Demanding that users create a new account before they are able to access a website or mobile app is only justified in rare cases. Usually, people go away, rather than scale a wall placed between them and your offerings.
Before you write any content for the web, you should clearly define who will read it, what the reader’s goals are, and what impact you want your content to have on the reader.
The words in your interface can help establish your product’s personality. The tone of any piece of content can be analyzed along 4 dimensions: humor, formality, respectfulness, and enthusiasm.
Users expect that the content they see will be relevant to their individual needs. Personalization and customization are techniques that can help you ensure that users see what matters to them.
In our usability study with domain experts, we discovered that even highly educated readers crave succinct information that is easy to scan, just like everyone else.
Even a talking-head video can keep people engaged. Take advantage of residual fixations upon scene changes; vary the facial expression, subject position, and even camera angle to reawaken the user’s attention.
Demanding that users create a new account before they are able to access a website or mobile app is only justified in rare cases. Usually, people go away, rather than scale a wall placed between them and your offerings.
Before you write any content for the web, you should clearly define who will read it, what the reader’s goals are, and what impact you want your content to have on the reader.
The words in your interface can help establish your product’s personality. The tone of any piece of content can be analyzed along 4 dimensions: humor, formality, respectfulness, and enthusiasm.
Users expect that the content they see will be relevant to their individual needs. Personalization and customization are techniques that can help you ensure that users see what matters to them.
In our usability study with domain experts, we discovered that even highly educated readers crave succinct information that is easy to scan, just like everyone else.
Links that follow up on the user’s current interest encourage site exploration and reduce bounce rates. With the proper invitation, people will stay longer on your site.
Format-based navigation, such as links to Videos, at the top levels of a website’s information architecture lacks sufficient context and information scent for topic-focused users.
Longer pages can benefit users. Accordions shorten pages and reduce scrolling, but they increase the interaction cost by requiring people to decide on topic headings.
Fancy media on websites typically fails user testing. Simple text and clear photos not only communicate better with users, they also enhance users' feeling of control and thus support the Web's mission as an instant gratification environment.
Even small holiday decorations can increase joy of use and make websites feel more current and more connected to users' lives and physical environment. The key is to commemorate without detracting from your users' main reasons for visiting the site.
To take the Internet to the next level, users must begin posting their own material rather than simply consuming content or distributing copyrighted material. Unfortunately most people are poor writers and even worse at authoring other media. Solutions include structured creation, selection-based media, and teaching content creation in schools.
