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Showing posts with label online. Show all posts
Showing posts with label online. Show all posts

Thursday, September 10, 2015

13 mind-blowing statistics on user experience


1) Infinite scrolling can decline your bounce rate. Time.com’s bounce rate down 15 percentage points since adopting continuous scroll
2) In 10 years, a $10,000 investment in design centric companies would have yielded returns 228% greater than the same investment in the S&P.
3) ESPN.com revenues jumped 35% after truly listening to their community and incorporating suggestions into their homepage redesign
4) Choosing a specific blue over some other hues amounted to anadditional $80 million in annual revenue for Bing
5) For every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return is $44.25
6) 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience
7) Slow-loading websites cost retailers £1.73bn in lost sales each year
8) Judgments on web site credibility are 75% based on a website’s overallaesthetics
9) First impressions are 94% design-related
10) 85% of adults think that a company’s mobile website should be as good or better than their desktop website
11) 70% (of the 200 small business websites evaluated) don’t display clear calls-to-action for anything on their home pages, such as specials, e-mail newsletters, how-to guides, demos, and interactive tools
12) 90% of people use multiple screens sequentially
13) You are 64 times more likely to climb Mount Everest than clicking on a banner ad
Note: This article was originally written for Cameron & Wilding

Monday, June 1, 2015

3 ways sales people should use LinkedIn to increase sales




You are sitting at your desk in a panic because you are not going to make quote for the quarter....LinkedIn can help even if you do not have a premium account.


1- Reach people at companies you want to sell to and you are not selling to today.
A-Search for employees at XYZ- check out titles -look at profiles. 
B- Check to see if any of your connections know them- If yes, ask them to help connect you so you can send a message to them.
C-See if they belong to any of the groups you belong. If yes, go to group page find them and send a message-this is free.

Need more help using LinkedIn as a sales tool...Contact us for an individual online session at nanette@nsgconsultinginc.com

Or do you want to get more sales from your sales team-Contact us about doing a presentation at your next sales meeting at: nanette@nsgconsultinginc.com

Learn more about our firm at: http://nsgconsultinginc.com/



Thursday, October 3, 2013

Designing Around Little Minds

Designing Around Little Minds

 
In designing user interfaces, we aim to empower the “user” to understand and control the system at hand. Output via screens and speakers, with input from a keyboard, a touch screen or gestures. Between them, the “user” is understood to be our conscious “mind” – the logical bit of our brain that thinks it’s in charge.
This “mind” is actually not nearly as “in charge” as it thinks it is. In fact, our larger and often much more wise mind – the emotional, sub-conscious, parallel-processing, pattern recognizing part of our nervous system even manipulates and deceives our conscious mind. Articulated long ago as Dual Process Theory, Kahneman formalizes them as System 1 (this vast, quick and automatic aspect of thinking) and System 2 (the small “conscious” mind that logically considers and judges).
There is a basic fitness function to having our conscious mind feel confident, whether fighting, mating, or even making the small decisions that people make to get through a day. But the confidence we are building is with the small and logical part of our minds, deceiving ourselves that things are ok when another part of ourselves might know otherwise.
This is articulated in an experiment described by Trivers in which subjects are asked to listen to a series of voices, some of which are their own. Depending on the confidence of the subjects, some tended to attribute their voice to others … or conversely, mistake other voices as their own. The interesting thing was that the galvanic skin response that connects to our parasympathetic nervous systemalways reacted consistently to our own voices, even when our conscious minds were deceived. (Trivers 1985)
Whether it’s the decisions we make or the assessments of how we feel, we are consistently persuading ourselves that the world is organized and coherent, and that we understand what’s going on, most of the time. In fact, the world is complex and chaotic. Most of what goes on in the world -- and even in our own bodies -- is beyond the comprehension and (luckily) the control of our little minds.
Thus, good design communicates with the broader, faster, more emotional system. What we call the “flow state” or “in the zone” is just our little minds getting out of the way so that our bigger and more intuitive mind can run the show. Whether throwing a basketball or driving a car, if our logical minds were coordinating each step, it would be impossibly difficult to coordinate all of the steps. However, our little minds are “smart” enough to get out of the way when we have mastery and allow the rest of the system to dominate.
Why is it then that we seem to insist on building and assessing our systems based on what our little mind thinks? Think about the testing in schools that only measures local knowledge and logical skills, or designing user interfaces around what the user is focused on like pull-down menus and the mouse pointer.
I believe that we must focus much more on creating interfaces that send information to – and receive controls signals from – the rest of our system. This could apply to sensors for health, assistive robots, the Internet of things, thermostats, or future vehicles.
The problem is, individually and collectively, our little minds don’t like to give up control. We have to trick our minds to get out of the way sometimes. That’s where deception emerges as a design pattern.
In the late 1800s, James Naismith, a pastor and a physical education teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts realized that he needed a way to deal with young kids who would become restless and unruly during the harsh New England winters. He knew they needed the exercise, collaboration and competition they got the other nine months of the year.
So Naismith invented basketball, allowing kids to exercise indoors, to compete and collaborate, all through playing this fun new game. It worked swimmingly, and quickly spread through YMCAs and became the sport it is today. My bet is that if he had called it “social ball” or “don’t-beat-each-other-up ball” it probably wouldn’t have been nearly the hit that it was.
Was this subtle deception immoral? Was it effective? Which part of the mind was Naismith looking to address, and which part did he find ways to speak to?
Today, we spend so much time telling our conscious and self-deceived minds what we want it to do. What if we spent more time trying to induce our minds to get out of the way, through meditation, play, prayer ... or even deception. We need to think less like industrial designers (designing for the intentions of the conscious user) and more like game designers (designing for the desires and quick, “irrational” behavior of our mind.) We need to design our medical devices, computers, vehicles and communication tools to be influenced by what we really do and think. Not just what we tell ourselves we are doing or thinking.
--
Trivers, R. (1985). Social evolution. Menlo Park, Calif., Benjamin/Cummings Pub. Co.