wonder how difficult it was to get stakeholders to agree to the constraints of a single Wordpress template. By standardizing the blog creation process, they now have an agile publishing system that imposes creative constraints but has been able to grow rapidly with nytimes.com.
Imagine being the guy in charge of maintaining these blogs though.
Matt / April 14, 2008, 12:23 pm
This year’s IA Summit just wrapped up in Miami and as usual there are several sets of slides that made me wish I had gone. Not surprisingly, I was drawn to Leah Buley’s presentation “How to be a UX team of one.”
A bunch of others look really interesting too, and relevant to others outside of the IA/UX practice:
Matt / March 21, 2008, 4:41 pm
This is a classic blog post I rediscovered today. Totally worth reading, even if you’ve seen it before and even if you’re not an information architect.
Users don’t much care “where they are” in the website. So-called “breadcrumb links,” which show the user the exact hierarchy of the website as they click further down, are a nice but mostly irrelevant technology. It’s not that users don’t understand the links; it’s that they don’t care.
Let me say it again, Max Bialystock-style:
USERS DON’T CARE WHERE THEY ARE IN THE WEBSITE.
I emphasize this because Web developers often waste time worring about “where content should live.” Should it be in section B? If so, we need to put big links from Section A to Section B. And then the secondary navigation will list Sections A through C, which are part of category D, because users might need to see the relationship between C, B, and the sub-tertiary wormhole that just opened in the site map!
Meanhwile, the user is on the site thinking, “Do they have it in size three?” and ignoring every element on the page that doesn’t appear to take them toward that goal. All the site-organization links, so carefully consistent with their display in other areas of the site… totally ignored by the user.
Matt / March 19, 2008, 11:59 am
Safari 3.1 (released yesterday) offers support for some new HTML & CSS features. There’s a demo on MacRumors.
One of the most exciting, I think, is downloadable font support — you can link to actual font files from the CSS instead of having to use the common “web safe” fonts.
All of these features are just eye candy until Firefox and IE support it, but it offers a little glimpse into the future of web design & development.
