Overview: UX

The single most important thing I’ve learned about online marketing is that it is about paying attention. Offline marketing is about getting attention, but once someone is on your website, they know what they want to do, so your first job is to help them do what they came to you website to do as quickly and easily as possible.

Vertical navigation is a good fit for broad or growing IAs, but takes up more space than horizontal navigation. Ensure that it is left-aligned, keyword front-loaded, and visible.

90% of data does not get used three months after it’s published. Most Web teams know that they are not working in a professional manner, and yet they feel that there is nothing they can do about it. Digital has in so many ways destroyed content professionalism.

For digital designers who want to organise their working files to improve clarity and collaboration within and across teams

Clarity, not creativity, is the backbone of good UX writing. Choose simple words and craft shorter sentences. Explain acronyms users might not know. Use proper punctuation. Be extra careful about things like cleverness, wordplay, and idioms that might affect usability. Above all, write to be understood.

Probably my biggest frustrations ... is the utter contempt they seem to hold content in. ... they won’t hire a professional copywriter to work on the content ... never teach content creators how to create appropriate web content.

Summary: For mobile navigation, image grids should be saved for deeper IA levels where visual differentiation between menu items is critical, as they increase page load times, create longer pages, and cause more scrolling.

We must design things on the basis that we want them to last, ... Because when you expect nothing to last, nothing does.

Imperative voice gets shared. Imperative voice boosts email click, open and read rates.

A clear visual hierarchy guides the eye to the most important elements on the page. It can be created through variations in color and contrast, scale, and grouping.

Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design. They are called "heuristics" because they are broad rules of thumb and not specific usability guidelines.

Refrain from opening new browser windows. [...] Carefully examine the user’s context, task at hand, and next steps when deciding whether to open links to documents and external sites in the same or a new browser tab."

Users pay close attention to photos and other images that contain relevant information but ignore fluffy pictures used to "jazz up" web pages.

Law 1 / Reduce - The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.Law 2 / Organize - Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.Law 3 / Time - Savings in time feel like simplicity.Law 4 / Learn - Knowledge makes everything simpler.Law 5 / Differences - Simplicity and complexity need each other.Law 6 / Context - What lie…

"Designers love it, website owners want to fill it. Whitespace seems to be one of the most controversial aspects of design. Why then is it so important and how can we ensure it is maintained?"

start to understand how we may need to balance social media with other more challenging, but ultimately more satisfying forms of communication

Users have learned to ignore content that resembles ads, is close to ads, or appears in locations traditionally dedicated to ads.

Summary: Design elements that appear similar in some way — sharing the same color, shape, or size — are perceived as related, while elements that appear dissimilar are perceived as belonging to separate groups.

"Eyetracking studies show that users sometimes look at only a single result on a search-results page because that result is good enough for their needs."

People do not read online: "fundamental scanning behaviors remain constant, even as designs change."

"While it is important to keep key information easily accessible, the 3-click rule is an arbitrary rule of thumb that is not backed by data."

"Design for each channel’s unique strengths and role in the customer journey to create usable context-specific experiences."

Chunking is a concept where text and multimedia content is broken up into smaller chunks to help users process, understand, and remember it better.

We live in a supercharged attention economy - the internet is a buffet. Keep in mind when we create and how we consume content! What kind of information do we give to our audiences? Junk, or healthy stuff?

Cheap storage. Cheap processing power. Cheap energy. It’s all great. We don’t have to think. We just dump our content onto the website and let search engines figure it out.

Traditional, mass marketing branding still good for low information type customers. If they’re high information customers, you need to give them the facts and be useful because that’s what they want.

Good evidence why coming up with ever new, more "beautiful", "attractive" and trendy designs that "pop" is not always a good thing.

"A link is a promise. A menu is a selection of promises. Without the link there is no Web."

"In spite of an increase in Internet speed, webpage speeds have not improved over time."

An interface to control a spacecraft - how complex and complicated does it have to be?