For today’s Web design projects, we must design for the way the world is, not the way we wish it were. This means accepting search dominance, and trying to help users with poor research skills.

• The reason sketches are so awesome are because they are quick and disposable.
• Knowing your audience ensures that the purpose of your sketch is heard.
• The ultimate purpose behind any sketch is to visually convey an idea to an audience.

The first is an article is from Sitepoint, “Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and the Less Framework 3”.

The second article is from Smashing Magazine, “Responsive Web Design: What It Is and How To Use It”.

Both articles are interesting and well worth the read, if you are into that kind of stuff. This is also in anticipation for UIE Virtual Seminar Presentation, “The How and Why of Responsive Web Design”, that will be going on tomorrow.

Responsive thinking increases your vocabulary for addressing UI challenges on a variety of devices and viewing contexts. via UIE

image courtesy of Shutterstock.com

For the last little while I’ve been reading The Smashing Book. It has been a good read and a lot of great pointers and reminders in there. There was one area that impressed me since I’m in the middle of a project that deals with this. It is in the chapter, “Design to Sell: Increasing Conversion Rates. The beginning of the chapter talks about things that sell.

To sell effectively, you have to sell solutions, not products.

It talks about customers aren’t looking for services or features: they’re looking for a solution to their problems. When it comes to having a product that people are going to pay for, simply throwing up a list of features isn’t going to convince them to buy the product, it needs to show them how it is going to save them time or money or how they can benefit from the product.

One example that is brought up is the iPod Nano. Telling consumers that it has 16 gigabytes is one thing, but what does that mean? It would be more effective to say that it holds 4000 songs. That provides an easy to understand solution to someones problem.

There are so many reason for not purchase something and if there is not a good reason to move forward, visitors to your site will leave. It is important to grab their attention and then move them through the process and create more of a desire so you can eventually get them to act. I have worked a lot with direct mail and the process isn’t that different. You need to create a reason for them to pick up this piece of mail, grab their attention, show them how you can provide a solution to their problems and then get them to act by calling or going online.

In the book they go into the AIDA process, Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. This is a great concept to remember when you are trying to sell anything. Also, it doesn’t stop there, you need to Satisfy your customers so they become advocates for your product.

Luckily, I’m in the early stages of this project and can help the client rethink the direction they should be taking.

Where some website managers want their websites to appeal to everybody, others want it to appeal to themselves and their colleagues.

A surprising number of organisations choose to ignore their users entirely and build their websites entirely around an organisational perspective. This typically manifests itself in inappropriate design that caters to the managing directors personal preferences and content full of internal terminology and jargon.

A website should not be about pandering to the preferences of staff but about meeting the needs of users. Too many designs are rejected because the boss doesn’t like green. Equally too much website copy uses acronyms and terms that are only used internally within an organisation.

From Boagworlds, 10 harsh truths about corporate websites.

Liz is a user experience consultant in New York City. She has been developing web sites and user experiences online for about 12 years. She works with Happy Cog Studios with Jeffrey Zeldman and Jason Santa Maria.

Liz gives some very insiteful information on user experience and user research. I’m sure those already in this field know all of this, but for me it was some great information.

Some of the points she brings up are:

There are no real rules about what [user research] includes and what it doesn’t. You can basically speculate about what your users want, or you can find [what they] know?

She brings up four methods you can use in gathering research.

1. Testing in a lab
2. Testing in the users home or offic (natural environment)
3. Creating personas
4. Analytics software

I would say that, usability testing in a lab, using personas and scenarios, and ethnography or going out into the field and watching users, whether they’re in their homes or their offices, are the three kind of key ways to gather user research with users. The fourth way that I’ll mention is not with users directly, but it is certainly user research that’s available more and more now, and that is data on sort of analytics, which you can gather from Google Analytics, Shaun Inman’s Mint, these kinds of things. Watching site data and user behavior through site analytics is another form of user research that gives you some information, and you can watch these traffic patterns on your site. It doesn’t answer the question “Why?” but it does show you some evidence as to how users are behaving on your site.

Subscribe to the podcast here (link to iTunes).

What is Gel?

Gel (“Good Experience Live”) is a conference and community exploring good experience in all its forms — in business, art, society, technology, and life.

The 2009 conference is coming up but they are also posting videos to the previous conferences speakers. This is a great resource to learn about “good experience” in all forms of life.