We must effectively design to gain and hold users’ attention in order to have them use our digital products. In this article, Victor Yocco covers specific tactics with supporting research that are bound to help you design for attention. He also discusses the need to understand why we want to gain users’ attention as well as what our users’ needs are.
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If you haven’t already researched biometrics for your user testing projects, perhaps it’s something you’d like to check out as an addition to your current testing. Today, Susan Weinschenk brings you some new tools that are easy and inexpensive to use. Others may take more investment of your time and budget. Or you may want to bring in an outside firm that specializes in these tools. (Some suggestions for outside vendors are at the end of the article.)
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It’s important to understand that all decisions involve emotions. In this article, Susan Weinschenk explains how you can make your users feel confident of their decisions and why it’s a bad idea to provide more than four options to choose from. For example, if someone is making a habit-based decision, do not give them a lot of information, and always limit the number of choices people have to make to one, two or three. If you provide too many choices then people likely won’t choose at all.
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The visual cortex is the part of the brain that processes visual information. Each of the senses has an area of the brain where the signals for that sensory perception are usually sent and processed. Given the way our brains work, there are things you can do that will grab your user’s visual attention. In this article, Susan Weinschenk explains how the visual cortex of our brains plays a vital role in controlling our behavior.
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It’s not just micro-moment design problems that can cause trouble. Designers often spend a lot of time on macro design issues, and sometimes less so on critical micro-moment design issues. That might be a mistake. Macro design issues can result in massive UX problems, too. In this article, Susan Weinschenk will take a closer look at how to avoid such failures and why they are critical to the UX success of any product.
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The mobile web is a booming place right now, which means web designers are spending lots of time trying to figure out how to win over this particular class of users. One way not to do that? Dark patterns. While your company may get some superficial and short-term gains in the process, nothing good will come from it in the long-run.
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Have you noticed the alarming lack of touch stimuli in current technologies? Our thoughts and feelings are strongly connected to the gestures, postures, and actions we perform. I aim to push you — as a designer — to think outside of the zone of screens. In this article, Lucia Kolesárová will aim to consider using more touch and motor skills when designing your very next product.
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Every $92 the average company spends attracting customers, a meager $1 is spent converting them. Real conversion optimization is rooted deeply in psychology. In this article, John Stevens will analyze seven psychology studies that date as far back as 1961. Each experiment raises principles that will help you boost conversions on your website. Effective conversion optimization goes beyond simply changing a button’s color or making a few tweaks here and there. The trick is knowing the fundamental principles that make people act the way they do. Hopefully, the psychology studies reviewed in this article will provide you with some practical insight to boost your conversion rates.
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Emotions aren’t a problem to be solved. People are complicated. People change. People are often a little conflicted. Algorithms can have a hard time with that. Emotion-sensing data promises to balance machine logic with a more human touch, but it won’t be successful without human designers. It may be difficult to imagine all the ways that artificial intelligence with emotion-sensing or emotionally intelligent technology, will shape experience. Let’s start by looking at the most familiar type of emotionally intelligent technology: a conversational app.
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Besides creating the best conditions for users to complete their tasks, it’s important to map their motivation to convert their good intentions into tangible outcomes. When UX combines motivation with users’ ability and triggers, it gets easier to persuade them to perform an action. In this article, we’ll explain from a psychological perspective what drives behaviour, and we’ll share three tips on how you can use these insights along with UX best practices to change your users’ behaviour — and count on the formal model Fogg’s to help you structure research and design processes to ensure that users’ needs are considered.
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