A/B Testing inspiration
A/B testing examples that might help you to decide whether to use that marketing popup or not (of course, the only way to really know is to do some A/B testing of your own!)
ABTests.com - Various websites can share and comment on the results of their own A/B tests
Which Test Won - A “hot or not” style gallery where you guess which test won before seeing the answer & proposed explanation
iPhone App Design Patterns Gallery
From Mari Sheibley, nice gallery of iPhone screenshots grouped by design pattern. Patterns include:
- Splash screens
- Activity feeds
- User profiles
- Walk-throughs
- …and more!
...More Android Interaction Design Patterns
Another great blog about Android design patterns, including lots of examples.
You may wish to start with the site’s UI Pattern Index.
Android Interaction Design Patterns
Finally, someone has done a proper job of documenting Android design patterns! Patterns include navigation, notifications, personalization, and more. There are also clear explanations of when and how to use them, including examples of actual apps.
EightShapes Unify Documentation System
Templates and snippets for design documentation, wireframes, and more within Adobe InDesign. The website is well documented and has several video tutorials. If you prefer to jump in, download the pack and open “documentation/IASummit2008.InstantDeliverableMix.NathanCurtis.pdf” for an overview of available templates.
Once I’d familiarized myself with the system, I was able to set up a decent looking design review document in just a few clicks. Since this is using InDesign, this enables a separation between the presentation layer and actual files. The EightShapes Unify blog has a few articles about sourcing library artwork.
Hint: If you’re new to InDesign, note the differences between templates (.indt) and snippets (.inds). You can open a template directly in InDesign, but in order to add a snippet, you must add it to an existing document.
Kano Model - Invest in Customer Delight
The Kano Model describes the relationship between the investment in a product and customer satisfaction.
Summary:
- Performance Payoff: In general, more investment in (the right areas of) your application will increase customer satisfaction.
- Basic Expectations: If your application sets user expectations by making a promise, then you must invest in meeting this expectation or risk frustrating your customers. However, meeting expectations won’t necessarily inspire delight.
- Excitement Generators: To increase delight, strive to “under promise and over deliver”. The classic example of this is Zappos, which may promise 4-5 day delivery, but ship the item much faster.
- Change: Realize that over time and industry adoption, delight may eventually turn into basic expectations.
Geotagging reveals friendships
How many photos do you need to tell someone is socially connected? When combined with time and location data, the number could be as low as three. And that finding may not be tied to more than just photos (think credit card transactions, public transit tickets, and cell phone records).
“While it’s obvious that a photo you post online reveals information about what is pictured in the photo, what is less obvious is that as you post multiple photos you are probably revealing information which may not be pictured anywhere.”
An model that can predict these connections could lead to highly targeted social advertisements, without requiring you to provide Facebook/Twitter credentials.
wordmark.it
Use your HTML5-compatible web browser to preview the fonts on your computer. It’s like FastFontPreview, but more awesome because there’s nothing to install.
From its creator:
Wordmark.it detects fonts with the aid of a flash script by Marko Dugonjić. It also uses Remy Sharp's font detection script.
Bottle Label Inspiration
Q: What’s great about brewing your own beer?
A: You get to design a label for it.
Q: What’s great about designing a beer label?
A: It’s an excuse to visit The Dieline for some inspiration! (Somehow a quick trip here always turns into hours of happy browsing…)
A sampling:
- Why not turn “BYOB” into BYO Label?
- This 3D rum label appeals to both geeks & pirates
- I would love to find this holiday edition beer under my Christmas tree
- Creative “medal” metaphor: Virtuous Ales
- Beautiful illustration on Cerveceria Hacienda, from Pachuca Mexico
- I won’t be making any beer business cards, but this is a neat concept by Ampro Design
Enjoy! I’ll post pictures if I ever stop reading The Dieline long enough to design my own label.
Fonts In Use – Type at work in the real world.
Great website for typography inspiration. It has photos of “real world” examples of typography in use, categorized by industry, format, and typeface.
Good Help Content Improves the User Experience
From the MailChimp blog, some tips about creating great help content to improve your customer experience. It also includes a few tips around improving help content SEO:
Get used to repeating the names of your features over and over and avoid pronouns when writing out steps. This will help your search results as well.
UX Movement Blog
Just stumbled across this blog… lots of nice design patterns, including some that are fairly new (such as infinite scrolling).
Kinect Gestural UI (Jakob Nielsen)
Nielsen reviews the Kinect from a user experience standpoint.
By the way, if you haven’t experienced the Kinect yet, go take it for a test drive. Although it’s not 100% perfect, the gestural interaction and user experience are quite impressive and worth exploring.
The Top Six Innovation Ideas of 2011
Contests, interactive content, innovation labs, promotions… it all comes back to interaction design for a truly connected society.
The Top iPhone & iPad Apps of the Year
I’m not really surprised by any of these, but it is interesting to see that the top 10s include a mix of productivity and recreational apps.
Best Time to Publish Blog Posts
Visualization of view/link/comment activity throughout the week. As you might expect, activity peaks around lunch time. Interesting that views are lighter on the weekend, but comments are much heavier.
A Study of Trends in Mobile Design
An excerpt from a Smashing Magazine book about mobile design. Topics are a mix of technical (TLD usage, code validation, load time), visual design (typography, contrast), and interaction design (navigation, link click region, scrolling). Worth reading to get a quick snapshot of mobile design patterns as they exist today.
Tailoring communication to improve customer support
Customer support calls are opportunities to create great user experiences.
They often don’t end up that way. Long wait times, complicated menu systems, and rep juggling can be frustrating. Yet more and more we’re hearing about companies like Zappos that distinguish themselves through their excellent customer support. Nailing the customer experience when when a user is most upset can transform them from the biggest critic to the strongest promoter.
eLoyalty offers systems to help companies to improve their customer support experiences. When a user calls the customer support line, the system uses the Process Communication Model to determine the caller’s communication style. It alerts the agent, who can then adjust their own communication style in order to best help the user. For example, if a fact-focused “Workaholic” calls, an agent can get straight to the point and give them the information they need. If an emotional “Reactor” calls, the agent knows to connect with them on a personal level before trying to solve their problem.
The numbers are pretty impressive:
A banking client saw the attrition rate among customers struggling with the most serious issues drop from 7% to 1%. Another client using the system saw their J.D. Power rating rise from the high single digits to the low single digits (in the J.D. Power system, one is best). And according to Wesbecher, call center operation costs drop as much as 15% in the first year to 18 months that clients use the eLoyalty system.
This speaks to the value of tailoring support experiences to users’ preferences and emotional needs.
How else can we detect and design for individual preferences?