Saturday, March 14th at 10:00 AM
Presenter: Robert Hoekman Jr – Miskeeto LLC
- (actually more than 7 rules)
You want your users to feel like a lion, and not feel frustrated. - Unfortunately, the web sucks for making users feel like lions.
- Sites that work well support innate human behavior (you don’t buy a drill to drill, you buy a drill to make a hole).
- The number one goal for people using your site is to get away from your site.
1. Understand your users, and then ignore them.
- Who would buy a low carb version of a cheeseburger (they look the same, taste the same, smell the same, cost the same)? People said they would buy it, so they created and tried to sell the sandwich, but it did NOT sell. Why? People are bad at predicting their own behavior.
- Find out how users ACTUALLY act by observing and not going off of what they say they’ll do. Ignore what they say. If they tell you, they might be wrong.
- Example: basecamp.com – it focuses on the real human behaviors, and not just answers to questions.
2. Build only what’s absolutely necessary
- What does something absolutely need to do? Focus on those items
- Example: senduit.com (file upload/download service) there is no extra stuff in it.
- When people buy a cell phone, they don’t use many of the features on the phone that they’re paying for.
- It’s not about simplicity, it’s about clarity and usable/understandable.
3. Support user’s mental model – drag a fie to trash can to delete it.
People don’t think like computers – look at DOS delete model vs. the current delete model.
4. Turn beginners into intermediates immediately
- Don’t make users feel stupid – they will leave. Make things easier, and make them feel smart – they will stick around.
- Example: Old WordPress.com homepage was very difficult to sign up for an account. They got actual phone calls asking how to sign up. It took 10 minutes to add a larger more prominent sign up button. Conversions went up 12-14%. All the change did was help users feel smart
5, Prevent Errors (and handle them gracefully)
- Policy emergency system harder to use – should be a BIG RED BUTTON. This makes it less likely someone will make a mistake.
- Make it easy to fix and change things to prevent errors.
- Example: Backpack.com – you can’t make errors – there are no error messages.
- Eliminate the possibility of errors – find errors and see if you can prevent them (or at least provide a helpful nice error message).
6. Design for uniformity consistency and meaning
- Squidoo.com – people would happen across the site from a search and not know where they were or why they’re there.
- Clean things up and make the experience more understandable.
- Improve the explainablity of the site so you know where you land and why/what you can do there.
7. Reduce Reduce Reduce (and refine)
- Store sign from "We Sell Fresh Here" to "Fresh Fish Sold" to "Fresh Fish" to "Fish" to No sign at all. It was obvious what was happening, and a sign wasn’t necessary. All clues for what happened in the store were obvious.
- Reduce the signal to noise ratio.