Jacob Nielsen just proclaimed the lightbox the “interaction design technique of the year“:
In UI terms, a lightbox draws the user’s attention to a dialog box, error message, or other design element in the middle of the screen by dimming the rest of the screen.
Yes, the lightbox has some benefits. It shows you an Important Message within the context of the page you were just looking at. And it doesn’t get blocked by popup killers. And it looks super-cool, especially when used as a slideshow.
But lightboxes are starting to crop up everywhere. In my Yahoo mail (I hope the guy got paid a lot for that), in half the applications I interact with, even in my own website (OK, I put it there, but that was 2 years ago when it was super-cool and cutting edge).
Is anyone else starting to suffer from lightbox fatigue?
I came across an interesting article on hand-drawn interfaces here. Sometimes a Sharpie and good, strong paper tell the story better — and faster — than a fully fleshed out wireframe. (I must confess that ballpoint sketches on notebook paper don’t pack nearly the same punch.) So hang on to your paper napkin drawings, at least for posterity’s sake.
The November/December 2007 of Ragged Left, the newsletter of the STC Berkeley Chapter, is now online.
The issue includes my summary of a talk given by Adaptive Path’s Sarah Nelson and David Verba, entitled “Lessons Learned from Web Applications and User Centered Design“.
In their talk, they defined Ajax and Web 2.0 and then offered insights into how these developments in web application design offer both opportunities and challenges in designing effective user experiences.
Jacob Nielsen writes in his latest column that eBay’s recent earnings increased because of better usability.
eBay reported record profits for Q1. This despite the fact that the number of auction LISTINGS only increased by 2%. However, merchandise SOLD increased by 14%.
In presenting the record numbers, the CEO, Meg Whitman, said that “the company had been benefiting from changes in the user experience that had increased the number of auctions leading to sales” (as quoted in The New York Times, April 19).
This is a great example of the benefits of usability for e-commerce: income comes from multiplying the amount of use with the conversion rate. The more you improve the user experience of finding products, researching them, and buying them, the higher your conversion rate.
Advertising is important, but it only brings customers to the site. A good user experience is what convinces them to stay there. Careful usability testing and a minimum of user annoyances is at least equally important. Usability affects whether the customer makes a purchase or clicks off to another site.
In eBay’s case, user experience is so important for profits that it’s one of the main things the CEO mentions to the financial press in presenting the quarterly results. eBay has a particularly competent user experience department, but smaller companies usually find that a smaller usability effort can increase their financial performance materially. Your first usability test will uncover a gold mine of low-hanging fruit, to mix metaphors.
Good design isn’t just pretty, it’s also good for business.
In the past week I’ve come across two useful reviews of best practices for designing web forms. The first is from LukeW’s Functioning Form–he writes about the pros and cons of different label placement options (top-aligned, right-aligned, left-aligned). He’s posted about the topic in detail before, but this recent post offers a handy summary of the issues to consider. Print it and hang it on your wall. For lots more detail, scan the pdf presentation.
As the question of top, right, or left aligned form labels comes up often for designers, here’s a short overview of the pros and cons of each method. For illustrated examples and more details, take a look at the full document: Best Practices for Web Form Design (3.9 MB PDF).
Another recent article related to web forms addresses instructional text in the user interface. Embedded user assistance can quickly become more complicated than you might think. Too much assistance clutters the screen, but if you hide the form field explanations under tooltips, your users might never see them.
Mike Hughes offers up the compelling idea that contrary to the logic of flow, instructions should appear below the form element rather than above it. When completing a form on the web, people tend to go straight to the action–so if the help text comes first, they skip over it:
Users skip static elements, such as instructional text, because they focus immediately on downstream actionable objects. Effective user assistance design accommodates users’ natural workflows by providing instruction immediately beside or following interactive elements that constitute points of need for more information.
Now that average Internet users are more accustomed to interacting with web forms, they have higher expectations for usability. Written best practices like those above help to make these expectations explicit, so we can better understand what makes a form easy vs. annoying.
The Daily Domainer reports on an interesting phenomenon–it seems that Internet users are using search engines to go to websites, rather than the browser’s address bar. It’s faster to type “yahoo” into the Google search bar and click the first result link, than to type “http://yahoo.com” into the browser’s address bar.
Some surfers may not understand the difference between the address bar and the Google search bar. Other people do this intentionally as a shortcut. The comments offer some insight: one poster writes, “If I want to search amazon I type [into Google] ‘amazon mybook’, wikipedia is ‘wiki somesubject’, or ‘weather san diego, ca’.”
A parallel development is that some people choose a search term and make up a domain name to match it–like “aromatherapy.com”–rather than entering “aromatherapy” into a search engine.
In summary, we can observe two opposite trends: People who “should” type domains into their address bar end up typing them into their search bar or search engine. And people who “should” use search engines to find what they’re looking for, make up domains on the fly and type them into their address bar. You could call it the Battle of the Clueless. And the battle has only just begun.
Those of us who have been using the Internet since the first GUI browser tend to forget that newer users don’t necessarily follow the “rules”. People find surprising ways of using software that may never have occurred to its designers. “Clueless” or otherwise, users run the show and designers must adapt.
It will be interesting to explore how this phenomenon impacts search engine rankings, pay-per-click advertising, and the value we place on website hits statistics. If search engines aren’t used only for searching, traditional methods of measuring clicks and referral sources may need to be rethought.
