Cases. Digital is changing the purchase path for furniture shoppers. Today, 74 percent of all shoppers start their research online, driving 50 percent year-over-year growth for some retailers. Mobile search amplifies the opportunity for brand discovery, powered by generic keywords. Check out the data below to get the full picture.
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Cases. With its four-foot-long homepages and hundreds of sidebar images, the Mail Online breaks every rule of web design. It’s also winning the web (and design awards). During the average workday, I allow myself to take a couple “Internet breaks,” little bursts of Tumblr and Gawker and other forms of web candy that tug at my attention span like a needy kid. There’s one web threshold I never step over on a weekday, though: the Mail Online.
Cases. More than 200 design teams participated in the Health Design Challenge, a competition to redesign patient medical records. Soon, 6 million VA patients will see the benefits. There are 315 million “patients” in America, and only 1 million physicians. Keeping track of their histories is a gargantuan task, and many doctors have turned to the Electronic Medical Record, a computerized list of everything from allergies to addresses, to keep up.
Cases. In Part 1 of this article, we have seen the usability problems encountered by users when they try to book cinema tickets for kids on a Saturday morning. The websites that were tested were all UK cinema websites: CineWorld, Empire Cinemas and Odeon Cinemas. This article shows two other tasks that were performed by users [.
Cases. During a recent spot of unavoidable eavesdropping in a slow-moving queue, I overheard two ladies expressing great frustration at their less-than-positive experiences on cinema websites. This reminded me of usability testing on UK Cinema websites that we had carried out in late 2011. Back at the office, I dug up the video clips of user [.
Cases. There's a lot of stuff on the Internet. Think about it — how many mouseclicks do you make on any given weekday? If you work in any business with an Internet presence, it's likely that you click through hundreds of pages on a daily basis. Delicious is a site that helps bring a method to the madness. If you come across an interesting or useful link, it's easy to store it in Delicious to find and reference it later.
Cases. Last week, we dove into the redesign of a technology news outlet, the re-branded ReadWrite. Despite minor confusion around the mobile site's navigation, the redesigned, responsive site did very well in our tests. So this week, we shifted our attention to another popular technology blog, The Next Web. The latest version of their site went live on Wednesday morning, to the delight of tech news readers everywhere.
Cases. The web is serious business in our eyes. It's our bread and butter. We're always looking for ways to improve how we build websites. Thinking of designs across different-sized screens has become the norm.
Cases. With all the exciting technology announcements (iPad mini's and such), you might have missed ReadWrite, formally ReadWriteWeb, rebranding itself and launching a new, responsive website. ReadWrite recently announced Dan Lyons would take over as Editor-In-Chief of the new property, so their content approach will certainly be shaken up a bit. But what really intrigued us was ReadWrite's new design.
Cases. NoteThe Innovation By Design Awards on October 16 will celebrate the controversial ideas, new products, business ventures, and wild ideas highlighted everyday on Co. Design. Award Winners in nine categories will be unveiled at the event. Register today.
Cases. Windows 8, expected to be released in October 2012, is the latest version of Microsoft’s flagship operating system. Its release also marks the first time that Microsoft has significantly evolved its design since 1995. Microsoft’s new, touch-oriented design language opens the door to designers, giving them a chance to reconsider their existing applications.
Cases. The impending 2012 US presidential election looms closer every week, and offers an excellent opportunity to take a good look at the home pages of the two primary candidates: Democrat incumbent President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney. We created a visual Usabilla survey to benchmark the home pages of the two presidential candidates against each other.
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Cases. Our product team was reviewing the feature backlog to determine what should have top priority. We’d heard from many of our larger customers that they wanted Users and Groups to be supported by my company’s product, ProtoShare.
Cases. The newest Digg redesign is among the most-anticipated and biggest launches of the year. Earlier this month, Betaworks acquired what was left of the property for a mere $500K. At the time of the report, Betaworks said they planned to 'build Digg for 2012,' but could it really be done? Well, the new Digg launched last Tuesday night and, yes, Betaworks did a solid job with the redesign.
Cases. On one hand, it’s a bold claim to say you’ve designed an app around Dieter Rams’s famed 10 Principles of Design. And on the other, how could you design an app otherwise? WTHR is an iPhone weather app ($1) by David Elgena that scales the entire experience of weather down to one page. There are no settings screens, no ads, no weather radars, and no chances of rain.
Cases. Foursquare's redesign was one of the biggest June announcements, and with good reason. The popular geolocation app was long overdue for a big design update. CEO Dennis Crowley referred to the 5. 0 release 'like waking up on Christmas morning,' so we realized there has to be something cool here.
Cases. It’s so rare that technology feels like magic. That first time you sifted through thousands of songs in your pocket or used a touch-screen phone? Forgotten now. In using technology in our daily lives, the impossible is proven, again and again, to be entirely possible, and we grow numb to the magic around us. I only mention this because the Leap certainly looks like one of those magical moments in technology.
Cases. UPDATE: Bit. ly changed the call-to-action text in the upper-right hand side of their design, so we hopped back in to see if it had a positive impact on people adding bitmarks. This time, we used a Verify Yes/No test to determine the percentage success that a user would click on the correct spot to add a bitmark, highlighted in orange. Amazingly, only 61% of people successfully clicked within the correct area, and the median user took 24.
Cases. When Facebook first reached out to Kate Aronowitz in late 2008, the then-head of LinkedIn’s design team was pretty sure she didn’t want to move over to the social network. She was a new mom. Crazy startup hours were not part of her plan. A conversation with Facebook VP of product Chris Cox, however, changed her mind.
Cases. After a mere 6 months on the market, Google released their first major redesign of Google+. If you check your profile now, you should see the latest version. And if your taste is anything like ours, you’ll agree that it feels better in just about every way. Yes it’s on purpose.
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Cases. A paraphrased transcript of my talk at UX London 2012. Do you want to know what interests me about our industry? It’s the fact that we always talk about the importance of making mistakes, and iterating, and learning from our failures, but we never actually share real stories about our mistakes and failures. It’s this weird taboo. We’re obsessed with it – yet we never share the details.
Cases. It seems like every few weeks, we hear about a new field that falls under the umbrella of “design. ” Though it is a great time to be a designer, we are not taking full advantage of the learning and techniques that stem from other design fields.
Cases. When we first sat down with Tony Fadell, the CEO of Nest and the inventor of the Nest Learning Thermostat, we asked him what made Steve Jobs so great. Fadell is, perhaps, one of the best-qualified people on the planet to answer. He’s the one who first pitched the idea of an iTunes/iPod ecosystem. He’s the one who Steve Jobs hired to bring the iPod to life.
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Cases. With the Republican Party presidential primaries of 2012 fully underway, we decided to test the home pages of the Republican Party candidates: Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich. We focussed on the travel sector, banks and online retailers in previous cases, and we were excited to look into politics. The pages need to have a different appeal, which leads to different design decisions.
Cases. Last week, iTunes became home to a historical first. This time, in the form of an ingenious app that turns an iPhone into a gesture-based calculator that replaces the most common mathematical function keys with finger swipes. Rechner is the work of Berger & Föhr, a two-man studio based in Boulder, Colorado.
Cases. Designing for findability, usability, and brand reinforcement are basic requirements of web experience design. But the purpose of a website is not just to be found and admired. It's to generate leads, sales, and revenue. By using a conversion rate optimization process that tests UX and persuasion hypotheses, you can create pages that are proven to generate more revenue.
Cases. [Guest post by Jan-Christoph Zoels, senior-partner of Experientia] Avoiding one of the shortcomings of Oscar ceremonies, the international jury of the first Interaction design awards, selected a diverse range of winners from all over the world – from Ford’s smart speed gauge to a Dutch shopping application Ice Mobile to a Brazilian museums installation Interaction cubes.
Cases. In January 2012, The UK government launched a BETA version of the new website Gov. uk to replace the existing direct. gov. uk site.
Cases. Given that we love everything UX and design related, it must come as no surprise we are big fan of Smashing Magazine. Their choice of subjects is always spot on, and their articles show an impressive amount of attention to detail. They recently had their site redesigned, and the result is a beautiful, spacious site, designed from the typography out. I took a closer look at the new design and I’d like to discuss some of the findings with you.
Cases. Remember when you were five and you first learned how to make a shadow puppet of a dog by holding your palm in front of a flashlight and waggling your pinky finger? Making anything more complicated than that takes a lot of effort.