In the latest newsletter from UIE, Jared Spool writes:

"…designers always get cautious when we start talking about creating a persuasive design. They think we're suggesting that they somehow should try to deceive their users."

I've experienced similar reactions to my article Business-centred design.

UIE has an interview with Andrew Chak, author of the excellent book Submit Now: Designing Persuasive Websites, which elaborates on the subject of persuasive design.

Here are a few highlights from the interview:

"Persuasive Design is not about manipulating users into doing something they don't want to do. Instead, the goal of Persuasive Design is to get users to make the right decision."

"Persuasive design is not just about influence. It's about understanding the user's decision process and providing the information and tools to help facilitate a decision."

Links:

• The interview with Andrew Chak
• Andrew Chak's book at amazon.com
• Andrew Chak's book at amazon.co.uk

Henrik Olsen - February 13, 2003 - via UIEtips Email Newsletter

See also: Persuasive design (13)  Interviews (10) 

Usability News has tested the correlation between perceived usability and aesthetics.

The results showed that when the test participant where asked to the predict usability of a site, they ranked the site with balanced colours and layout highest.

However, user satisfaction reported after the sessions were related to successful navigation more than aesthetic appearance.

Links:

• The article Aesthetics and Usability: A Look at Color and Balance

Henrik Olsen - February 12, 2003

See also: Visual design (14)  Research (93) 

Winning on the Web: The Executive Pocket Guide to SMARTER Marketing is a guide on analyzing web visitor behaviour in order to evaluate the effectiveness of a site's navigation, content and marketing campaigns.

Though it's published by NetIQ, which produces the web analytics tool WebTrends, the methods described applies equally to other tools.

Links:

• The guide Winning on the Web: The Executive Pocket Guide to SMARTER Marketing
• Previous posting about Bryan Eisenberg's eBook on monitoring web site visitor behaviour

Henrik Olsen - February 02, 2003

See also: Web log analysis (7)  E-commerce (21) 

Craig Saila interviews web designer and author of Designing CSS Web Pages (New Riders), Christopher Schmitt. The topic is form and function. This can and often does apply to usability on the functional level.

Links:

• An interview with Christopher Schmitt

Nick Finck - January 30, 2003 - via Digital Web Magazine

See also: Interviews (10)  Visual design (14) 

Luke Wroblewski has written a nice primer on visual design of web pages, which condenses the core principles of functional aesthetics.

There is too little talk about visual design among interaction designers and information architects though it's an important aspect of usability. If you want to learn more, read Kevin Mullet and Darrel Sano’s book Designing Visual Interfaces.

Links:

• The article Visible Narratives: Understanding Visual Organization
• Previous posting about Kevin Mullet and Darrel Sano’s book Designing Visual Interfaces

Henrik Olsen - January 28, 2003

See also: Primers (9)  Visual design (14)  Web page design (23) 

With the online tool Vischeck you can test how a site or an image will look for colour-blind viewers. Vischeck even offer a free service, which will optimize images for viewing by colour-blind people. You'll also find a lot of interesting and educational background information there. The site is worth a visit.

Links:

• The site Vischeck

Henrik Olsen - January 19, 2003

See also: Accessibility (11)  Tools (51) 

As the web has matured, interaction designers have been faced with the challenge of designing complex web-based applications, which resemble desktop applications in functionality and complexity.

Bob Baxley is a practicing designer specialized in interface design for both web and desktop applications. In his book, he does a great job explaining how the page-based hypertext model of the web, compared to the task and action based model of desktop applications, present a variety of unique challenges for web interface design. In the book, you'll find a great amount of useful tips on how to exploit the limited interactive vocabulary of the web.

Unfortunately, the focus of the book is somewhat blurred. A large part of the book deals with general aspect of web site development, which isn't relevant in the context of web applications. I'm sure that if Baxley had focused more exclusively on web applications, he could have taught us much more in less space.

Links:

• Sample chapter (PDF)
• The book at amazon.com
• The book at amazon.co.uk
• A more extensive review from Boxes and Arrows

Henrik Olsen - December 15, 2002

See also: Books (32)  Web applications (2) 

Since reviewing "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Second Edition" (AKA the Polar Bear book) we decided it would be of interest to our readers to interview the authors of this book to see how the role of IA has changed since the first edition was released. Meryl K. Evans conducted the interview.

Links:

• An interview with Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld, Information Architects
• Book Review: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Second Edition

Nick Finck - December 12, 2002 - via Digital Web Magazine

See also: Interviews (10)  Information architecture (12) 

In two subsequent articles Martin Lindstrom from Clickz.com discusses the practices of up- and cross-selling used by brick-and-mortar retail stores and the potential in applying their principles to the web. The key is planogramming.

"A planogram is a detailed and thoroughly thought-through map that determines where every product in an establishment should be situated. It illustrates not only in what area every product should be placed but also on which shelf every item should be accommodated. Shelf by shelf, aisle by aisle, the planogram assigns selling potential to every item in a store."

Links:

• The article Webogram Power, Part 1
• The article Webogram Power, Part 2

Henrik Olsen - December 05, 2002

See also: Persuasive design (13) 

According to Maryam Mohit, Amazon.com's V.P. of Site Development, the key to Amazon.com's success is a strong focus on customer experience, which is infused throughout all levels of the company and includes all aspects of the buying process.

"And it's not just the people you'd think, like designers and usability specialists. Our engineers are really strong about thinking about customer experience, and our operations team, the people who run the back-end operations. Are the boxes easy to open, what packing material do we use, how much packing material is in the box, is it recyclable?"

Monitoring the customer experience is also important to Amazon.com.

"Metrics are super important. It's not just measuring, but measuring the right stuff and understanding it."

"…we correlate our measurements with changes we've made on the site, to see what's driving what, how to position things on pages, and which features to delete."

Links:

• An interview with Maryam Mohit, Amazon.com

Henrik Olsen - November 23, 2002

See also: E-commerce (21)  Interviews (10)