For large-scale and e-commerce sites, the search experience is an increasingly critical tool. You can vastly improve the experience for users with thoughtful microcopy and the right contextualization. Users who favor searches tend to move quickly, scanning the page for that familiar-looking rectangle, and bouncing quickly when they don’t find what they’re looking for. Communicating with those users “at speed” is a tricky job that requires a specialized tool. In this article, Andrew Millen will show you how to use microcopy.
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Email is a great tool for, first, acquiring leads from a website and, later, converting and retaining them. But just as you now approach web design with a mobile-first mentality, the same switch should occur as you design email marketing campaigns for your clients. If users are more likely to open email on mobile and we know that opened emails convert at a higher rate than those that go unopened, wouldn’t it make sense for designers to prioritize the mobile experience when designing emails? In this article, Suzanne Scacca brings you some facts and tips you need to know for designing mobile-first emails.
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How can we improve our keyboard-only (KO) and Assistive Technology (AT) user experiences without affecting the experience for anyone else? In this article, we’ll dig into some specific, practical examples including skip links, navigation menus, modal focusing, and user education components. In this article, Aaron Pearlman is going to go over a few of those affordances that can make your KO/AT user experiences better without really changing the experience for anyone else.
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How do browsers and HTML support screen readers today? In this article, Be Birchall explains why it’s so important to prioritize accessibility among teams and why there needs to be more awareness raised among developers. Lack of awareness and prioritization, rather than any technical limitation, is currently the main barrier to an accessible web. We hope to shift your perspective closer to Haben Girma’s by showing how web accessibility fits into the broader areas of technology, disability, and design.
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Have you noticed that contact forms are disappearing? Have you also noticed that many websites are replacing their forms with chatbots? Whether you put a chatbot on your website or direct visitors to one hosted on Facebook Messenger, is that a better solution for capturing leads and other contact information than with a traditional form? In this article, Suzanne Scacca will explore what is happening to forms on the mobile web and why chatbots may or may not be a suitable replacement for them.
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It’s essential to be ready to design for both visual and voice. Since prototyping for voice is new for many designers, it may be unclear as to where to start and what process to follow.
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Design involves decisions, and those decisions are often flawed because our brains are wired for survival. The same brain features that literally helped us survive in the wild do not serve us well in the 21st-century workplace. In this article, Eric Olive will identify four decision-related traps that impede good design and offer techniques for avoiding these traps. These decision traps are based on research conducted by psychologists, neuroscientists, molecular biologists, and behavioral economists including several cited here.
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Many mobile applications require access to location, photos, and even the camera during installation, which isn’t something most customers would be happy to consent to. In this series of articles, Vitaly Friedman talks about privacy-related design patterns. You’ll be exploring some of the respectful ways to approach privacy and data collection, and how to deal with the notorious cookie consent prompts, intrusive push notifications, glorious permission requests, malicious third-party tracking and offboarding experience.
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With so many applications and services and people and machines and chatbots fighting for our attention, staying focused is a luxury that needs to be savored and protected, and so no wonder notifications don’t enjoy a decent reputation these days. More than that, often they feel off the point and manipulative, too. In this series of articles, Vitaly Friedman will talk about privacy-related design patterns. He’ll be exploring some of the respectful ways to approach privacy and data collection, and how to deal with those notorious cookie consent prompts, intrusive push notifications, glorious permission requests, malicious third-party tracking and offboarding experience.
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Story structure can be the lens through which we view websites. It helps us step into the user’s shoes and understand where and how users interact with our websites. The user finds themselves on a journey through your website on the way to their goal. If you can see this journey from their perspective, you can better understand what they need at each step, and align your goals with theirs. We, web professionals and site owners, are characters in their story and it’s about time we acted like it.
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