Archive for the ‘Information Architecture’ Category
Emphasize Customers and Realize Value
It’s a huge value, you know that, right? If a business would place more emphasis on their customers instead of themselves they will see better results for both their customers and their business.
In one well-known example, The $300 Million Button, UIE’s Jared Spool made one simple change and the rise in revenue was enormous. He writes:
When the team contacted us, they’d already pretty much decided what the problem was and how they were going to fix it, even though they had never watched any shoppers make purchases. And they were dead wrong. Not only was their fix not going to help, our research showed that it was going to increase abandonment.
Two weeks of usability testing on the live site (and on competitors’ sites), followed by two weeks of iterative paper prototype testing produced a streamlined checkout process, which, once implemented, showed a dramatic increase in revenues. It’s amazing what you’ll learn when you actually watch your users.
The ‘Wow’! It isn’t about the homepage.
Three seconds if you’re lucky. It’s all you’ve got.
You only have a few seconds to gain the interest of your visitor. It’s important to make those few seconds count when making a first impression. However, those few and precious seconds don’t always happen where you believe they are going to happen. Continue reading The ‘Wow’! It isn’t about the homepage.
Getting Visual Feedback from Online Users
Sometimes is hard to see what people are doing from looking at Web Paralytics. There are people who can look at the numbers and understand the user experience picture. Even if you are one of those people, my guess is that your manager or your client isn’t.
It can be really compelling to take a look at what users are doing on a page. Recently, we started making some information architecture changes based on analytics. However, we wanted to have a more visual proof for the client to see that the parts of the site that were strongly active were the ones we knew should be kept prominent. It also allowed us to see other activity on the site.
The strong button clicking was an ah-ha moment because none of the headlines were linked – robbing users of the common activity of clicking headlines.
When you work on a site over a long period of time, you get used to how it works and have the “curse of knowledge” regarding its use. Even as a usability practitioner, there is a certain interpretation of what users are doing.
For this project, we used Crazy Egg to capture the click heatmaps. For $19 a month, we got invaluable insight into the user experience of the site. By installing javascript code on the key pages we wanted to test, Crazy Egg will render these click maps and will also do scatter maps that allow you to filter by new and returning visitor, search terms and geography.
Being able to slice the date in multiple ways is very powerful, but in general the master heatmap is more than enough for management.