UIEtips 11/30/05: Galleries: The Hardest Working Page on Your Site

In this week’s UIEtips, I talk about how hard galleries have to work to help users succeed, with examples from Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo.

By observing users in usability tests, we’ve seen that there is a specific moment where designers have the best chance of enticing a user to pay attention to a promotion or advertisement: the seducible moment.

As we’ve watched users search for their desired content, we’ve realized there are patterns to the pages we see. We’ve started to catalogue these patterns and have concluded there are essentially 8 types of pages a user can run into, which Jared describes here.

We’ve been using a cool graphic design site, called Design Outpost for our graphical needs.

Within minutes of the UIE Roadshow 2006 Tour announcement, we’d received our first registration and they haven’t stopped coming in. This is a new phenomenon for us.

The folks here at UIE hope everyone is having a Happy Thanksgiving.

We’ve all been there. You find a new cool site. You decide to register for their service. You enter your favorite user id, the password, your pet’s birth date, the name of your third grade teacher (the cute one that you had a crush on), and your favorite Easter egg color. You finally press Submit. [...]

It’s amazing how many different ways web sites handle sign-in pages. The messaging of the interface, whether or not to sign up for an account, and the HTML elements used are just some of the details that change drastically from site to site. Just recently I was doing an interface review to see what the state of the art was, and I was simply boggled by the different approaches I saw. Here they are…

NPR exerts effort to recruit participants for a survey, only to turn them away when they get there.

Fandango.com recruits study participants during the signup process. Clever kids, those Fandango folks.