Anticipatory Design: "The next design trend is one that eliminates all choices" (Anne Quito)

In 2004, psychologist Barry Schwartz wrote The Paradox of Choice, a compelling manifesto that outlined the paralysis and dissatisfaction one feels when presented with too many choices. A decade later, Aaron Shapiro, the CEO of the global digital design agency Huge, has evolved Schwartz’s observations into a provocative scenario he calls “anticipatory design.” (qz.com)

A/B Tests are Destroying Your Conversion Rate (Karen McGrane)

Conversion rate specialists say you should use A/B tests to optimize your web pages. But the tests themselves slow pages down. Poor site performance results in lower conversion rates. Never use A/B tests! Here’s what to use instead. (medium.com)

The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Google Analytics (Kristi Hines)

If you don't know what Google Analytics is, haven't installed it on your website, or have installed it but never look at your data, then this post is for you. While it's hard for many to believe, there are still websites that are not using Google Analytics (or any analytics, for that matter) to measure their traffic. In this post, we're going to look at Google Analytics from the absolute beginner's point of view. Why you need it, how to get it, how to use it, and workarounds to common problems. (moz.com)

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Responsive design is failing mobile UX (Kevin Rice)

It’s no longer enough to simply make sure your web content fits on a small screen. Google reinforced this precedent by updating its algorithm to emphasize the importance of carefully planned and well-executed responsive designs on mobile phones. (webdesignerdepot.com)

Fact or Opinion? Perfecting UX (Edgar Wilson)

Focus on UX, amazingly, can still get sidelined on a project where tastes and opinions dominate. Short of attempting the impossible and appealing to everyone, satisfying project managers (or even the designers themselves) rules decision-making. As an afterthought, UX gets reduced to making sure the end product works, and leaves it at that. (speckyboy.com)

Why Users Miss Form Buttons Placed in the Action Bar (Anthony)

Where you place your mobile form buttons can affect task completion and efficiency. If they’re not in a place where users expect to find them, they could abandon their task and your form. (uxmovement.com)

Taking the Marketing Approach to UX (Paul Andrew)

The key to successful marketing is advertising a solution, and selling the tool that provides it. Put another way, by looking at the jobs people are trying to accomplish, marketers can better interact with their prospects. Now imagine we think about UX in the same way: the key to a successful product is creating a solution (a better way to make a hole), and not just a tool (the drill). (speckyboy.com)

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Material Design is design science (Daniel Hollick)

Why Material Design is our best attempt (yet) for a unifying theory of design. In 2013 Apple launched iOS 7 and the world fell in love with flat design. Apple by no means invented flat design (in fact Microsoft championed flat long before Apple), but they brought it to the massses. And they did it well. As a designer I set down a very familiar path. (medium.com)

Mastering the Art of the Ecommerce Microconversion (Corey Beale)

Marketing automation is the very core of HubSpot’s abilities. We talk all the time about the buyer’s journey, the marketing funnel, segmenting your contact lists, and automating the whole process. And it works, obviously, or we wouldn’t still be here. You could make that process even more powerful for your ecommerce business, if you’re willing to focus some of your attention on microconversions. (hubspot.com)

Psychology and the Call-to-Action Button (Marie)

If you are a business owner, then you need to understand how to turn customer clicks on your website to actual sales for your business. This is a process known as conversion, and all it takes is a little understanding of basic human psychology. You may be thinking that you know nothing of psychology, and you do not understand how it could possibly benefit your business. We’ve discussed how creative advertisements drive interest and engagement however, in this article, we will discuss who Robert Cialdini is, why understanding psychology is essential to business, and the six influential techniques you need to convert clicks to customers. (designreviver.com)

Optimizing Landing Pages for Multichannel Marketing (Vincent Sevilla)

Strictly defined, a landing page is a singular web page that’s built to receive visitors from a defined subset of a target audience. These pages are responsible for persuading visitors to heed calls to action that will fulfill a marketer’s conversion goals. (speckyboy.com)

Ten lessons from Snoop Dogg on being a better CEO (James Altucher)

Snoop Dogg should become CEO of Twitter and I’m about to tell you why. But first, leave Dick Costolo, the outgoing CEO, alone. When Dick became CEO, Twitter was valued at about $3 billion. (now it’s $26 billion). The site was constantly overloaded with traffic and would crash. Now it doesn’t crash. Twitter had 30 million active users a month and now has over 250 million active users a month. The most important business advice anyone can follow: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. (qz.com)

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UX Without User Research Is Not UX (Hoa Loranger)

UX teams are responsible for creating desirable experiences for users. Yet many organizations fail to include users in the development process. Without customer input, organizations risk creating interfaces that fail. (nngroup.com)

The Complete Guide On Getting Started With Facebook Marketing (Zoe Summers)

Whether you have a small business or a Fortune 500 company, you’re a celebrity or simply make a living online, you can’t ignore the importance of a consistent Facebook presence for your online success. Facebook marketing has become an integrated part of the overall marketing strategy for the most thriving brands these days and contributed to their massive growth. (massplanner.com)

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Where Social Media and SEO Fit in Today’s Content Marketing Mix (Lee Odden)

Whether your role is in search, social media, marketing communications or PR, the importance of content marketing is unmistakable. Brand content budgets and participation are up with the vast majority of B2C and B2B marketers now using content marketing. The industry is coming together on best practices and organizations are evolving their structures to include roles like Chief Content Officer and Brand Journalist. (toprankblog.com)

The Shape of Story (Christina Wodtke)

Just after college, I decided to get my masters in creative writing. I loved (and still love) books more than just about anything. And I loved graduate school: reading, writing, even critique. But when I came to do my thesis, I decided to write a novel and I stalled. I got mired down in the “second act” and never recovered. To be honest, I was boring myself. I just wasn’t interested in what my characters were trying to do. It would be ten years before I’d learn what went wrong. (eleganthack.com)

5 Apple Watch Design Patterns to Avoid (Doron Katz)

Since first announcing the Apple Watch last fall, Apple has been trying to prepare its developer community for the launch, providing early access to the WatchKit SDK in order to inspire well-thought-out apps for the wrist device. (thinkapps.com)

Beyond Responsive Design: How to Optimize Your Website for Mobile Users (Will DeKrey)

You’ve weathered Mobileggedon. You’re confident that your website and blog will look great on mobile devices and that Google’s algorithm change won’t hurt your search listings. Congrats! You’ve survived this skirmish ... but it's not going to be the last. The algorithm change is evidence Google knows it has to surface websites that painlessly get users what they need at the time that they need it. Google doesn't want to send mobile users to websites that provide a frustrating browsing experience -- that would damage Google’s promise to its users to always deliver helpful, relevant content. (hubspot.com)

Internet of Things Spending to Reach 1.7 Trillion by 2020 (Yuyu Chen)

The Internet of Things market is estimated to reach 1.7 trillion globally by 2020, according to a new study by International Data Corporation. The worldwide Internet of Things (IoT) market will grow from $655.8 billion in 2014 to $1.7 trillion in 2020, according to research company International Data Corporation (IDC). IDC defines the IoT as a network of identifiable endpoints that communicate using IP connectivity without human interaction, including smart appliances, automated public transit and remote health monitoring, among others. The company predicts that by 2020, devices, connectivity and IT services will represent more than two-thirds of the worldwide IoT market, with devices alone accounting for 31.8 percent of the total. (clickz.com)

Combining HEART With The Goals-Signals-Metrics Process To Determine Which UX Metrics To Use (Marcin Nowaczyk)

The effect on the User Experience (UX) brought about by a newly-implemented product change is something that is both necessary yet difficult to measure. This is because changes in the user experience tend to be generic in nature and may not directly relate to the quality of the UX or the overall goals of the project. At the same time the ability to measure this effect will help you take decisions related to future product modifications. This article discusses how the HEART framework can be applied in conjunction with the Goals-Signal-Metrics process in order to establish which metrics can be used to measure the UX of a product. It will also discuss how we have applied this combination when choosing UX metrics for our product, Sales Manager – an application that supports sales on Allegro. (usabilitygeek)

Set the Research Aflame (Matthew Ovington)

One of the challenges of product design is ensuring customer insight is baked into the design process. Typically it’s a researcher or other UX practitioner who gathers and communicates customer insight. However, this is only one input into the design process—product owners, developers, testers, and business analysts all contribute to the design process by bringing their own perspectives and priorities. Customer insight, business value and technical feasibility must all align. (uxbooth.com)

Material Design: Why the Floating Action Button is bad UX design (Teo Yu Siang )

Material Design is a design language introduced by Google a year ago, and represents the company’s bold attempt at creating a unified user experience across all devices and platforms. It’s marked with bold colours, a liberal but principled use of shadows to indicate UI layers, and smooth animations that provide a pretty pretty user experience on Android (and some Google apps on iOS). (medium.com)

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Design UI for Recognition More than for Reading (Ryan Nance)

James Montalbano, a typographic designer, knows that legible is good, but recognizable is better. He worked on the Clearview font which has become an official alternate for Federal Highway signs. It is a high pressure reading situation to be sure. The 500 miliseconds to 1 sec it can take to read a highway sign at 70 mph can translate into up to 30 meters. Most drivers, rather than risking such a relatively huge amount of time, don’t ‘read’ signs as much as glance at them. And in recognition speed and distance terms, mixing letter case can contribute to half the time needed and twice the distance. (medium.com)

Mobile Marketing: "Mobilegeddon Hits & Misses" (Bryson Meunier)

It has been more than a month since Google’s mobile update occurred, and many marketers are moving on to the next thing, having not seen much of an impact from the update formerly known as “Mobilegeddon.” Not every site is so lucky, however. Looking at the data, it’s clear that many sites were not only hit by the mobile update, but hit hard. (marketingland.com)

Accordions on Mobile (Raluca Budiu)

Accordions conserve space on mobile but they can also cause disorientation and too much scrolling. Easy design fixes improve the usability of these UI elements. (nngroup.com)

The Ninja Skill for UX Designers: Earning Your Whiteboard Belt (Molly Inglish)

We’ve seen one big trend in how startups interview UX designers: companies want to know how designers think through a problem. There are multiple ways to do this of course. You can ensure your UX portfolio demonstrates your work, and more importantly your process. You can develop a slide deck walkthrough of specific design projects. But the technique that works best… (medium.com)

Asking Probing Questions During a Usability Study (Janet M. Six)

You are in the midst of a usability study and, when testing one of the tasks, you observe that participants do not seem to see a design element that would help them to finish their task. What do you do now? Do you ask them whether they see the element? Do you just continue and say nothing? Do you ask them later? Is it even possible for the moderator to avoid affecting the test results in some way? (uxmatters.com)