Archive for the 'Interaction Design' Category

One of the most pervasive design shortcomings of web sites is neglecting entire market segments–a mistake that can have very costly consequences. This article provides the basis for an effective method to correct this and improve overall conversions.

Principal Market Segmentation for Web Sites

There are many different ways to divide a company’s market into segments; the most effective partitioning for web site design hinges on the conversion likelihood of the prospective customers. It is a matrix of a user’s commitment to buy a product or service and that user’s perception of the company selling that product or service. (more…)

Last Thursday, September 7th, a federal judge ruled that a class action lawsuit brought on by the National Federation of the Blind against Target Corporation could commence. (Additional coverage available here and here.) The lawsuit alleges that Target’s web site is inaccessible to people with impaired vision. Although the lawyers for Target tried to get the case dismissed arguing that the Americans with Disabilities Act and state laws do not apply to its web site, the judge ruled that the laws protecting disabled persons not only apply to Target’s web site but also to all other services offered by the company.

This ruling is a clear wake-up call for all web and mobile-based services regardless of the outcome of the trial—just going to trial is a huge cost. New web design and development must take accessibility into account, and existing services should perform audits to identify and correct accessibility issues. The case against Target Corporation is not an isolated incident; it is just the tip of the iceberg of a larger industry-wide problem. (Similar lawsuits over web accessibility for the blind were filed against Southwest and American Airlines in 2002.) Undoubtedly, the company was the target (no pun intended) of this disability lawsuit due to its size and high profile, but this certainly does not rule out smaller internet and mobile-based services. Just as accessibility laws apply equally to large corporations and your local, tiny, family-owned restaurant, so too the Americans with Disabilities Act and other state, local, and federal disability laws apply to web properties of all sizes.

Alright, but where to start?

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Much has been written about the correct placement and style for effectively integrating search on a site, yet a fundamental issue with such search remains: the results are too broad and are difficult to sift through. Alleviating this problem is a simple case of letting the user put their search query into context. That is, if we provide a mechanism for letting the user search within specific categories, the probability of that user finding information pertaining to their interests is greatly increased. This mechanism is what I refer to as “categorical search.”

Categorical search is by no means a new idea; in fact, it has been around for hundreds of years. Can you imagine searching for a book in a library or a video in a video store without genres? What if you had to search through an Atlas for a city without being able to choose the country first? How useful would the yellow pages be if business types were not grouped together?

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When starting a web development project, there are many advantages to hiring a user experience architect first. The most important of these are:

1. to ensure a usable product that matches the goals of your company
2. to obtain a definitions guide which can protect against scope creep, synchronize efforts and protect against costly revisions
3. to acquire accurate estimates for project development by providing detailed and unambiguous specifications

Ensure a usable product that matches the goals of your company and reduces support costs

By hiring a web developer first, the process of refining features to address the users’ and company’s goals can be missed entirely, giving less attention for the sake of feature development, and even postponement until integration of usability efforts is much more difficult and less effective. Unlike web developers, user experience architects specialize in evaluating user behavior and task analysis which is invaluable in creating sites with which people can feel accomplished and can enjoy interacting.

Although, a web developer will produce a functional solution, without the expertise of the user experience architect, the result may not be an effective solution; that is to say, it may work technically but your users may not be able to easily accomplish their tasks.

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Information architectures and accompanying sitemaps often illustrate page relations with single channels linking them. These architectures are sub-optimal because they do not take advantage of the principle of multiple varied access points to key destinations which can increase the traffic flow to said goals.

Providing multiple and varied pathways to key destinations is a fundamental tenant of both urban planning and building architecture, and thinking of its application in those fields can shed light on this principle’s vast potential in website architecture.

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