8 Highlights from edUI Conf 2016

I have a new favorite conference called edUI! I attended it few weeks ago in Charlottesville, VA. Following are some highlights from it, including resources for you:

Steve Krug kindly plugged my usability workshop with Julie Grundy of Duke University. He then joined us as a helpful participant!

Steve Krug kindly plugged my usability workshop with Julie Grundy of Duke University. He then joined us as a helpful participant!

  1. Running with a keynote speaker is a unique experience. What a memorable jaunt planned by the conference organizers! It was worth getting out of bed early to hit the pavement with the inspiring Josh Clark. Wonder what the future of tech looks like? Watch Josh's fun talk Magical UX and the Internet of Things. 
  2. Steve Krug first sparked my interest in UX in 2007. His fantastic book was required reading in grad school. If you are a person making choices about a website, read Don't Make Me Think! Your website visitors will thank you. At edUI, Steve gave a keynote speech. But he also participated in workshops, including mine, and made them better just by his quiet presence and helpfulness. He offers a great example to follow.
  3. Charlottesville, Virginia, is a walkable, fun and friendly location. How did I not realize this before?
  4. Aussie Donna Spencer rocked her workshop on moving from research to design. She wants us to write down a coherent story before jumping to content and functions. UXers, see Donna's detailed slide deck here. 
  5. Getting fresh air between sessions = a better conference. Two thumbs up for having 3 interesting venues. How great not to feel stuck in a hotel with terrible carpet all day. 
  6. You can hike to beautiful Humpback Rocks in the morning and still make an 11am session!
  7. Analytics master Mitch Daniels of the interaction agency Viget wants you to stop wasting your analytics budget. So stop tracking everything and focus on the KPIs for your organization.  Learn from Mitch about analytics.  
  8. The edUI organizers know how to put on a conference. They also made themselves very accessible throughout the event. If you work in the higher ed, library or museum field, attending edUI should be a high priority. 

Learn more about the edUI conference here. Maybe I'll see you in Charlottesville next year! 

Join Me at the edUI Conference!

If you create or work with websites in any way, the upcoming edUI Conference is a great value for professional learning. It's happening next month in lovely Charlottesville, Virginia. A batch of terrific speakers will cover topics including UX, UI, social media and more. I'll be teaching a workshop on guerrilla usability testing with Julie Grundy of Duke University. We also teach the Intro to UX Class for Girl Develop It RDU. Join us! Register here.

Usability Review of a Small Business Website (Video Included)

If you aren't paying attention to usability and user experience, your business may be doomed. Currently great UX is a competitive advantage in the small business world. This advantage will be lost as more business owners realize they must meet their customers' desires, needs and expectations of the company website.

Small business websites can benefit from a professional usability review to craft a better user experience for their potential customers. While nothing replaces actual user testing, usability professionals can point to problems with a website quickly and offer suggestions to improve UX.

What is a usability review?

A usability review is an evaluation of a website, app or other user interface by a usability professional to see whether common usability best practices are being followed. A usability review is thorough and evaluates more parts of a user interface than one usability test usually can. This may lead to finding a greater number of problems. However, because usability reviews are conducted by just one person, they cannot discover all the usability issues of a user interface.

What are the benefits of a usability review?

Usability reviews:

  • Offer quick feedback on an interface as they can be conducted in 1 - 2 days
  • Are often less expensive and time-consuming than user testing
  • Result in a prioritized list of usability problems as well as potential solutions

How much do they cost?

The cost for a usability review varies widely and certainly depends on the complexity of the website. I've seen some listed for $300 and others for $30,000. The less expensive ones are conducted by firms who would like your business, e.g. they want to do a website redesign. I suspect in most cases you'd be better off using an independent professional who just focuses on usability. However, many small business websites can spend $3,000 or less to get significant ROI. Usability issues are contributing factors in abandoned shopping carts and exit rates on websites.

How is a usability review done?

Here's a short example of the beginning of a usability review I recently conducted for a small business client recently. I'm talking aloud during this video so you can hear what I'm thinking. This is a small website so it only took me about an hour to review it and a couple of hours to write up a report with recommendations for the business owner.

What's next?

Next I'll be conducting usability tests with participants to explore what I saw as potential problems. However, I'll also be certain to bring an open mind because it's very typical to be surprised by users during testing. Sometimes what I you expect might be a problem isn't one, but another issue will pop up you hadn't considered. There is truly no substitute for testing users and watching what they do at your website. But a usability review is a good start for many small businesses who need to improve UX.

What can you do now to improve the user experience on your website?  What kind of help do you need?

UX Article Roundup

UX (short for user experience) is a common buzzword now— it's popping up in business magazines and newspapers regularly. Marketing and communications people* are paying attention to user experience as never before. This is great because your website users are going to have an experience at your site no matter what. Now you have two options: 1) Ignore your users and hope their experience at your website is a good one.

2) Make sure your users' experience is terrific by learning from and adjusting to them.

What do YOU think is the best thing to do? This doesn't require an MBA.

Screenshot of Command C websiteSince January, I've been writing articles on UX for a terrific web development company in New York City called Command C. I'm guessing one of the following articles probably has important information you need:

If you think you can know why your website users act as they do by just looking at at your website analytics, it's time to read this article on the importance of context.

If you think that all you must do is make your website good enough for the majority of your website users, consider designing for drunks instead. 

If you sell products online, don't miss this interview with a marketing ecommerce expert whose three websites bring in millions each year in part by focusing on user testing.

Next month I'll share with you what I learn at the Digital Marketing for Business Conference in Raleigh, where I'm speaking about Website Design with UX in Mind. Until then, I'm crossing my fingers that you choose option 2 above.

(*this group includes you if you own or manage a website)

5 Important Things Photojournalists Can Teach Website Managers

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One photojournalist in Iraq narrowly avoided death by explosion when she declined to get in the first vehicle of a convoy. Another woman was mugged twice in a short trip to Africa. As I listened to these photographers speak, I thought about how easy my job is helping people improve their websites. I spent a recent weekend at the National Press Photographers Association Northern Short Course to further my multimedia storytelling and photography skills. I was awed by the amazing images that people sometimes risk their lives to get. I was also able to glean many pointers that apply to anyone who owns a website.

Here are five important things relevant for any website owner or content manager:

1. Seeing is believing. Photojournalists and videographers are providing visual evidence to give weight to facts, statistics and stories. Whether it’s the war in Syria or poverty in Tennessee, seeing images makes things real. Whatever service or product you provide, using photos and videos can have outsize impact on your viewers.

Are people’s lives transformed by your work? Get them on video talking about that. Show what their lives look like now. Is it really easy to use your product? Demonstrate that visually. If you’ve created a big happy community, give us genuine pictures of joyful people interacting on your website. Show, don’t tell, when possible. It’s so much more compelling when we can see the process and/or the results.

2. People need to get the idea from one picture. On the safer side of photography is portrait specialist Greg Heisler (pictured, right). He has shot more than 70 Time magazine covers including most celebrities you can name. Heisler explained that he makes sure that he has that one image that encapsulates the main message of the story. Although he will shoot other photos for interior pages, his audience needs to get a strong sense of that famous person by looking at one photo.

Similarly, the pictures you choose for your website, especially your homepage, have to represent what you do very well. Your photos must capture the main messages you are trying to send. People make very fast decisions about websites and move through them quickly – you often have only a few seconds to make an impression. Finding the perfect pictures for your website takes time, but it's worth it. And please, don’t use carousels (aka sliders) – users usually ignore them or find them annoying.

3. You have to have a good reason to produce something longer than a minute. This gem is from Ben Garvin, a photojournalist based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Currently I've noticed that video is a favorite content tactic. Yet attention span for viewing video is very short. Abandonment rates on video are tremendous – in fact, research from the Nielsen Norman Group states you lose 20% of your viewers within the first 10 seconds of a video.

If you are using a promotional video on your website, keep it as short as possible! Spend the money to hire a great videographer. Watch this terrific example of a well-made video created for a non-profit organization. If you have audio stories or testimonials, edit them down to be short and powerful.

4. It's important to avoid jarring the viewers. This idea came from photojournalist John Kirtley of Asheville, North Carolina, as he explained his editing process. (You can see a particularly inspiring news video he produced below.) He really keeps viewers in mind and is careful not to startle them as he puts together his stories. You need to apply the same idea to your website.

Pop-up windows, auto-playing music or videos and even anchor links can startle website users. These are not the kind of surprises we enjoy, yet I encounter them regularly. If you aren’t sure if something is jarring, try it out on a few honest friends. Check out their reaction to make sure you aren’t hindering instead of helping your website users.

5. People remember what they feel. If something makes you smile or feel some sort of emotion, you pay attention to it, Kirtly explained in his session “Making the Most of the Mundane.” Keep this idea in the forefront of your mind as you plan your website - how are you making your users feel?

Improving user experience for website visitors is on the rise but remains a competitive advantage. Your focus should be on your website user. Help them feel trust, ease and happiness when they visit your site. Can they accomplish their goals quickly and easily? Is it possible to delight them along the way? MailChimp does a great job of this with not only with a great product but also a high-fiving monkey after you send out an email blast. It’s a small but memorable touch that puts a smile on my face.

You don’t have to risk your life to help your website users, you just need to pay better attention to them. Channel your inner photojournalist, and start now.

For some extra inspiration check out this video produced by John Kirtley:

A Letter to Content Marketing People

Dear Content Marketing People, I’m so bummed to be writing this, but someone needs to call this to your attention.

Cover of Content Marketing MagazineIf you had been watching me over the winter holidays, you would have seen me peacefully reading the December 2014 Issue of Chief Content Officer magazine published by the Content Marketing Institute. But then I read this advice on page 17:

"Consider incorporating carousels or sliders - old standbys that remain effective for promoting content."

NO!

Stunned. I flip over magazine to check the date, yes, it's December 2014. Go back and re-read. This can't be right.

I too was a big fan of carousels (sliders) – in 2009. Because I worked for a big organization, many groups wanted to be on the homepage. Carousels solved my problem. I was no longer forced to prioritize my organization's homepage content or tell anyone “No, I'm sorry, I’m not putting you on the homepage and here's why . . .” It was the easier, softer way. For that reason alone I should have known the carousel solution would backfire.

In 2012 the usability and accessibility experts started to speak out against carousels. Loudly. Multiple times. All over the place. They referenced usability and user experience research. One fine gentleman even bashed carousels by creating a carousel. I love that. The bottom line is that carousels are user-UN-friendly, frustrating, and ignored. That is not an opinion - this statement is based on research.

Now content marketing folks, you aren't alone in the carousel fan club that remains in 2015. I was brought to a non-profit conference to speak last October and did a lot of research ahead of time prepare for the talk. I learned that carousels are very common on non-profit websites. Some conference attendees did not like it when I strongly recommended against using carousels. "When you said that about carousels, I wanted to slap you," said one non-profit executive. Then she scornfully asked me what she should put on her homepage instead of a carousel (as if that were the only choice!), and I suggested one image, an information graphic, a video or some other kind of content, depending on what would be most useful to her target audience.

If you are really considering your users - the people you want to help, impress, partner with and/or sell to - carousels are NOT a good solution.

So, Content Marketing People, I beg you:

Stop encouraging the use of carousels!

 

And please take one of the following actions so you don’t make an error like this again:

  1.  Watch this video of a talk I gave at a recent WordPress WordCamp about to learn usability principles. Go straight to 43:18 to hear about carousels.
  2. Sign up for the weekly e-newsletter from the Nielsen Normal Group - it’s free. They reference old and new usability research studies each week.
  3. Make a column on TweetDeck for the hashtag #usability and/or #userexperience.
  4. Get some friends in the usability and user experience community. They have good information and are nice folks.

Usability is like gravity, even if you know nothing about it or want to ignore it, you will still fall flat on your face if you don’t pay attention to it. Usability can help content marketing or it can hurt it, but it can’t be ignored.

Contact me anytime to talk about usability issues. I'm here to help. Together let's make the web a better place for all.

Sincerely, Melissa