The AYCL Blog

When in the thick of a project, the small, day-to-day decisions we make as designers can get away from us. As Dan Mall tells us, that’s when an interface inventory can make a difference.

If you take an inventory of button styles, for example, on your project or site, you may find a variety of styles, typography, and subtle design variations that were not intentional. Design teams can review an inventory, and all of the decisions that were made, and use that information to create an overall style guide that streamlines design decisions and can be applied in the future. This approach will result in cleaner code, and reduce the cognitive load on users.

Your product must communicate its unique value to stand out in a competitive marketplace. Stories shape the way customers interact with products, and provide purpose and meaning to their experience. When customers respond well to product stories, they attribute value and desirability to the product and brand.

Begin by asking yourself what the story of your product is.

• Who is the hero?
• What is the hero’s goal?
• What is getting in the way of that goal?
• How will your product meet the hero’s goal? What is its value?
• How will you get your hero to use the product?
• How will you sustain interest in the product?

Our goal, says Donna Lichaw, is to create the best product stories that we can for customers. Successful product stories shape the way customers interact with the product. We create a world in which customers can see how our products enrich their lives.

Getting the right participants for your research is perhaps the most fundamental building block to gathering great insights. Nate covers the best methods for recruiting participants, including pros and cons and common use cases.

This presentation is one of 6 we captured from Lou Rosenfeld's User Research for Everyone.

Get a primer on the range of research methods available, and guide you in determining which is the best technique for what you’re trying to learn now (and for your budget).

This presentation is one of 6 we captured from Lou Rosenfeld's User Research for Everyone. 

With a little care and tough love, you can improve the form completion rates on your site. You might even make them fun. How? As Adam Gustafson tells us, start by humanizing the language in your forms. Approach the content as a conversation you would like to have with your audience, and use language they would use.

Eliminate the clutter and noise of multiple fields and focus your user’s attention on the information you need to gather. Make every field fight for its existence. This can be hard, as forms often represent an amalgamation of “asks” from across an organization. You’ll need to fight the good fight and argue for clarity, precision, and laser-like focus. Pare-down fields to the bare minimum and remove anything that isn’t required.

Make sure it’s clear to your users what they need to be doing, and why it benefits them to share their information with you.

Dan Mall shares some behind-the-scenes design process details of responsive redesigns for organizations like TechCrunch, Entertainment Weekly, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and more.

In the full seminar, you'll write a manifesto that gets your project on track from the start, as well as use performance budgets to guide your design work.

Images and content are a powerful duo when matched appropriately. Images compel us to act, convey emotion, and communicate the overall art direction of a project. Images help people understand content better. Choosing the wrong image to represent your content can make a big difference in the way users interact with it.

As Jenn Lukas tells us, we have 10 seconds to engage users on our sites before they lose interest. Forty percent of people will abandon a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. Every second of your page load-time counts, and the culprit behind growing page sizes and slow rendering is the lofty and powerful image, particularly on e-commerce sites.

As we look at page load times and our brand experience across devices, we need to ask whether the image we use in one experience fits the needs of all devices. We should not only consider strategies like optimizing images, loading images lazily, but also choosing the right image and size for the right device, particularly in responsive designs. We want our sites to perform well and we should be shooting for page load-times of one second.

Every product, service, or interface we design in the safety and comfort of our workplaces has to survive and thrive in the real world. Research is the key to grounding ideas in reality and improving the odds of success, but research can be a very scary word.

This presentation is one of 6 we captured from Lou Rosenfeld's User Research for Everyone.

Content plays a critical role in guiding the pace of the user’s experience. What we write, the words we choose, and the way we display language in design, are all tools we use to engage users and direct them. Users will often rate experiences that they perceive as slow as frustrating, while they will positively respond to ones in which they perceive to unfold quickly. But should all experiences be fast?

As Margot Bloomstein tells us, when appropriate, users appreciate slow experiences when it is right for the brand, and it allows them to be engaged with the content, discover information, and create memories. Slow content can focus user attention and allow them to deliberate. For example, e-commerce sites that allow users to compare different types of products, pricing, quality, and attributes within comparison charts encourage deliberation. Financial and health information content can also benefit by these slower experiences.

We all design products that influence our users. Whether we are working on digital apps and tools that support physical or financial health, encouraging a customer to start down the path of a customer life cycle or close a transaction. Learn what behavior change design is and how it can be applied to digital interactions with powerful results.

Watch this seminar to hear case studies and techniques on how to translate behavioral science research into design that improves user engagement.

Not all data is created equally. Designers use data and observation to make design decisions. But what data is useful? Google Analytics can give us bounce rates and time on page, for example, but what do the numbers actually tell us? We need to understand the why behind the numbers. Why did someone click on a link? What do people find confusing in the design? These are questions that analytics can’t tell us, and we need to understand them to improve the user experience.

But we do have tools to investigate these questions. Customer Journey Maps help us see an experience and a product through the eyes of the user. Qualitative findings derived from user research can and should drive quantitative analysis. Quantitative and qualitative research should be essential tools that we blend together in our work to make informed design decisions that improve the user experience.

Mapping experiences can help teams think more analytically about a product, adopt a user-centric approach, work cohesively, and engage more deeply with the user experience. Jim discusses how he uses maps as tools to support a collaborative, cross-functional team and stakeholder workshop.

Watch to learn how you can contribute to more strategic conversations and build cross-functional, collaborative environments in the workplace.