UX Superstar

Quince, interactive UI pattern library

2009-03-01T06:37:00.000-08:00

http://quince.infragistics.com

Great interactive looking-up.

You must have Silverlight 2 (sort of Flash-wannabe from Microsoft) installed to use this page

Some useful links about UX, UI and Usability

2009-02-26T20:44:00.000-08:00

Usability Readings:

UXBooth - where we can learn about how experts reviews the usability
UsabilityPost - tips and insights into good design practices
Designing Interfaces, homepage of a very famous book on Interface Design, lot of useful stuff there.
Designing Web Interfaces, a sequel of the book Designing Intefaces, but focuses on web design
Serveral papers and essays of Jakob Neilsen, an usability guru, also author of the book Prioritizing Web Usability (2006)

UX / UI patterns library:
Make use of convention ;)

Enjoy, ;)

Steve Krug UX Presentation

2009-01-05T02:25:00.000-08:00

Steve Krug, author of "Don't Make Me Think!" speaks about usability. Watch for the user testing at the end!

10 Tips to Optimize Your Website

2008-12-22T18:39:00.000-08:00

Great tips on optimizing your website. Click the "fullscreen" button on the bottom right to see full screen.

Future Now 10 Tips To Optimize

View SlideShare document or Upload your own. (tags: web marketing)

Great Post on Web Design Tips

2008-12-22T18:38:00.000-08:00

Reducing Friction in the Sales Process

Posted December 17, 2008 by Linda Bustos /

Trucking along in our series on landing page optimization, we’re going to look at friction in the sales process.

According to Marketing Experiments, friction can be defined as psychological resistance to a given element of your sales process that causes aggravation, fatigue or confusion. While impossible to eliminate resistance, your goal is to minimize it as much as possible.

In the Marketing Experiments Landing Page Optimization Workshop, we laid transparencies over top of print-outs of our landing pages (some placed them over their laptop screens) and marked the areas of potential friction. This is a useful exercise when you’re developing split tests, it gets you thinking about the elements on your page you should test first.

Examples of Friction

The following is a “Frictionary” of sorts - not an exhaustive list, but a collection of examples of friction customers may experience on your ecommerce site, with links to relevant Get Elastic posts.

Home Page Friction

1. Slow loading pages

Less of a problem today than 10 years ago, but Web users are also less tolerant of any delay:

Can’t see video? Check out the original Crazy Messed Up World of Ecommerce post, #6 Bananarama…rama…rama…rama

Our friend Justin Palmer offers 25 ways to speed up your website.

2. Difficult to find search boxes

3. Showing too many products on a single page / cluttered design

Friction in Navigation

1. Navigation in sidebars

Be careful how you design your navigation, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin says “don’t put anything in right hand sidebars unless you don’t want them to see it.”

Especially if it looks like Adsense. In fact, don’t hide your calls to action in anything that resembles a banner or text ad block.

2. Tombstone navigation

Tabbed design menus are fine, until you grow to Amazon proportions. Remember the graveyard that was the ‘Zon’s horizontal navigation menu?

Last year’s revamp is much cleaner, easier to scan and to use:

Friction in Site Search

1. Inability to handle synonyms and mispellings

There’s nothing more frustrating than “0 results found”

Can’t see video? Check out the original post, #4 Zero Results Found

If you can’t match relevant products to typos or alternate ways of describing a product, customers often assume you don’t carry it. Even Amazon.ca couldn’t handle my typo, but Amazon.com could.

Amazon.ca:

Amazon.com:

2. Inability to locate non-product information

Can customers quickly find your shipping policies and other customer service information?

Category Page Friction

1. Too many products, not enough filter options

Filtered navigation is a girl’s best friend, whether she’s shopping for diamonds or pearls:

The ability to sort results by relevance, price, best selling and average customer review is also lovely:

PS: a “View All” link is a must-have.

2. Tiny Thumbnails

Sometimes the thumbnail simply doesn’t show enough detail. Customers don’t like to keep clicking between the category page and product pages to see larger images, prices and details. “Quick Look” and AJAX mouse-over image zoom are helpful to see more without a click:

Quick Look:

Mouseover zoom:

Friction on Product Pages

1. Can’t find buy button (or can’t read its text)

It’s crazy but it’s true - some button designs convert better than others. We never really know which ones until we test, but we can make a safe guess this:

would out-perform this:

2. Hey, did I just add to cart?

Not making it clear when an item has been added to cart causes confusion. For example, iBuyDigital updates below the product description, which is easy to miss:

Nine West’s notification is one of my favorites:

3. Irrelevant cross-sells

Friction on the Cart Summary Page

1. Continue shopping means what?

Sign Up Forms / Registration Resistance

1. Too much required information

2. Form design

Like the cart button, it’s proven that form design impacts conversion. Here’s an example of before-and-after. The after converts 200% better:

Image credit: Web Design 4 ROI
Download a sample chapter on form design and optimization from Web Design 4 ROI book

It’s not just form length but also label alignment and placement that matter:

There’s a ton more registration form usability tips here.

3. Vague email sign-up calls-to-action

It’s common practice to not provide any explanation of what to expect from retail emails, and to omit the privacy policy. Kudos to eToys for bucking this trend:

Checkout Process Friction

The number one cause of cart abandonment is “sticker shock” or the addition of unexpected taxes and fees in the checkout process. One way to avoid this is to show pre-checkout tax and shipping based on a zipcode lookup.

Justin Palmer contributed an article to Get Elastic called Losing Customers at The Register: 12 Checkout Blunders with 11 more causes of checkout friction.

Another recommendation is reducing the number of steps in the checkout process, and showing a progress indicator:

You can see more design examples and find tips on split-path testing from Bryan Eisenberg.

Email Marketing Friction

1. Spammy sender name

Names like Carl@yahoo.com (yes, an actual retailer used this as a sender name) and “nobody” (used by American Apparel AND Eatonweb) scream SPAM.

2. When scent wears off

Your landing pages should pick up where your emails, PPC ads and banner ads leave off, using consistant imagery, messaging and pricing:

404 Not Found!

404 pages without links back to the site need no explanation:

Check out more good and not-so-good 404 pages from ecommerce sites.

Again, it’s not possible to eliminate friction all together, and not every visitor will experience the same degree of friction on a given site. Your goal is to reduce friction as much as possible, and sometimes gut feeling isn’t enough to go on, you need to test different versions and see what converts best.

See article here: http://www.getelastic.com/reducing-friction-in-sales-process/

10 Principles of effective web design

2008-12-21T00:52:00.001-08:00

From Smashing Magazine:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/31/10-principles-of-effective-web-design/

Usability and the utility, not the visual design, determine the success or failure of a web-site. Since the visitor of the page is the only person who clicks the mouse and therefore decides everything, user-centric design has become a standard approach for successful and profit-oriented web design. After all, if users can’t use a feature, it might as well not exist.

We aren’t going to discuss the implementation details (e.g. where the search box should be placed) as it has already been done in a number of articles; instead we focus on the main principles, heuristics and approaches for effective web design — approaches which, used properly, can lead to more sophisticated design decisions and simplify the process of perceiving presented information.

Please notice that

you might be interested in the usability-related articles about 10 Usability Nightmares and 30 Usability Issues we’ve published before,
we’ll cover more principles of effective design in our following posts. Therefore you might want to subscribe to our RSS-feed.

This article has been translated to Hebrew.

Principles Of Effective Web Design

In order to use the principles properly we first need to understand how users interact with web-sites, how they think and what are the basic patterns of users’ behavior.

How do users think?

Basically, users’ habits on the Web aren’t that different from customers’ habits in a store. Visitors glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they’re looking for. In fact, there are large parts of the page they don’t even look at.

Most users search for something interesting (or useful) and clickable; as soon as some promising candidates are found, users click. If the new page doesn’t meet users’ expectations, the Back button is clicked and the search process is continued.

Users appreciate quality and credibility. If a page provides users with high-quality content, they are willing to compromise the content with advertisements and the design of the site. This is the reason why not-that-well-designed web-sites with high-quality content gain a lot of traffic over years. Content is more important than the design which supports it.
Users don’t read, they scan. Analyzing a web-page, users search for some fixed points or anchors which would guide them through the content of the page.

Users don’t read, they scan. Notice how “hot” areas abrupt in the middle of sentences. This is typical for the scanning process.
Web users are impatient and insist on instant gratification. Very simple principle: If a web-site isn’t able to meet users’ expectations, then designer failed to get his job done properly and the company loses money. The higher is the cognitive load and the less intuitive is the navigation, the more willing are users to leave the web-site and search for alternatives. [JN / DWU]
Users don’t make optimal choices. Users don’t search for the quickest way to find the information they’re looking for. Neither do they scan web-page in a linear fashion, going sequentially from one site section to another one. Instead users satisfice; they choose the first reasonable option. As soon as they find a link that seems like it might lead to the goal, there is a very good chance that it will be immediately clicked. Optimizing is hard, and it takes a long time. Satisficing is more efficient. [video]

Both pictures show: sequential reading flow doesn’t work in the Web. Right screenshot on the image at the bottom describes the scan path of a given page.
Users follow their intuition. In most cases users muddle through instead of reading the information a designer has provided. According to Steve Krug, the basic reason for that is that users don’t care. “If we find something that works, we stick to it. It doesn’t matter to us if we understand how things work, as long as we can use them. If your audience is going to act like you’re designing billboard, then design great billboards.”
Users want to have control. Users want to be able to control their browser and rely on the consistent data presentation throughout the site. E.g. they don’t want new windows popping up unexpectedly and they want to be able to get back with a “Back”-button to the site they’ve been before: therefore it’s a good practice to never open links in new browser windows.

1. Don’t make users think

According to Krug’s first law of usability, the web-page should be obvious and self-explanatory. When you’re creating a site, your job is to get rid of the question marks — the decisions users need to make consciously, considering pros, cons and alternatives.

If the navigation and site architecture aren’t intuitive, the number of question marks grows and makes it harder for users to comprehend how the system works and how to get from point A to point B. A clear structure, moderate visual clues and easily recognizable links can help users to find their path to their aim.

Let’s take a look at an example. Beyondis.co.uk claims to be “beyond channels, beyond products, beyond distribution”. What does it mean? Since users tend to explore web-sites according to the “F”-pattern, these three statements would be the first elements users will see on the page once it is loaded.

Although the design itself is simple and intuitive, to understand what the page is about the user needs to search for the answer. This is what an unnecessary question mark is. It’s designer’s task to make sure that the number of question marks is close to 0. The visual explanation is placed on the right hand side. Just exchanging both blocks would increase usability.

ExpressionEngine uses the very same structure like Beyondis, but avoids unnecessary question marks. Furthermore, the slogan becomes functional as users are provided with options to try the service and download the free version.

By reducing cognitive load you make it easier for visitors to grasp the idea behind the system. Once you’ve achieved this, you can communicate why the system is useful and how users can benefit from it. People won’t use your web site if they can’t find their way around it.

2. Don’t squander users’ patience

In every project when you are going to offer your visitors some service or tool, try to keep your user requirements minimal. The less action is required from users to test a service, the more likely a random visitor is to actually try it out. First-time visitors are willing to play with the service, not filling long web forms for an account they might never use in the future. Let users explore the site and discover your services without forcing them into sharing private data. It’s not reasonable to force users to enter an email address to test the feature.

As Ryan Singer — the developer of the 37Signals team — states, users would probably be eager to provide an email address if they were asked for it after they’d seen the feature work, so they had some idea of what they were going to get in return.

Stikkit is a perfect example for a user-friendly service which requires almost nothing from the visitor which is unobtrusive and comforting. And that’s what you want your users to feel on your web site.

Apparently, Mite requires more. However the registration can be done in less than 30 seconds — as the form has horizontal orientation, the user doesn’t even need to scroll the page.

Ideally remove all barriers, don’t require subscriptions or registrations first. A user registration alone is enough of an impediment to user navigation to cut down on incoming traffic.

3. Manage to focus users’ attention

As web-sites provide both static and dynamic content, some aspects of the user interface attract attention more than others do. Obviously, images are more eye-catching than the text — just as the sentences marked as bold are more attractive than plain text.

The human eye is a highly non-linear device, and web-users can instantly recognize edges, patterns and motions. This is why video-based advertisements are extremely annoying and distracting, but from the marketing perspective they perfectly do the job of capturing users’ attention.

Humanized.com perfectly uses the principle of focus. The only element which is directly visible to the users is the word “free” which works attractive and appealing, but still calm and purely informative. Subtle hints provide users with enough information of how to find more about the “free” product.

Focusing users’ attention to specific areas of the site with a moderate use of visual elements can help your visitors to get from point A to point B without thinking of how it actually is supposed to be done. The less question marks visitors have, the better sense of orientation they have and the more trust they can develop towards the company the site represents. In other words: the less thinking needs to happen behind the scenes, the better is the user experience which is the aim of usability in the first place.

4. Strive for feature exposure

Modern web designs are usually criticized due to their approach of guiding users with visually appealing 1-2-3-done-steps, large buttons with visual effects etc. But from the design perspective these elements actually aren’t a bad thing. On the contrary, such guidelines are extremely effective as they lead the visitors through the site content in a very simple and user-friendly way.

Dibusoft.com combines visual appeal with clear site structure. The site has 9 main navigation options which are visible at the first glance. The choice of colors might be too light, though.

Letting the user see clearly what functions are available is a fundamental principle of successful user interface design. It doesn’t really matter how this is achieved. What matters is that the content is well-understood and visitors feel comfortable with the way they interact with the system.

5. Make use of effective writing

As the Web is different from print, it’s necessary to adjust the writing style to users’ preferences and browsing habits. Promotional writing won’t be read. Long text blocks without images and keywords marked in bold or italics will be skipped. Exaggerated language will be ignored.

Talk business. Avoid cute or clever names, marketing-induced names, company-specific names, and unfamiliar technical names. For instance, if you describe a service and want users to create an account, “sign up” is better than “start now!” which is again better than “explore our services”.

Eleven2.com gets directly to the point. No cute words, no exaggerated statements. Instead a price: just what visitors are looking for.

An optimal solution for effective writing is to

use short and concise phrases (come to the point as quickly as possible),
use scannable layout (categorize the content, use multiple heading levels, use visual elements and bulleted lists which break the flow of uniform text blocks),
use plain and objective language (a promotion doesn’t need to sound like advertisement; give your users some reasonable and objective reason why they should use your service or stay on your web-site)

6. Strive for simplicity

The “keep it simple”-principle (KIS) should be the primary goal of site design. Users are rarely on a site to enjoy the design; furthermore, in most cases they are looking for the information despite the design. Strive for simplicity instead of complexity.

Crcbus provides visitors with a clean and simple design. You may have no idea what the site is about as it is in Italian, however you can directly recognize the navigation, header, content area and the footer. Notice how even icons manage to communicate the information clearly. Once the icons are hovered, additional information is provided.

From the visitors’ point of view, the best site design is a pure text, without any advertisements or further content blocks matching exactly the query visitors used or the content they’ve been looking for. This is one of the reasons why a user-friendly print-version of web pages is essential for good user experience.

Finch clearly presents the information about the site and gives visitors a choice of options without overcrowding them with unnecessary content.

7. Don’t be afraid of the white space

Actually it’s really hard to overestimate the importance of white space. Not only does it help to reduce the cognitive load for the visitors, but it makes it possible to perceive the information presented on the screen. When a new visitor approaches a design layout, the first thing he/she tries to do is to scan the page and divide the content area into digestible pieces of information.

Complex structures are harder to read, scan, analyze and work with. If you have the choice between separating two design segments by a visible line or by some whitespace, it’s usually better to use the whitespace solution. Hierarchical structures reduce complexity (Simon’s Law): the better you manage to provide users with a sense of visual hierarchy, the easier your content will be to perceive.

White space is good. Cameron.io uses white space as a primary design element. The result is a well-scannable layout which gives the content a dominating position it deserves.

8. Communicate effectively with a “visible language”

In his papers on effective visual communication, Aaron Marcus states three fundamental principles involved in the use of the so-called “visible language” — the content users see on a screen.

Organize: provide the user with a clear and consistent conceptual structure. Consistency, screen layout, relationships and navigability are important concepts of organization. The same conventions and rules should be applied to all elements.
Economize: do the most with the least amount of cues and visual elements. Four major points to be considered: simplicity, clarity, distinctiveness, and emphasis. Simplicity includes only the elements that are most important for communication. Clarity: all components should be designed so their meaning is not ambiguous. Distinctiveness: the important properties of the necessary elements should be distinguishable. Emphasis: the most important elements should be easily perceived.
Communicate: match the presentation to the capabilities of the user. The user interface must keep in balance legibility, readability, typography, symbolism, multiple views, and color or texture in order to communicate successfully. Use max. 3 typefaces in a maximum of 3 point sizes — a maximum of 18 words or 50-80 characters per line of text.

9. Conventions are our friends

Conventional design of site elements doesn’t result in a boring web site. In fact, conventions are very useful as they reduce the learning curve, the need to figure out how things work. For instance, it would be a usability nightmare if all web-sites had different visual presentation of RSS-feeds. That’s not that different from our regular life where we tend to get used to basic principles of how we organize data (folders) or do shopping (placement of products).

With conventions you can gain users’ confidence, trust, reliability and prove your credibility. Follow users’ expectations — understand what they’re expecting from a site navigation, text structure, search placement etc. (see Nielsen’s Usability Alertbox for more information)

BabelFish in use: Amazon.com in Russian.

A typical example from usability sessions is to translate the page in Japanese (assuming your web users don’t know Japanese, e.g. with Babelfish) and provide your usability testers with a task to find something in the page of different language. If conventions are well-applied, users will be able to achieve a not-too-specific objective, even if they can’t understand a word of it.

Steve Krug suggests that it’s better to innovate only when you know you really have a better idea, but take advantages of conventions when you don’t.

10. Test early, test often

This so-called TETO-principle should be applied to every web design project as usability tests often provide crucial insights into significant problems and issues related to a given layout.

Test not too late, not too little and not for the wrong reasons. In the latter case it’s necessary to understand that most design decisions are local; that means that you can’t universally answer whether some layout is better than the other one as you need to analyze it from a very specific point of view (considering requirements, stakeholders, budget etc.).

Some important points to keep in mind:

according to Steve Krug, testing one user is 100% better than testing none and testing one user early in the project is better than testing 50 near the end. Accoring to Boehm’s first law, errors are most frequent during requirements and design activities and are the more expensive the later they are removed.
testing is an iterative process. That means that you design something, test it, fix it and then test it again. There might be problems which haven’t been found during the first round as users were practically blocked by other problems.
usability tests always produce useful results. Either you’ll be pointed to the problems you have or you’ll be pointed to the absence of major design flaws which is in both cases a useful insight for your project.
according to Weinberg’s law, a developer is unsuited to test his or her code. This holds for designers as well. After you’ve worked on a site for few weeks, you can’t observe it from a fresh perspective anymore. You know how it is built and therefore you know exactly how it works — you have the wisdom independent testers and visitors of your site wouldn’t have.

Bottom line: if you want a great site, you’ve got to test.

References

Designing Effective User Interfaces by Suzanne Martin
Summary on Web Design
UID presentation (Flash)
Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines
“The psychology of computer programming” by Gerald Weinberg
“Designing Web Usability” by Jakob Nielsen [JN / DWU]
“Prioritizing Web Usability” by Jakob Nielsen
“Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug
“Usability for the Web: Designing Web Sites that Work” by Tom Brinck, Darren Gergle, Scott Wood
A Summary of Principles for User-Interface Design

Some ideas on using stock photo models in web design

2008-12-20T09:01:00.000-08:00

I found an article written about the usage of stock photo models in web design.

http://justcreativedesign.com/2008/09/30/top-7-most-cliche-stock-images-used-in-web-design/

Here is another article that's quite humorous though it's a little bit hardcore.

http://tinyurl.com/5e37tl

Have fun reading

UI Design

2008-11-18T18:34:00.001-08:00

Inspiration from The Edge: New Patterns for Interface Design

From: stephenpa,
7 months ago

Inspiration from The Edge: New Patterns for Interface Design

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: interfacedesign interface)

(My presentation from the IA Summit 2008)

Want a fresh perspective on UI design? Look around. Not at other web sites or desktop applications but at other interactive media. Tivo, the iPhone, the Wii software interface, the ‘Sugar’ OS for the XO Laptop… there’s a world of new UI inspiration that is already being proven out in other devices.

SlideShare Link

What to Look for in UX Professionals

2008-11-18T08:54:00.000-08:00

This is a guide to how to select a UX consultant. But I found it a great summary of general UX advice. There are great points in here, such as "What users say about a website usually has no relation to what they *do* on a website." A/B testing is the only way to know for sure.

To read, click on the "fullscreen" icon in the bottom right corner of the document.

Download the document here.
Key Questions For Ux Professionals

View SlideShare document or Upload your own.

Awesome UX and Marketing Blog

2008-11-17T20:37:00.000-08:00

This blog is from my old colleage at Yahoo, Sean O'Malley. It's fantastic! All of you should subscribe now!

http://seancomalley.com/

Startup Marketing

2008-11-17T20:36:00.001-08:00

Startup Marketing

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: blogging influencial)

Designing with Vision

2008-11-17T20:34:00.000-08:00

Designing With Vision

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: startup strategy)

Some Cool Web 2.0 Concepts

2008-11-17T20:25:00.000-08:00

Introducing Web 2.0 concepts

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: john intergen)

Eye Tracking Lessons

2008-11-17T20:23:00.000-08:00

Scientific Web Design: 23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies

By Christina Laun

Eye-tracking studies are hot in the web design world, but it can be hard to figure out how to translate the results of these studies into real design implementations. These are a few tips from eye-tracking studies that you can use to improve the design of your webpage.

Text attracts attention before graphics. Contrary to what you might think, the first thing users look at on a website isn’t the images. Most casual users will be coming to your site looking for information, not images, so make sure your website is designed so that the most important parts of your text are what is most prominent.
Initial eye movement focuses on the upper left corner of the page. It shouldn’t be surprising that users look at webpages in this way, as most computer applications are designed with the top left hand side as the main focus. You can do your website a favor by keeping this format in mind when creating a design. Remember, while you want to have a personal style, you have to keep the habits of your readers in mind if you want your site to be successful.
Users initially look at the top left and upper portion of the page before moving down and to the right. Users were found to generally scan webpages in the shape of an ‘F’. Make sure the important elements of your content are located in these key areas to keep readers engaged. Place headlines, subheadlines, bullet points, and highlighted text along these lines so readers will be enticed to read further.
Readers ignore banners. Ads may be the bread and butter of your site, but studies have shown that readers largely ignore banner ads, often focusing for only a fraction of a second. If you’re trying to make money from ads, you need to be creative in your ad placement or in the types of ads you have on your site.
Fancy formatting and fonts are ignored. Why? Because users assume they are ads and don’t have the information they need. In fact, studies showed that users had difficulty finding information in large colored letters formatted in this way because visual clues told them to ignore it. Keep your site streamlined and not so shiny that important elements will be glossed over.
Show numbers as numerals. Readers will find it much easier to find factual information on your site if you use numerals instead of writing out numbers. Remember, you’re writing for readers that are going to be primarily scanning your site, so make it easier for them to find what they need and keep them interested.
Type size influences viewing behavior. Want to change how people look at your page? Change the size of your font. Smaller fonts increase focused viewing behavior while larger fonts encourage scanning. Depending on your needs, you may want more of one than the other.
Users only look at a sub headline if it interests them. Don’t put in subheadlines just to stick to a particular format–make sure that they are relevant and interesting. You can also help yourself out by making sure they include keywords that will bring search engines to your site.
People generally scan lower portions of the page. You can use this to your advantage if you give readers something to latch onto when they’re scanning your page. Highlight certain sections or create bulleted lists so information is easy to find and read on your page.
Shorter paragraphs perform better than long ones. Information on your page should be designed for the short attention span of most Internet users. Keep paragraphs and sentences short unless context mandates otherwise, such as descriptions of products on an e-commerce sites.
One-column formats perform better in eye-fixation than multi-column formats. Don’t overwhelm visitors to your site with too much information. Simpler really is better in some cases. Multiple columns will more than likely by ignored by users, so eliminate clutter from the get-go.
Ads in the top and left portions of a page will receive the most eye fixation. If you’re going to place ads on your site, try integrating them into the top left portion of your page, as those will get the most visual attention. Of course, just because readers see them there doesn’t mean they’ll click on them, so don’t sacrifice design just to gain some extra visibility.
Ads placed next to the best content are seen more often. If you want to get your ads seen and hopefully clicked on, incorporate them into your design in a way that places them near the most interesting elements of your content. Users will still be able to find what they need, but you’ll gain an advantage in advertising.
Text ads were viewed mostly intently of all types tested. Like we said earlier, the average Internet user generally doesn’t waste much time looking at things that immediately appear to be ads. That’s why text ads perform so much better. They aren’t distracting and blend in with the rest of the content on the page, making them less visually irritating to the reader and ultimately more successful.
Bigger images get more attention. If you are going to use images on your page, bigger is better. People are more interested in an image where they can see details and information clearly. Just make sure that any image you are using is particularly relevant to your text, otherwise it will most likely be ignored. Most readers have high-speed connections these days so don’t be afraid to stick a few larger photos on your Web host.
Clean, clear faces in images attract more eye fixation. While they might look good with your design, abstract and artsy photos aren’t going to garner much reader attention. If you’re using photos with people in them, make sure they are clear, easy to read shots. It should also be noted that photos with “real” people, not models, perform better.
Headings draw the eye. One of the first things readers have been found to look at on a webpage are headlines. Make sure yours are unobstructed by other items on the page and that they are engaging enough to draw the reader into looking further through your site.
Users spend a lot of time looking at buttons and menus. Because of this, you’ll want to put in some extra time making sure that yours are well-designed. After all, they not only draw a lot of eye fixation, they are one of the most important elements of your site.
Lists hold reader attention longer. One way you can break up the paragraphs in your content and keep users looking through your site is to make frequent use of a list format for your articles. Use numbers or bullet points to highlight important information within your content. It will make your site more scannable and easier for users to find the information that they’re looking for.
Large blocks of text are avoided. Studies have shown that that your average Web visitor isn’t going to take the time to study large blocks of text no matter how informative or well-written they might be. Because of this, you need to break up these larger blocks of text into smaller paragraphs. Highlighting specific areas and pulling out bullet points can also help to keep user attention.
Formatting can draw attention. To keep users from skipping over the main and most important points in your content use bold, capitalized, italicized, colored, and underlined text. Use these things judiciously however, as too much will make your page hard to read and send readers away.
White space is good. While it might be tempting to put something in every corner of your page, it’s actually better to leave some of your site free of any text. Sites with too much going on tend to overwhelm users and they ignored a large part of the content. So keep things simple and allow some visual open space for readers to rest their eyes.
Navigation tools work better when placed at the top of the page. Ideally, you don’t want readers to just look at the initial page they came to on your site, you want them to stick around and look at other interesting things as well. You can help send them in the right direction by making your navigation easy to find and use by placing it at the top of the page.