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Tuesday, September 16, 2014

6 Website Design Flaws to Avoid

6 Website Design Flaws to Avoid
BY ILYA POZIN @ILYANEVERSLEEPS

Forget text--here's why a great website design is worth a thousand words.

1.7k SHARES

How long do you have to make a good impression online? According to researchers, the amount of time could be as little as 50 milliseconds. Your website design has to capture attention, and capture it fast to avoid losing out on customers and clients.

Here are the six big design flaws to avoid, so you can keep eyes on your website for more than 50 milliseconds:

Know where the eye wanders

What is your audience looking at when it first sets eyes on your page? Eye tracking studies have been performed for years, and the same pattern has been found multiple times. According to eye tracking research by the Nielsen Norman Group, people generally tend to view websites in an "F" pattern. This "F" pattern is true across articles, e-commerce sites, and even Web searches.

Therefore, the location of your most essential information is important, including links and call-to-action statements. Placing important information at the top of your website or in the upper lefthand corner means your audience is more likely to see and digest it quickly.

Choose the right images

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The images you choose will have a huge influence on how viewers see and respond to your site. Positive images evoke a similarly positive feeling for your audience, so you might want to include some smiling faces. In fact, research by Temple University found inspiration-related design elements had the biggest impact on first-impression formation on travel and tourism websites.

Sunny optimism is not only attractive but also more likely to leave a lasting impression on your target audience. According to research, positive expectations can actually positively affect user impressions. Ignoring upbeat images isn't an option. If your site paints a vividly upbeat portrait of your company, users will form a first impression built to last.

Design for everyone

There are plenty of audience segments you need to consider when designing, yet many companies and Web developers are leaving potential customers on the table. People living with disabilities are a huge audience, and you should build your site to be as inclusive as possible.

Consider using Alt tags, so a screen reader can pick up the images on your site. Create subtitles and transcripts for your videos, describe your links in greater detail, and provide larger clickable areas for those with limited mobility. Web design should be inclusive, not exclusive, because your site or company should want to make room for everyone.

Mind your color wheel

Speaking of disabilities, did you know approximately 0.5 percent of women and 8 percent of men have some form of color blindness? Unfortunately, few designers spend much time considering color blindness when putting together the color wheel on websites. Red-green color blindness is the most common form, yet most sites include red prominently as call-to-action items and error messages.

It can be hard for those living with red-green color blindness to, for example, notice an error made when filling out a form if the red color recedes into the background. Use color cues in combination with other images and graphical symbols when trying to grab the attention of users.

Use nonverbals to spur call-to-actions

As humans, we have a natural tendency to follow the gaze of others. Which is probably why a study called "Eye Gaze Cannot Be Ignored" found we tend to even follow the gaze in still images. For Web design, this is a powerful tool that some designers are missing. The nonverbal behavior in the images you select can influence the actual behavior of your site's visitors.

This means you might want the image of your company mascot to stare directly at the call-to-action item or at newsletter signup on your page. Visitors will be more likely to pay attention to what the image is looking at by following eyelines.

Know your target audience

One of the biggest design flaws is ignoring your target audience. Are you targeting investment bankers, AARP members, or tech-obsessed Millennials? The audience should dictate many of the design elements, from images to font size. Pay attention to what your competition is doing, and make sure you're on-trend instead of trailing behind the pack.

You should also know from where your target audience is coming. Smartphones and tablets have changed the game, meaning mobile optimization is more important than ever before.A study by Latitude found 61 percent of consumers feel more positive about a brand or company if they have a good mobile experience. Ignoring the new mobile reality is a huge design flaw, no matter what your target audience.

Understanding these common design flaws can help you build a better user experience and convert more visitors into loyal customers.

What do you think? What are some common website design flaws you've noticed? Share in the comments!

http://www.inc.com/ilya-pozin/6-website-design-flaws-to-avoid.html

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

4 Myths About Apple Design, From An Ex-Apple Designer

WHAT'S LIFE REALLY LIKE DESIGNING FOR APPLE? AN ALUM SHARES WHAT HE LEARNED DURING HIS SEVEN YEARS IN CUPERTINO.

Apple is synonymous with upper echelon design, but very little is known about the company's design process. Most of Apple's own employees aren't allowed inside Apple's fabled design studios. So we're left piecing together interviews, or outright speculating about how Apple does it and what it's really like to be a designer at the company.

Enter Mark Kawano. Before founding Storehouse, Kawano was a senior designer at Apple for seven years, where he worked on Aperture and iPhoto. Later, Kawano became Apple's User Experience Evangelist, guiding third-party app iOS developers to create software that felt right on Apple's platforms. Kawano was with the company during a critical moment, as Apple released the iPhone and created the wide world of apps.

In an interview with Co.Design, Kawano spoke frankly about his time at Apple--and especially wanted to address all the myths the industry has about the company and about its people.

MYTH #1

Apple Has The Best Designers

"I think the biggest misconception is this belief that the reason Apple products turn out to be designed better, and have a better user experience, or are sexier, or whatever . . . is that they have the best design team in the world, or the best process in the world," Kawano says. But in his role as user experience evangelist, meeting with design teams from Fortune 500 companies on a daily basis, he absorbed a deeper truth.

"It's actually the engineering culture, and the way the organization is structured to appreciate and support design. Everybody there is thinking about UX and design, not just the designers. And that's what makes everything about the product so much better . . . much more than any individual designer or design team."

It has often been said that good design needs to start at the top--that the CEO needs to care about design as much as the designers themselves. People often observe that Steve Jobs brought this structure to Apple. But the reason that structure works isn't because of a top-down mandate. It's an all around mandate. Everyone cares.

"It's not this thing where you get some special wings or superpowers when you enter Cupertino. It's that you now have an organization where you can spend your time designing products, instead of having to fight for your seat at the table, or get frustrated when the better design is passed over by an engineering manager who just wants to optimize for bug fixing. All of those things are what other designers at other companies have to spend a majority of their time doing. At Apple, it's kind of expected that experience is really important."

Kawano underscores that everyone at Apple--from the engineers to the marketers--is, to some extent, thinking like a designer. In turn, HR hires employees accordingly. Much like Google hires employees that think like Googlers, Apple hires employees that truly take design into consideration in all of their decisions.

"You see companies that have poached Apple designers, and they come up with sexy interfaces or something interesting, but it doesn't necessarily move the needle for their business or their product. That's because all the designer did was work on an interface piece, but to have a really well-designed product in the way Steve would say, this 'holistic' thing, is everything. It's not just the interface piece. It's designing the right business model into it. Designing the right marketing and the copy, and the way to distribute it. All of those pieces are critical."

MYTH #2

Apple's Design Team Is Infinite

Facebook has hundreds of designers. Google may have 1,000 or more. But when Kawano was at Apple, its core software products were designed by a relatively small group of roughly 100 people.

"I knew every one of them by face and name," Kawano says.

For the most part, Apple didn't employ specialist designers. Every designer could hold their own in both creating icons and new interfaces, for instance. And thanks to the fact that Apple hires design-centric engineers, the relatively skeleton design team could rely on engineersto begin the build process on a new app interface, rather than having to initiate their own mock-up first.

Of course, this approach may be changing today.

"For Apple, having a small, really focused organization made a lot of sense when Steve was there, because so many ideas came from Steve. So having a smaller group work on some of these ideas made sense," Kawano says. "As Apple shifted to much more of a company where there's multiple people at the top, I think it makes sense that they're growing the design team in interesting ways."

Notably, Jony Ive, who now heads usability across hardware and software, is reported to have brought in some of the marketing team to help redesign iOS 7. It's a coup, when you think about it, for marketers to be deep in the trenches with designers and engineers. (That level of collaboration is frankly unprecedented in the industry.)

MYTH #3

Apple Crafts Every Detail With Intention

Apple products are often defined by small details, especially those around interaction. Case in point: When you type a wrong password, the password box shakes in response. These kinds of details are packed with meaningful delight. They're moments that seem tough to explain logically but which make sense on a gut level.

"So many companies try to mimic this idea . . . that we need to come up with this snappy way to do X, Y, and Z. They're designing it, and they can't move onto the next thing until they get a killer animation or killer model of the way data is laid out," Kawano explains. The reality? "It's almost impossible to come up with really innovative things when you have a deadline and schedule."

Kawano told us that Apple designers (and engineers!) will often come up with clever interactive ideas--like 3-D cube interfaces or bouncy physics-based icons--during a bit of their down time, and then they might sit on them for years before they make sense in a particular context.

"People are constantly experimenting with these little items, and because the teams all kind of know what other people have done, once a feature comes up--say we need a good way to give feedback for a password, and we don't want to throw up this ugly dialog--then it's about grabbing these interaction or animation concepts that have just been kind of built for fun experiments and seeing if there's anything there, and then applying the right ones."

But if you're imagining some giant vault of animation ideas hiding inside Apple and waiting to be discovered, you'd be wrong. The reality, Kawano explains, was far more bohemian.

"There wasn't a formalized library, because most of the time there wasn't that much that was formalized of anything that could be stolen," Kawano says. "It was more having a small team and knowing what people had worked on, and the culture of being comfortable sharing."

MYTH #4

Steve Jobs's Passion Frightened Everyone

There was a commonly shared piece of advice inside Apple--maybe you've heard it before--that a designer should always take the stairs, because if you met Steve Jobs in the elevator, he'd ask what you were up to. And one of two things would happen:

1. He'd hate it, and you might be fired.
2. He'd love it, the detail would gain his attention, and you'd lose every foreseeable night, weekend, and vacation to the project.

Kawano laughs when he tells it to me, but the conclusion he draws is more nuanced than the obvious Catch 22 punchline.

"The reality is, the people who thrived at Apple were the people who welcomed that desire and passion to learn from working with Steve, and just really were dedicated to the customer and the product. They were willing to give up their weekends and vacation time. And a lot of the people who complained that it wasn't fair . . . they didn't see the value of giving all that up versus trying to create the best product for the customer and then sacrificing everything personally to get there."

"That's where, a lot of times, he would get a bad rap, but he just wanted the best thing, and expected everyone else to want that same thing. He had trouble understanding people who didn't want that same thing and wondered why they'd be working for him if that was the case. I think Steve had a very low tolerance for people who didn't care about stuff. He had a very hard time understanding why people would work in these positions and not want to sacrifice everything for them."

As for Kawano, did he ever get an amazing piece of advice, or an incredible compliment from Jobs?

"Nothing personally," he admits, and then laughs. "The only thing that was really positive was, in the cafeteria one time, when he told me that the salmon I took looked really great, and he was going to go get that."

"He was just super accessible. I totally tried to get him to cut in front of me, but he'd never want do anything like that. That was interesting too, he was super demanding . . . but when it came to other things, he wanted to be very democratic, and to be treated like everyone else. And he was constantly struggling with those roles."

Thursday, June 12, 2014

How Complexity Theory Affects Social Media, Streaming and Musicians

I have been fascinated with Complexity Theory and Complex Systems Science for some time now. The chemist Ilya Prigogine, a Nobel Laureate, is credited with pioneering research into this discipline and in 1971, based on his research, he applied his theories to vehicular traffic flow in his book Kinetic Theory of Vehicular Traffic. After the release of that book scientists and mathematicians began to take note of what was seen as a less deterministic approach to the science of human behavior. It has been just over forty years since the discipline took hold.

I am not yet fully immersed in Complex Systems Science so I haven't felt comfortable sharing my insights until now, so here I am taking a risk by presenting some decidedly, non-expert ideas in this forum. Feedback is very welcome.

Around the middle of 2013 after having written posts or rebutted articles about the complaints of musicians regarding the new models of music distribution, mainly the streaming of music, I realized that there were human behaviors being overlooked. New systems and structures were occurring in the models; one could see individuals behaving collectively, creating a societal shift. That shift was to "renting" music via streaming services, not owning it. It appeared that a complex system, or at least an evolving complex structure, had come into play.

This user behavior was not controlled by Spotify, Rhapsody, Rdio or any other streaming service. It would have been almost impossible to predict. This makes the musician's arguments against Spotify et al very difficult. The message to musicians is that in complex systems and structures that have already formed in new models, it's impossible to return to a system that existed in the past.

Musicians are now faced with different systems. The new systems shouldn't attempt to ape the old equilibrium (the recording industry model) and musicians should never hope for a return to the status quo, because there will be constant flux in the new systems; remember, humans are unpredictable.

For a while now my interest has been in how individuals behaving collectively when using streaming music services, affect new systems and structures that are different in feature but have a lot in common; in other words, large groups of people interacting with each other according to fairly specific rules constantly create new structures.

What, I thought, did that mean for the new companies trying to carve out sizable streaming music audiences in their attempt to reach scale and therefore profitability?

Another question that I wasn't certain had been answered was this: before they launched did any of these companies apply complexity theory studies to their business models, and if so, what were the results?

There are large amounts of commonalities between the streaming service models: almost identical music catalogues; monthly subscription plans or free access with advertising in the streams; the use of Facebook or Twitter for access to the service and for sharing.

Did these competing services discover, or simply assume, that people acting collectively would find equilibrium in one of the services and not use the others? (More on equilibrium in a moment...) Did they assume that all music fans want to access their music through almost identical systems?

The Internet has changed a lot of things. It is also a great example of a people-powered complex system and there are great tools available that help us try and understand how humans behave across the Social Web. This can lead to an understanding of what strategies can be applied based on actual user behavior.

While researching all of this “complexity” I was fortunate to come across a podcast. For his series In Our Time on BBC Radio 4, the host Melvyn Bragg had gathered together three professors to discuss Complexity: Ian Stewart, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick; Jeff Johnson, Professor of Complexity Science and Design at the Open University and Professor Eve Mitleton-Kelly, Director of the Complexity Research Group at the London School of Economics.

Here were people skilled in this discipline discussing it in depth. The podcast’s abstract was very clear:

"Complexity is a young discipline which can help us understand the world around us. When individuals come together and act in a group, they do so in complicated and unpredictable ways: societies often behave very differently from the people within them."

Does complexity and complicated mean the same thing? The answer is no.

Professor Mitleton-Kelly says in the podcast that complications are found in machine-type systems. For example a jet engine which has very many parts interacting with each other is a complicated system. The fact that those parts interact with each other doesn't make it complex, it makes it complicated. Therefore we can design a jet engine, predict its behavior and control its actions.

There has also been debate that complex systems cannot be designed, yet some can. Ilya Prigogine found that complex systems create new order, they create something new in a structure; a new way of working which complicated systems cannot do. For example cities are complex systems that are designed and never finished. Cities evolve. Cities are partially planned by people who live in them; buildings are assembled for us to use, we create roads. So structural systems are partly planned, partly evolved. We are always trying to design, but in the design of a complex system we must allow for a great deal of uncertainty, unpredictability and the system evolving.

This has important implications for streaming music companies if we accept that complex systems are rarely designed and human behavior is hard to predict. For streaming music companies, as with almost all digital products, the work will never be finished - at least not until users decide it's finished; and then of course they may move on to the next "new" thing.

Then there are social interaction networks. I don't mean only online social interaction but to stay true to this post I'd like to focus on user behavior in online social networks.

The structure of networks often make spread look easy: think corridors. We also assume that connectivity is the same over time, it is not. The quality and intensity of connectivity varies all the time even with the same individuals. If online social networks are the "corridors" of the web we must constantly evaluate what individuals are doing there. We cannot assume that because these individuals are grouped together in Facebook that they all act the same way at the same time.

For instance, brands often look in those online networks for positive and negative feedback. This is where the role of the social media community manager is meant to be of most use. The community managers are looking for equilibrium in the system - in an ideal world, positive brand feedback is the equilibrium point. The problem is that positive feedback may have multiple equilibria, whereas negative feedback is different - it's associated with mechanistic feedback and a single equilibrium point.

Professor Mitleton-Kelly gives an example: central heating systems are based on negative feedback. The temperature in a room drops so you feel cold. The thermostat tells the system to raise the temperature to your desired point, closing the gap between the actual and the desired temperature. That is a single equilibrium point. She also says: "We assume there are single equilibrium points in complex systems so we make wrong assumptions."

In my social media networks example, where Facebook is a gathering of individuals using a structure in a complex system - the Internet, community managers assume that all of those users act in the same way, whether giving positive or negative feedback. When faced with negativity they respond as if they are dealing with a central heating system, thinking that they only have to apply the right amount of correction at the correct time to reach equilibrium, i.e. a return to a positive brand result. Well that doesn't happen in complex systems.

The point here is that if a community manager is trying to re-establish the former position, e.g. positive feedback, she's in trouble, because the structure’s acts of evolving and co-evolving (through user activity) allow it to obtain different states. All those Facebook users create multiple equilibria, not a single point of equilibrium, therefore the system is in a state of constant flux. In other words, you can't return to a system that existed in the past. The community managers have no control over this turmoil as much as they might believe they do.

This flux happens a lot in Twitter too. In fact Twitter is a digital product that has moved far, farfrom its original roots precisely because of how people use it. Its creators could not have predicted that human behavior outcome.

Social media community managers have to carefully consider their user behavior biases and understand that social network systems are incredibly fluid and unpredictable.

Emergence is another piece of the complexity puzzle. Emergent behavior appears when a number of entities (in our case, Users) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviors in a multi-level system as a collective.

In multi-level systems, for example the brain, we have a level of social intelligence not just our own individual level of intelligence. Social intelligence can be seen in the actions of our House of Representatives where Congressmen and women make decisions collectively that might be a decision they would never have made alone.

When emergent behavior is in place it adds dynamic; it both constrains the activity and opens up new possibilities that create greater dynamics. Think of the swarming of birds and mammals; schooling fish and ant colonies.

Complex systems are not hard to understand. Most people handle complexity and handle it extremely well - for example navigating the Internet. It's a science that is accessible to everyone. It's a way of thinking and a matter of understanding. If we don't understand complex systems we inadvertently block them.

We are, after all, only human.

By the way, the Butterfly Effect is real. But that's chaos theory which I'll save for another post...

Image: iMore.com

https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140122193329-269150-complexity-theory-and-its-effect-on-social-media-streaming-music-services-and-musicians?trk=mp-reader-card

NSG Consulting Inc.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014