Articles and News
Beyond Goals: Site Search Analytics from the Bottom Up
Top-down analytics are great for creating measurable goals you can use to benchmark and evaluate the performance of your content and designs. But bottom-up analysis teaches you something new and unexpected about your customers’ something goal-driven analysis can’t show you. Discover the kinds of information users want, and identify your site’s most urgent mistakes.
Posted on 05 Nov, 2009 - 12:00 AM in A List ApartYou Can Get There From Here: Websites for Learners
“Content-rich” is not enough. Most websites are not learner-friendly. As an industry, we haven’t done our best to make our content-rich websites suitable for learning and exploration. Learners require more from us than keywords and killer headlines. They need an environment that is narrative, interactive, and discoverable. Amber Simmons tells how to begin creating rich content sites that invite and repay exploration and discovery.
Posted on 05 Nov, 2009 - 12:00 AM in A List ApartGetting to No
A bad client relationship is like a bad marriage without the benefits. To avoid such relationships, or to fix the one you’re in, learn the five classic signs of trouble. Recognizing the never-ending contract revisionist, the giant project team, the vanishing boss and other warning signs can help you run successful, angst-free projects.
Posted on 05 Nov, 2009 - 12:00 AM in A List ApartCan You Say That in English? Explaining UX Research to Clients
It’s hard for clients to understand the true value of user experience research. As much as you’d like to tell your clients to go read The Elements of User Experience and call you back when they’re done, that won’t cut it in a professional services environment. David Sherwin creates a cheat sheet to help you pitch UX research using plain, client-friendly language that focuses on the business value of each exercise.
Posted on 05 Nov, 2009 - 12:00 AM in A List ApartInline Validation in Web Forms
Web forms don’t have to be irritating, and your inline validation choices don’t have to be based on wild guesses. In his examination of inline form validation options, Luke Wroblewski offers that rarest of beasts: actual data about which things make people smile and which make them want to stab your website with a fork.
Posted on 05 Nov, 2009 - 12:00 AM in A List ApartTesting Search for Relevancy and Precision
Despite the fact that site search often receives the most traffic, it’s also the place where the user experience designer bears the least influence. Few tools exist to appraise the quality of the search experience, much less strategize ways to improve it. But relevancy testing and precision testing offer hope. These are two tools you can use to analyze and improve the search user experience.
Posted on 05 Nov, 2009 - 12:00 AM in A List ApartUsability Testing Demystified
The value in usability testing comes from the magic of observing and listening as people use a design. The things you see and the things you hear are often surprising, illuminating, and unpredictable. This unpredictability is tough to capture in any other way. Dana Chisnell shows you how.
Posted on 05 Nov, 2009 - 12:00 AM in A List ApartDiscovering Magic
Wouldn’t it be a little magical if, when you signed up for a new site, it said something like, “We notice you have a profile photo on Flickr and Twitter, would you like to use one of those or upload a new one?” Glenn Jones created a JavaScript library called Ident Engine that can help you do just that.
Posted on 05 Nov, 2009 - 12:00 AM in A List ApartThe Myth of Usability Testing
Usability evaluations are good for many things, but determining a team’s priorities is not one of them. The Molich experiment proves a single usability team can’t discover all or even most major problems on a site. But usability testing does have value as a shock treatment, trust builder, and part of a triangulation process. Test for the right reasons and achieve a positive outcome.
Posted on 05 Nov, 2009 - 12:00 AM in A List ApartInternal Site Search Analysis: Simple, Effective, Life Altering!
Your search and clickstream data is missing a key ingredient: customer intent. You have all the clicks, the pages people viewed, and where they bailed, but not why they came to the site. Your internal site-search data contains that missing ingredient: intent. Learn five ways to analyze your internal site-search datas’ data that’s easy to get, to understand, and to act on.
Posted on 05 Nov, 2009 - 12:00 AM in A List Apart