My 3 year old daughter has discovered a love for the game Guess Who? recently and is really enjoying the idea behind the game which, in a nutshell, is to narrow a search by asking questions to eliminate possible choices. This game lays the grounding for understanding how we as humans approach information and attempt to make sense of it.

Information is very often grouped by common attributes, for example, an online clothing store may have a “men’s” and a “women’s” section. This grouping is known as taxonomy from the Greek taxis, meaning order, and nomos, meaning science. The basis for any web based navigation system is often built on the foundation of grouping pages and sections of a site by common attributes.

My daughter is beginning her education into understanding the idea behind taxonomy and grouping things by common attributes thanks to this simple game. The premise is to find a particular person by asking questions to eliminate possibilities. In only a small number of plays my daughter already understands to start with wider similarities (e.g. is it a man or a woman?) to eliminate the highest number of possibilities at each stage as she can. This is a great analogy for well designed web navigation with the best systems helping to eliminate the highest number of possibilities at each stage.

Next week I will show how Mr Potato Head is a great analogy for web based search

If you’re looking to get hold of Guess Who? try: Amazon.

An interesting post from Googler Gavin Dolan via Bokardo shows a graph that illustrates the relative merits in redesigning parts of your site in relation to the ROI for each action.

It seems that you will gain a greater ROI from redesigning your forms which is most likely due to a greater conversion of visitors into customers/clients due to forms becoming less laborious to fill in and weeding out the irrelevant data that forms often request. This is an area of web design that is often overlooked but good form design is of the utmost importance to the goals of most site owners.

This is not to say that redesiging the homepage and landing pages is not also important as they too provide an impact to conversions but it is good to be aware that form redesign has the greatest impact on ROI. This will be especially true for sites which have a high number of visitors but low number of conversions.

I have noticed that many WordPress plugins ignore semantic markup and am trying to rewrite and share them once I have amended the output code. The first of these happens to be the WP Testimonials by Jodi Diehl of Sunfrog Services

Description

The plugin includes the option to display a random testimonial in your sidebar using PHP code or the built-in widget.

Testimonials can also be displayed all on one page. Simply use [sfs-testimonials] where you want the testimonials to display on the page/post.

All on one page option now allows an optional image to be included in the testimonial, this is added via the Media Library and the filepath added in the Testimonials Management pages. Also the testimonials are now set up to render semantically correct Blockquotes and Citations.

All HTML output (sidebar and page) is controlled through the included CSS file to make it easier to edit the way the data appears. The data is now marked up using semantically correct blockquote and cite tags.

Download

Download WP-TestimonialsPlus [76Kb]

Minigolf Party – Invite Flow.

An interesting idea to augment my usual workflow process. I find the use of wireframing can be restrictive and not entirely useful in explaining a process to a client so have experimented with using the grey box method, Annotated flow charts and prototyping pages to help. This may help assist me in explaining user process as an interactive experience by showing examples.

The main problem is that many clients do not appreciate the interaction that an environment like the web can provide especially with AJAX and so on. This can cause problems with achieving sign off on certain stages of the design process. So any help in explaining the ideas or even exploring ideas before committing to developing one is probably going to be of great use.

User Experience Design, or UX as it is commonly referred to, is the practice of designing a website or application or product or anything that is intended for a person to use with the usability of the thing being designed at the forefront of the design process. Research, Information Architecture, 2 dimensional treatments or mocks, prototyping, user-testing and QA testing all help to create a good User Experience.

Defining the User Experience is of key importance as it allows the designer to visualise the intended users and the key demographic. User scenarios will assist the structural design of thestructural design of the site and allow the visitors paths through the site to be mapped. Analysis of the competition will allow you to see what they do well and point you towards better Information Architecture and Sitepaths by spotting opportunities they may have missed and using them to help visitors achieve their goals.

Questions which I often ask in the UX Design Process include:

• What is the purpose of your site?
• How will you measure the success of your site?
• Who do you want to come to your site?
• What image or persona do you want the user to pick up from your site? or; What is your site’s character?
• Why will the user use your service or purchase your product?
• What is your USP likely to be?
• What functionality do you wish the site to have?
• Who are your competition?
• What do your competition do well/badly?
• Is there a design style you are keen to explore or a metaphor for your site you would like to use?

These are only a number of examples I use but you may have more to contribute.