Since it’s inception, we’ve answered questions ranging from design exploration, career changes from coding to interface design and usability, and the most common UIs that confuse or impede the average user.

Robert Hoekman and I use our wits, humor, and knowledge (it occasionally creeps in) to answer these vexing questions. I know when I get notified about an exciting new episode I want to immediately check it out, however I’m usually too busy to do it at that moment, and then it slips my mind.

I’ve always appreciated receiving a summary on episodes I may have missed, so I thought you might appreciate it too.

Our latest episodes, podcasts 5-8, cover these topics:

• The most important UX activity in a web project
• Why so many basic usability failures are still around
• How a consultant can woo over a design team
• How to deal with link treatments when content display varies

With each podcast there is a place to share your thoughts with us, or you can let us know what you think below.  

If you want to hear more of me, you can see me live in Seattle, Denver, or DC at the UIE Roadshow: Secrets Behind Designing Great User Experiences. Use the promotion code SHOW09 and get $75 off the registration price.

Enjoy the podcasts.

In late June, we’re taking this workshop on the road to:

• Seattle, WA the week of June 21st, 2009
• Denver, CO the week of June 21st, 2009
• Washington, DC the week of June 29th, 2009

We’re just finalizing the venues and dates. If you want to be notified about the exact date and venue, send us an email with the city you’re interested in, and we’ll email you the moment we finalize everything.

Seattle, WA
Denver, CO
Washington, DC

The Roadshows back in February and March were a huge successful and filled up quickly. Even though the exact date hasn’t be finalized, you can still register and reserve you seat now.

Recognized industry leader, Jared Spool, will share information we’ve only made available to our biggest clients.

During the day, Jared will lead you through these sessions:

9:00 am: Designing for the Age of Experience
Jared will open the day with an overview of UIE’s research into great experience design. He’ll reveal the factors that are found in the organizations that are successful at delivering great experiences. And, he’ll show you the important criteria that you can use to measure your team’s effectiveness.

10:45 am: UX Level-Up: Taking Your Team to the Next Level
You’ll assess the critical dimensions that will pinpoint what your team needs to succeed. Jared will share how UIE measures organizations, which factors are most critical, and how to tell exactly where your group falls. From there, you’ll put together a solid action plan, describing the exact steps you need to take, to go to the next level and beyond.

1:00 pm: The Making of a UX Vision
You’ll discover the secrets behind creating a unified user experience vision that you can share with your entire organization. (Hint: it’s not nearly as hard as it sounds.) Jared will show you how, once you’ve created your vision, your team can use it to guide and focus your entire organization on a path that will yield delighted users while exceeding business objectives.

3:15 pm: Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusions to Simplify Design
In a perfect session to end the day, Jared will use professional magic effects to demonstrate the parallels between the world of magical illusions and the world of digital design. He’ll reveal the secrets from several magical illusions, and then show you how to use the same mechanisms to create delightful experiences for your users.

Read the detailed program description.

Knowing that times are tough for folks, we’ve made a special effort to make the UIE Roadshow a very affordable event. We think it’s important to get our latest research out, so we’ve priced this full-day workshop for far less than other programs. Additionally, we’re offering a $75 discount when you register with the promotion code SHOW09.

Do you have a team to send? We’re offering steep discounts. Bring your team and the price goes as low as $299 for each person.

This is guaranteed to be an eventful workshop, with a ton of detailed examples, hands-on exercises, Jared’s usual funny material, and, for the first time, live magic tricks!

We hope to see you there.

UIE is excited to announce our new UIE Roadshow: Secrets Behind Designing Great User Experiences, a full-day workshop, based on 10 years of UIE’s extensive research, that will deliver new insights and inspire your team to create the best user experiences. 

This winter, we’re taking this workshop on the road to:

• Portland, OR on Tuesday, February 17, 2009 
• Minneapolis, MN on Thursday, February 19, 2009 
• Atlanta, GA on Monday, March 2, 2009

Recognized industry leader, Jared Spool, will share information that previously we’ve only made available to our biggest clients. 

During the day, Jared will lead you through these sessions:

9:00 am: Designing for the Age of Experience

Jared will open the day with an overview of UIE’s research into great experience design. He’ll reveal the factors that are found in the organizations that are successful at delivering great experiences. And, he’ll show you the important criteria that you can use to measure your team’s effectiveness.


10:45 am: UX Level-Up: Taking Your Team to the Next Level


You’ll assess the critical dimensions that will pinpoint what your team needs to succeed. Jared will share how UIE measures organizations, which factors are most critical, and how to tell exactly where your group falls. From there, you’ll put together a solid action plan, describing the exact steps you need to take, to go to the next level and beyond.


1:00 pm: The Making of a UX Vision

You’ll discover the secrets behind creating a unified user experience vision that you can share with your entire organization. (Hint: it’s not nearly as hard as it sounds.) Jared will show you how, once you’ve created your vision, your team can use it to guide and focus your entire organization on a path that will yield delighted users while exceeding business objectives. 


3:15 pm: Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusions to Simplify Design

In a perfect session to end the day, Jared will use professional magic effects to demonstrate the parallels between the world of magical illusions and the world of digital design. He’ll reveal the secrets from several magical illusions, and then show you how to use the same mechanisms to create delightful experiences for your users.

Read the detailed program description.

Knowing that times are tough for folks, we’ve made a special effort to make the UIE Roadshow a very affordable event. We think it’s important to get our latest research out, so we’ve priced this full-day workshop for far less than other programs. Additionally, we’re offering a $75 discount when you register with the promotion code SHOW09. 

Do you have a team to send? We’re offering steep discounts. Bring your team and the price goes as low as $299 for each person.

This is guaranteed to be an eventful workshop, with a ton of detailed examples, hands-on exercises, Jared’s usual funny material, and, for the first time, live magic tricks! 

We hope to see you there.

Christine Perfetti and I will be your hosts. We are in Minneapolis for the conclusion of our 2006 UIE Roadshow. We want to take this opportunity to meet and chat with others in our field.

The happy hour takes place from 5:30-6:30 pm at the 5th floor Lobby Bar in the Minneapolis Marriott City Center. The Marriott is located at 30 South 7th Street, adjacent the Nicollet Mall. Please come, network, and meet your local colleagues. No RSVP necessary.

Taken at the Seattle 2006 UIE Roadshow

What’s even more interesting is three other clients have asked us this exact question in the past 3 weeks.

The rationale is this: Google’s home page has a simple search type-in box prominent on their home page, with virtually nothing else. Everybody loves using Google. Therefore, doesn’t everybody want the same simple design on every site they visit?

People are calling this approach Home Page Googlization.

On the surface, the rationale does seem to make sense. Google is an experience that people are very familiar with. It’s the starting point for many trips to the web. Why not transfer that experience to your own site?

Often, this is coming from sites really struggling to make their content easy to find. Intranet designers are fighting with their portals. Internet site designers are struggling to get everything they offer represented on a logical form on their home page.

Why keep the struggle going? Why not leverage the experience of Google?

The main reason is the experience of using Google is not the experience of using any other site. People go to Google to search the entire web. And Google has the game of numbers behind them. Because they’ve indexed billions of pages, they have probability on their side. Someone types in a keyword, no matter how odd or wacky it is, is likely to turn up some result somewhere. (For example, the mistyped word “Vidoes” produces 2,210,000 results. Every single one of them is probably close to what the user was seeking.)

But other sites aren’t indexing billions of pages. At best, it’s millions, but usually, it’s far less. This means many requests, even reasonable queries, will produce the dreaded No Results response. Unless the designers can eliminate these for 99% of the queries, Googlizing the home page is only going to frustrate.

All the evidence we have tells us, most of the time, users want to find strong trigger words to click on, not a box to type their trigger word into. When the trigger words are present on the page, users are far more likely to succeed. As designers, we need to focus on design solutions that make trigger words more prevalent, not less.

We’re anxious to see if someone has successfully Googlize their home page. We’ll be really impressed if someone manages to improve their user experience by minimizing the home page design down to a single search box. Until then, we’re going to keep to our opinion that it’s a move in the wrong direction.

Join us and other web designers, usability professionals, information architects, interaction designers, content managers, and other user experience professionals as we meet, greet, and connect up with other folks who face the same challenges we have.

Seattle Social Hour – Wednesday, 4/5 – 5:30-6:30 pm

Sazerac Restaurant inside Hotel Monaco
1101 Fourth Avenue (corner of Spring Street)
Seattle, Washington 98101
Phone: 206.624.7755

San Francisco Social Hour – Friday, 4/7 – 5:30-6:30pm

The Buena Vista Cafe
2765 Hyde St (corner of Beach Street, and the last stop on Powell-Hyde Cable Car)
San Francisco, CA 94109
Phone: 415-474-5044

No RSVP necessary.

The User Interface Engineering (UIE) 2006 Roadshow kicked off with it’s first venue here in Atlanta last week (February 24th). Usability guru and Founding Principal Jared Spool and Director of Instruction Christine Perfetti gave a daylong seminar on web design foundations. I’ll admit that I’m a UIE groupie, and I was excited that the Roadshow chose to stop by Atlanta this time around.

and

Jared further endeared himself to audience members — or at least those of us who are Bravo addicts — by referencing Project Runway during his presentation, which shot his coolness factor up by several percentage points.

Hee! Somebody liked us.

Maybe someone will convince me to do my Tim Gunn impression when we come to DC and Philly next week. “Gather ’round everyone.” I’m not quite as good as Santino, but not bad.

We’re offering scholarships for this year’s UIE Roadshow: Web Design Foundations.

We will award 12 scholarships (2 per roadshow city) to eligible full-time students, reducing the registration free to just $75 for the full day of insights!

Read more about the scholarship program and the application process here .

Hey, I read an article/study a while back on the efficiency of html text links compared to image links.
Can’t find it now..

I know we’ve published it somewhere, but damned if I can find it now.

Years back, we compared successful clickstreams (clickstreams that resulted in users accomplishing their goals, as observed in tons of usability tests) with unsuccessful clickstreams (clickstreams where users abandoned their goals before completing), looking for any clues that would help us predict behaviors in one that we didn’t see in the other.

One factor we looked for was whether the clickstreams contained image links versus text links — does one type of link show up more often in successful clickstreams than the other.

Our finding was when users clicked in image links they were just as likely to succeed or fail as when the clicked on text links. There was no statistically-meaningful difference.

Our inference from this was a well-designed image link will work as well as a well-designed text link. A poorly-designed image link will fail as often as a poorly-designed text link.

Since image links are significantly harder to design “well”, our recommendation to clients has been to favor text links. They are more efficient to create and manage and produce the same results.

We also concluded, from this same research, that there are three different types of images that can appear on a page:

1. Content images — images containing information within them that assist or accomplish the user’s goal.
2. Navigation images — images containing scent to inform the user what clicking will produce for them. (These may or may not be links — they just have to inform the user about links.)
3. Ornamental images — images creating mood, displaying professionalism, organizing the page (such as rules and fancy frames), and otherwise enhancing the experience.

The quick summary was that we saw well-designed content images helped shorten clickstreams, we saw well-design navigation images helped with scent, and we couldn’t see any advantage to the presence of ornamental images, beyond pure layout assistance. (Inotherwords, no matter how we measured, users beliefs about the site as professional, as fun, as well-designed, was independent of the presence of these images. At the time, it was this last finding that branded us as graphic-design-haters, since we were dipping into the rice bowl of the visual design community.)

Of course, there’s a lot more depth in this research — I’m only summarizing before I run to a meeting. But that’s essentially what we found. Hope this helps.

[Editor's note: We'll be discussing this topic in-depth at the UIE Roadshow: Web Design Foundations sessions coming up this spring.]

San Francisco is also close to selling out. And the shows in Atlanta, DC, Philadelphia, and Minneanpolis are climbing quickly to their room capacities.

We’re 6 weeks away from the first event in Atlanta and three months away from the events in Seattle and San Francisco. We’re thinking that we’re going to sell out every single one.

While some of this is due to the hard working efforts of our marketing folks, we have to attribute a lot of this to rebirth interest in skill improvement — a sign that the economy is improving.

When talent is scarce, because unemployment is down, companies are forced to train to keep competitive with their skills, instead of just hiring those skills off the street. About 6 months ago we saw a boom in job postings and now we’re seeing the followup trend of increased spending on training.

The most telling sign was two messages boards at the recent DUX 2005 conference. The one labeled “Jobs” was overflowing with opportunity postings. The one labeled “Resumes” was empty. Good news for people looking for new opportunities, bad news for those of us trying to hire you.

I do love it when the economy is in its boom phase!

I’m looking forward at everything we have planned for 2006 and I can tell you I’m very excited.

The 2006 UIE Roadshow is shaping up to be quite popular. (We’ve already exceeded our initial goals and are investigating expanding the program a bit.)

We’ve been working on the program for The User Interface 11 Conference (October 9-12, 2006 in Cambridge MA) and I think we’re going to out-do ourselves. (And UI10 really rocked!)

We’ve got a couple of other programs in the works that we’re excited about. Can’t say much about it, except you are going to wish you had more in your conference budget for this year.

Also, we’ve been busy working on some new reports. I just saw a draft of Christine’s upcoming publication and I think it’s fantastic. (More details in a few weeks.) You’ll see some great titles in the next few months, all at an affordable price. We expect to add new reports to our library throughout the year.

Our first two audio recordings were a tremendous hit, so you can expect a lot more of those. And our Brain Sparks Live programs proved very popular, so we’ll be looking at expanding that program for 2006.

Plus, we’ll be speaking at CHI 2006 in Montreal, the IA Summit in Vancouver, WebVisions 2006 in Portland, Web Design World in San Francisco, and a variety of regional events.

For the last few months, our phones have been ringing off the hook with people inviting us to speak to their organization. We love doing these visits because they allow us to really get to spend time really delving into the hard problems our clients are facing. (Would you like us to come visit your group? Give us a yell!)

Along with all this, we’ll be looking at blasting through our research agenda: creating a new understanding of design in today’s business context. Which will give us even more to talk about with everyone.

Wow! When I list everything going on, it’s quite exhausting! 2006 is going to be so busy that we might just have to take 2007 off!

• Presenter: Jared M. Spool
• Recorded at: Web Design World Seattle on July 18, 2005
• Program: #002 (Length: 54:38)
• Audio mp3 (25.6MB)
• Presentation PDF (3.7MB)

Happy Users are the brass ring of web site design. Ultimately, the designers of every site have making users happy as their primary objective. However, many designs end up frustrating instead. Since 1996, User Interface Engineering’s main research objective is to understand how to achieve designs which produce happy users.

UIE’s researchers have found that user happiness is directly tied to whether the users accomplish their goals on the site. What prevents users from accomplishing their goals? Almost always, it’s poor design caused by a design team that doesn’t have all the information they need to make the right decisions.

In this entertaining and insightful presentation, originally presented as the keynote at the 2005 Web Design World Seattle conference, Jared M. Spool will share practical design strategies from highly-effective web sites. He’ll show:

• How the best teams allocate their resources by focusing on the most important content on the site and how this affects every page
• Proven design techniques, such as persona-based design, to help teams understand what users need from the site
• Why the most effective sites never relaunch, yet manage to always have fresh designs
• How you can utilize the scent of information and how people search for their content to give your site a huge advantage

You’ll learn from a wide range of examples, from the sites for the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Netflix, and Wells Fargo, to Google, the Washington State Attorney General’s Office, and Amtrak.

Have you listened to the program? What did you think? Post a comment here with your thoughts and questions.

Program Underwriter: UIE 2006 Roadshow

Underwriting of this program is provided by the UIE 2006 Roadshow. Between February and May of 2006, Christine Perfetti and Jared Spool will bring their one-day seminar, Web Design Foundations, to Atlanta, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco, and Minneapolis, where they will discuss the foundation research every web designer needs to know, including the secrets to designing for the scent of information and the essential components of your usability toolbox. You can get more information on our six-city tour here.

We see this all the time. On nearly every one of the projects that we work on, and even the ones that we only hear about, we observe the same thing: the homepage has the highest priority in the design food chain. Much more energy is spent deciding what will go where on the home page than any other page or section of the web site.

The reason is simple. It’s the page with the most page views. Here is a snippet of uie.com’s page views over a few days recently.

The first reaction to a ranked list like this is to pay attention to whatever is ranked at the top. And inevitably, on the Web, that will be the homepage. After all, it’s the default page when someone visits the site. It ends up being an easy target for designers (and everyone else) to focus on.

However, if we push further with these numbers, stretch them out a bit, we actually paint a very different picture of where focus could be paid.

First off is the amazing statistic that the homepage accounts for only 1/10th of the total pageviews. In other words, approximately 90% of the time people spend on our web site is not on the home page! That suggests that there is a sizeable set of pages other than the homepage that fulfill the needs of our users.

And that brings us to The Long Tail. The Long Tail is an economic theory made popular by Chris Anderson, chief editor of Wired Magazine, who pointed out that the Web is enabling a whole class of content to be shared which wasn’t sharable before. Anderson uses physical items like CDs and books as his primary examples, noting that Amazon sells many more unpopular CDs than it does the most popular ones. (simply because there are so much more of them) Interestingly, the theory is equally applicable to those dark and dusty pages on your web site that don’t get much attention relative to the few popular ones.

Here is what The Long Tail of UIE.com looks like:

In this graph, the homepage sits on the left, getting over 4000 hits for the time period. But look to the right, the mass of area filled in with blue. That represents the rest of the pages (I included all the pages that got over 90 hits in the time period – the entire tail is much longer). These are the pages that get the vast majority of attention.

The Long Tail popularizes what mathematicians realized early on when they started researching the Web. That is, there is a pattern to the way that we browse web sites. The pattern is that there will always be a most popular page (usually the homepage) and there will always be a huge collection of pages that garner less individual attention but add up to the vast majority when put together.

Going further, when we separate out the pages in the tail into what areas of the site they are in, we can get an even clearer idea of where people are spending their time.

As you can see, the section of UIE.com that gets the most traffic is our articles section. This is followed by our Brain Sparks blog posts. Even though these sections of the site are made up of multiple pages, they’re mostly template-driven. Therefore, it might make sense to really optimize these templates before moving on to less-visited sections of the site.

We think it’s worth investigating the relationship of where users and designers spend their time. It might make sense for designers to spend most of their time where users spend most of their time. That way, designers will affect the most users possible with any improvements they make.

If you’re a long-time reader of ours, you won’t be surprised by this suggestion. We’ve long sensed that too much effort was spent on homepages. Our research continually shows it. (as do our site stats!) Not coincidentally, Christine and Jared talk about this very topic in our 2006 Roadshow.

Nothing beats a good buzzword, and we’ve found that The Long Tail is an effective way to communicate some of the issues design teams face. (In addition, it makes a great visual and opens up a slew of opportunities for making puns)

So that’s a little of what we’ve learned from analyzing our own tail. What does your Long Tail tell you?

Within minutes of the announcement, we’d received our first registration and they haven’t stopped coming in.

This is the third time Christine & I are hitting the road and it’s the first time we’ve seen this kind of immediate response. Usually, we get a burst of registrations right before the registration deadline (which, this time is December 15), but we’ve never seen such a flood of immediate registrations.

In each of the six cities, we’ve reserved a reasonable size room. However, in some of the cities, such as Atlanta, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, we’ve already reserved the largest room at the site. If the registrations keep coming in as they do, we’re likely to sell out in these cities and possibly in all of them. If you’re thinking of registering, you might consider doing it soon.

You can find details about the event here.

So, we’re relaunching the tour in another six cities. This time, we’re visiting Atlanta, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Washington DC, Seattle, and San Francisco. We can only spend a day in each city, so we expect them all to sell out.

You can read all about the events here. Anyone who has been will tell you this show is a must-attend if you’re involved in web site design and development. (At least, I hope that’s what they’d tell you.)

If you register by December 15th, you get the entire day at a great price and a very cool Timbuk2 Laptop Grip Sleeve Bag!