By now, Nintendo has made exactly 87,493,029 versions of Mario Kart since the game was first introduced in 1992 for the Super Nintendo. (Okay, the company has really made 13—which is still a lot!) But a new sequel coming this fall to the Nintendo Switch changes the formula in an enticing way, thanks to super experimental UX.

Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit transforms the Nintendo Switch into a controller for an actual toy race kart. The kart is fitted with a camera, giving the player a first-person view of its perspective as it whizzes around your living room, bedroom, or wherever you have some open floor space to play.

How does the game build your course? You place a few gates that are bundled with the game on the floor. From there, how the exact setup and customization works is unclear (perhaps vision AI is involved?), but Nintendo—alongside its partner developer Velan Studios—demonstrates that one of several tracks, from a simple oval to complicated curves, can be set up to avoid existing couches, coffee tables, and perhaps even sleeping cats.

As you race your kart around the course, all sorts of augmented reality (AR) effects, ranging from glowing boundaries, to power ups, to your racing competitors, will appear on the screen, as if they exist in your actual home. If you run over a virtual item, like a nitro-boosting mushroom, the kart will actually accelerate. If you hit a troublesome banana peel, the car will actually lose some control. Oh, and assuming you have friends with their own games, up to four players can race their karts together in the same space.

With few exceptions, augmented reality has been little more than a gimmick. Snapchat’s zany face filters are still the most successful commercialization of this technology that, not so long ago, the tech world heralded as the next big thing.

Microsoft’s Hololens AR headset is technically impressive, but it’s being marketed as an enterprise tool to businesses (which demonstrates pretty clearly that it’s not ready for the mainstream just yet). The hyped company Magic Leap, with billions in venture capital from investors like Google, has done little more than release a developer version of its headset to mediocre reviews while it hangs on for life. The hardware is simply too expensive, too bulky, but, most of all, too useless to really be worth buying for a vast majority of people. Plus, it’s antisocial by nature to be experiencing a different version of reality than the people around you.

But Nintendo is doing what it does best. It’s figuring out how to transform a gimmick into shared fun—and make it halfway affordable, too. A lot of that comes down to Nintendo just understanding the ergonomics around technology and play. For years, AR demos tasked you to hold up your phone like a little window to peek through, to do something like transform a magazine cover into an animation. These novelties wore thin quickly because they’re more physically awkward than visually amazing.

Nintendo is taking a similar approach here to its predecessors. But instead of utilizing the camera in your phone, it’s built it into the kart. That allows you to play a game like you always do (sitting on your couch), but experience all of these enticing and additive effects of AR. No, Nintendo isn’t aiming as high as Magic Leap, teasing an entire world of digital objects that you can reach out and touch. But Nintendo is competent enough at game design that it’s figured out how to work with what it has to create an AR experience that’s both new and destined to be massively successful.

Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit will be out for $100 on October 16. The last version of Mario Kart sold more than 25 million copies to date. And if Home Circuit is only a fraction as successful, it will still be one of the most profitable demonstrations of AR ever built.

Written by: Mark Wilson, Fast Company
Posted by: Situated Research

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A considerable amount of that success derives from the ongoing effort of Airbnb’s design team to create a user experience for its booking platform which surpasses that of other similar services.

Airbnb’s Landing Page (above the fold) as I am typing this

As a designer, I was always astonished of how Airbnb approaches their product design challenges and delivers a product that converts, for years now. So in this article, I’ll try to identify what makes their landing page different and why it is successful.

Visual Clarity and Minimalism

I strive for two things in design: simplicity and clarity. Great design is born of those things.” — Lindon Leader

Using colour contrast and shadows, the user interface is basically structured as two layers: The card, which contains the explanatory text and the Call-to-Action (CTA) button, forms the upper layer, while the rest of the page is perceived as the background layer.

Perceived layers of user interface

With little to no cognitive effort, users can identify the upper layer (card) as the area with which they can interact. The page as a whole does not overload the users with information, hence framing a clear interaction path for users who land on it.

Reducing the cognitive load the user needs for achieving his goals is of the utmost importance when designing for humans.

Let’s see how it compares to Booking’s landing page, in terms of visual clarity, by using predictive technology:

Measuring optical clarity of the landing pages (above the fold) for Booking.com and Airbnb via VisualEyes plugin

More clarity contributes to easier and driven scanning of information. Two metrics that can determine how an interface is efficiently designed for human interaction is Visual Complexity and Prototypicality. The conjunction of those two metrics affects the aesthetics processing of the user significantly and, thus, defines how he will interact with the interface.

More complexity requires more cognitive load. More cognitive load means less user engagement and, sequentially, less conversion and profitability.

Key Takeaway:

Airbnb has set an interaction focal point; therefore users have already determined where they will have to “lay their eyes” in order to forage information.

The Double Z-Pattern

The Z-Pattern (for people that read from left to right)

Humans have a natural reading pattern, which is applied when visual stimuli are present. Following the natural flow of eye-scanning a layout, the Z-Pattern complements better single-purpose webpages that contain only one CTA.

This specific pattern “traces” eye movement of the users, thus allowing for strategic placement of visual elements.

So, Airbnb used the Z-Pattern.

Twice.

Airbnb is setting focal points for their users, using the Z-Pattern

By utilising this layout, Airbnb’s designers achieved to establish a concise visual hierarchy. Areas of interest that convey some kind of message are pinpointed and brought up to the user’s attention. Below you can view how Airbnb’s Z-layout translates into attention heatmaps:

Attention Heatmaps generated in Figma, using the VisualEyes plugin.

Attention heatmaps suggest that the selected areas are drawing the most of the user’s attention in this particular instance.

As it is shown on the right image, the Area of Interest, in which the Card is placed, stands out three times more than the focal point of the hero image, while the CTA Button on the bottom right of the white card is almost three times more prominent than the card itself.

Key Takeaway

Airbnb augments, even more, the pre-established interaction path, by driving most of the attention to the single action -clicking the button- needed in order to “dive deeper” into their product.

Read more on the Z-Pattern here.

Priming

“Priming is a technique whereby exposure to one stimulus influences a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention.”

In other words, priming takes place when taking one’s memories or mental associations and using them to influence his future behaviour towards an upcoming matter.

The first image (Hero) someone views when interacting with Airbnb’s website

Almost all websites/products apply the “priming” effect to their audience in some way. In our case, the Airbnb landing page, visitors are subject to associative priming with the use of imagery. The design team is doing an excellent job in finding images that fit the company’s target group perfectly, so they can ensure that the desired emotions will be triggered.

Different target audiences, different hero images.

Which words pop in your mind when viewing the house on the left image? Maybe something like soothing, peaceful, refreshing, unique, care-free or even vacation-material?

Key Takeaway:

By “priming” their target audience, Airbnb’s designers use carefully-picked images to spark the emotions that could be associated with the subsequent expected experience: Staying in an awesome place for their vacation.

Read more on Priming from NN/g here.

Simple, strong and effective language

The text serves two purposes:

1. Validate the reason a user visited the website in the first place — “I’m where I was supposed to.”
2. Set a user goal — “Now I should search for places I want to visit.”

Using simple and clear language when communicating messages is essential in web design, as it establishes that your audience will not misinterpret your offering. Remember that communication is a “two-way street”:

“How well we communicate is determined not by how well we say things, but how well we are understood.” — Andrew Grove

Airbnb avoids unnecessary jargon, while choosing a set of words that their target audience will comfortably understand.

Key Takeaway:

Text content was carefully selected to disclose a specific message and the value of the product as quickly as possible, with few words in the play. All that without endangering that their audience will not understand the offering.

Conclusion

Insightful design is human-oriented and drives human actions and emotions. Airbnb’s design team found a very subtle -almost transparent- way to direct users’ actions on their website. The framing of the experience was so delicately designed that it accelerates interaction while keeping the primary user goal in mind.

Thanks for tuning in!

Written by: Thanos Dimitriou (via Medium)
Posted by: Situated Research

The post How Airbnb drives users’ actions with their landing page design — a UX analysis appeared first on Situated Research.

Consider the ease of simply clicking a button within an attractive user interface, following the vehicle as it comes to your door and enjoying a smooth ride. For all the talk about their technology, their business model and their strategy, experience is what ensures customers continue to use the service. This idea has brought me to the concept of UX as strategy. It’s the idea that today, more than anything else, your UX will determine the success or failure of your software and your business.

A killer UX creates deeper customer engagement and loyalty.

A powerful and engaging UX doesn’t just make your product easier to use — it helps you engage more deeply with your customers, ensuring they stay loyal to you rather than looking to your competition. It builds brand loyalty and increases the chances that your customers will become your most effective advocates. Your UX also plays a key role in enrichment, ensuring your customers purchase additional products and services.

Your UX now forms the heart of your competitive differentiation.

I don’t believe I’m writing anything new in highlighting the importance of UX for software and applications. What is new, however, is how your UX can form the basis of your competitive differentiation. Building long-term, sustainable, competitive differentiation is one of the toughest objectives that executives face. In today’s digital world, the UX of your products and services plays a fundamental role. People engage with brands and companies via their software, and thus via their UX.

It is your brand, plus highly satisfied customers and fans, that will result not just in your business growing, but in building competitive differentiation. For example, it’s incredibly hard for other companies to match the loyalty of people who love Apple’s products and services. Even when other manufacturers build products that can compete on a technical and functional level, and that may even sell at lower price points, people remain loyal to the brand. Apple has been at the forefront of blending the concept of a brand with people’s identity, their image of who they are as individuals. Apple’s UX is at the very heart of this.

Making UX Your Strategy

At a high level, I recommend the following actions as you make UX your business strategy:

• Link your design metrics to your business metrics.

Those individuals responsible for the design of your software are now at the heart of the success of your business. As a result, we also need to ensure that their success, and that of your design, becomes linked to your business’s key performance indicators.

• Use the latest technology to build hyperpersonalized services.

Increasingly, in order to build these powerful experiences, organizations will need to use the latest technologies, from automation to machine learning. Customers now consider such personalization the norm, part of the overall experience of using your software. Airbnb’s personalized travel recommendations after you book a trip, such as offering a tour of Boston’s live music scene just after you reserve a stay in the city, is one such example.

• Build design systems.

Leading organizations such as Adobe and Salesforce have increasingly spoken about the need to create “design systems” to build these powerful user experiences. These are the systems and processes that enable them to scale their design best practices, rather than constantly reinventing the wheel. Forrester analyst Gina Bhawalkar points out that they also play a key role in linking your design team to your development team. She mentions that design systems should “also include the reusable code behind those design elements, and for this reason they should be created as a partnership between design and development teams.”

• Foster a product-centric culture and mindset.

If you listen to any of the founders of the UX-centric companies I’ve mentioned before, you will realize that they obsess about their products and the experiences their customers have with them. I would argue that if it’s not their top priority, it probably ranks very high. This is something easy to achieve as a startup, but much harder when you are, for example, a large financial institution that is used to thinking that your “product” is a checking account or a home loan, instead of the app or website your customers use to buy and manage those financial solutions. I often wonder whether the top executives at large firms even use their software products because some of them are so bad.

The democratization of technology helps drive better UX.

Ultimately, this is all part of what many people have referred to as the “democratization of technology.” This is because, fueled by cloud computing and new open-source technologies, it’s not just large companies or tech giants that can create these compelling user experiences.

So while effective UX design is one of the hardest aspects of product development, new technologies, tools and approaches are making it possible even for startup teams on a budget to build these compelling digital experiences. We’re seeing organizations take advantage of this to move nimbly and build light, attractive, mobile-first experiences. This is what it means to make UX your strategy, and in 2019, I believe it is the only way your organization will achieve success.

Written by: Alex Robbio (Co-founder of Belatrix Software and Member of Forbes Technology Council)
Posted by: Situated Research

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Measuring Engagement

Prior research has shown the importance of engagement in game play. Creating a sense of flow, or a feeling where players are immersed into game play to the point where they lose track of their surroundings, has a huge effect on players’ perceptions of a game.

Games user research, when properly done, incorporates behavioral psychology into the research to observe players’ actions during gameplay. This yields insight into engagement levels, which are affected by a steady increase in difficulty over time (to challenge game players’ ability) and are encouraged by a great story line to immerse game players.

Measuring Player Communication

Besides the obvious task of watching players interact with the game interface, the observation of player-to-player communication can yield great insight into game play. Team-based activities, or even collaborative game play, can help researchers observe players’ strategies. In MMOGs, players might communicate through text or voice inside the game environment, and classic games might have players communicate via their proximity to one another.

Player communication yields great insight into how players learn to play a game and how they develop strategies to win a game. Great user research should use a research method where players are not coaxed or guided by researchers, and feel as if they are in a natural environment as to not bias their activity while playing games. Rigorous game research methods can use these factors to their advantage to achieve findings that are more accurate than traditional deductive, hypothesis-driven studies.

Affordances of the User Interface

While the broader experience of game play needs to be measured to gauge the overall player experience, examining the affordances of the user interface is a useful task to see what players perceive as possible actions in the game. These perceptions provide game players a foundation for creating strategies within the game. All aspects of the interface that can be interacted with, as well as those that gamers perceive as actionable, should be observed to inform game design. These perceived actions within a game suggest to gamers their possibilities for both playing and winning the game.

Often, critical actions might be overlooked by gamers. In line with theories of learning, a scaffolding difficulty structure should be achieved to create a feeling of flow for gamers. Game research can provide useful insight into ways that game players make use of a game interface, and lead to modifications in its discovery and use (via a nudge, animation, tutorial, etc.) that will provide salience to particular actions within the game that allow game players to learn, progress, and create engaging game play within the game.

Conclusion

Many of the current trends in game design are leading to amazing new games: including VR / AR (virtual / augmented reality), amazing graphics approaching lifelike detail, and engaging online multiplayer experiences. However, many of the properties of classic games offer players an engaging experience without advanced graphics, making use of a basic story, simple gameplay, and scaffolding difficulty structure to engage players. Game developers of all sizes can create games that maximize engagement by utilizing game research to create games that utilize the perfect mix of these features.

Good usability, afforded by the game user interface, helps players develop strategies for playing and winning games. Creating flow, where players lose track of their surroundings while immersed in game play, can be achieved by creating the right mix of engaging gameplay, player communication, and a scaffolding difficulty structure where players learn and accomplish tasks in the game.

About the Author

Matthew Sharritt, Ph.D., President and Co-founder of Situated Research, specializes in user-experience (UX) research and usability testing within software and video games. Dr. Sharritt’s research focuses on collaborative learning during playtesting and exploration, yielding insights in how to construct games that flow with engaging gameplay and collaborative interaction. The Situated Research team has provided independent expertise to the game industry across a variety of research projects. Learn more at https://www.situgames.com.

The post Games User Research: Driving Development with Actionable Insights appeared first on Situated Research.

Most clients and projects require the design researchers to state a predetermined sample size of users. Researchers often find it hard to justify to clients and business stakeholders on the choice of their sample size of users. Suggesting a very small sample size may make the client think that the research recommendations might not be impactful enough whereas, a very large sample size inflates the time and budget for the study. One of the many reasons for this conundrum may be that design research is often confused with market research and hence often assessed with the standards of market research. This report by Human Factors International superbly explains how they are different.

Well, theoretically a design research study can involve a minimum of 3 users to around 100+ users. Undoubtedly, the quality of insights drawn from such a range of users might differ nevertheless there is a combination of factors I believe one should consider when ascertaining the number of users. Let’s have a look at these factors in detail.

The Scope of the Design Study

The most important factor to consider is to determine what are we trying to accomplish through the study. The scope of the study can be:

a. To design a product from scratch and doing exploratory design research

When the focus is on discovering needs and opportunities for a product then, we need to maximize the number of users. This is because exploratory studies require to examine the entire spectrum of the target audience who might be existing or potential users of the product and also all possible behaviors, processes and interactions of these users with their operable environment which can lead to the creation of a new experience. Creating new experiences is like a gamble researchers and designers are taking. One can never be 100% assured that it’s going to work. Hence, the more the number of users, the better will be the statistical evidence to support the design hypotheses and ensure that the new experience is indeed a delightful one. However, the limiting factor of budget and time for the study can again constrain and influence the number of users for the study which I have covered later in the article.

b. To find solutions to problems of an already existing product and doing validatory research, eg. usability testing, identifying new features etc.

When we are finding potential solutions to difficulties with current design system then, we can go with a fewer number of participants. When probing for usability problems with an interface, sometimes the magic number of 5 users can do the trick as explained by this NN group article. However, when probing for new feature capabilities or studying the current state of the system then, sometimes one may need more than 5 users. In such cases, the decisions boil down to considering other factors such as characteristics of the study population, resources for the study, etc which I have discussed below..

Characteristics of the Study Population

It is uncommon to have just one kind of users of a product. Moreover, it is quite possible that the user groups may not be predefined and the research may further explore the various user categories in the study population. It is also possible that the target population might comprise users from various countries, cultures and even speaking many languages. Therefore, the more diversified a study population we are examining, the more the number of users will be required to get a comprehensive picture through the study. In other words, we will need multiple user representatives for each persona group or user type we are designing for. I recommend beginning with a minimum of three users to consider for each user type and then increase the number of users uniformly for each category depending on product and domain complexity.

Resources at Disposal

In reality, budget and time always dictate the sample size for research. In addition to conducting a research study, a researcher needs to budget time for recruiting users, analysing the data and further feeding the insights to design sprints. Hence, discerning the right number of users in perspective with time and budget of study is critical to ensuring complete project handling.

Considering the worst case scenario where the project permits very less budget and very less time, I would recommend to scale down the number of participants to get the data on time. This is to make sure that we are able to generate at least the most significant insights.

In cases, where there is ample time but less budget, we can always select research methods which are frugal enough to generate meaningful insights without compromising on the number of users being considered for study eg. methods such as design surveys, diary studies etc.

For the reverse case of less time and a substantial budget, we need to consider differentiating between exploratory and validictory research and further ascertain the number of users. This is because recruiting more users will not be a problem here, however being able to recruit more users in less time will definitely be.

Quantitative vs Qualitative studies

Out of all the factors which impact the number of users in a study, the choice of doing a quantitative study or qualitative study is the one 90% of the times in the hands of the researcher. This is because the purpose of research and the quality and type of insights which are expected from the study are most clear to the researcher. Rest all the factors are conditional and largely statutory to the project requirements. Thus, the researcher has the liberty of determining the number of users to fit its requirements. However, the only constraint to be careful here is findings from quantitative studies need to be statistically sound. Statistically sound quantitative studies set a requirement of a minimum number of users which is usually large (often 30 users or more). Whereas, findings from qualitative studies are behavioral estimates. Thus, the researcher has the freedom to decide the number of users which is further elaborated by this article.

To conclude

Small, medium or large — what sample size of users fits your study is a composite question. The magic number of 5 users may work magic in some studies while in some it may not. It depends on the constraints put on by project requirements, assumptions about problem discoverability and implications to the design process. Assess these factors to determine the number of users for your study:

1. What’s the nature and scope of research — is it exploratory or validatory?
2. Who and what kind of users are you planning to study?
3. What’s the budget and time to finish the study?
4. Does your research involve presenting statistically significant numbers or inferring behavioural estimates for the problem statement?

Happy User Recruiting!

Written by: Shrut Kirti (via Medium)
Posted by: Situated Research

The post User Research: is more the merrier? appeared first on Situated Research.

User-centered design isn’t just about creating a great experience for customers—it’s also a smart business move. 

In our previous article “The True ROI of UX: Convincing the Executive Suite,” we talked about how to persuade company executives on the ROI of UX, and how to illustrate the value of UX in increasing business KPIs. In this second piece, we discuss how, in order to really drive the message home, it is essential that UX teams present successful case studies of similar B2B UX redesigns.

The trouble is, finding data from real-world B2B UX redesigns is extremely challenging. Through dogged perseverance, our UX team found some useful data, but the proven difficulty of defining the ROI of UX (ie. how to exactly measure it) complicated matters further, and it became evident that the ROI of UX needed to be categorized into “soft” and “hard” dollars.

On the “soft side,” results are categorized into increased customer loyalty and net promoter scores (NPS), increased word-of-mouth referrals, productivity gains, and increased efficiency. On the “hard dollars” side, increased earnings and cost savings are gained from fewer support calls, less spent on development, fewer development “redo” cases, less user-testing, increased sales, and so on.

Here are the internal and external ROI measures:

Internal ROI

• Increased user productivity
• Decreased user errors
• Decreased training costs
• Savings gained from making changes earlier in design life cycle
• Decreased user support

External ROI

• Increased user productivity
• Increased sales
• Decreased customer support costs
• Savings gained from making changes earlier in the design life cycle
• Reduced cost of providing training

The B2B UX redesign case studies below represent the results of our research into the top 15 global design agencies/consultancies who performed B2B UX design/redesign projects. These case studies come from prominent design/consulting firms such as Accenture Interactive, Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey, Forrester, IDEO, Frog Design, Fjord, Adaptive Path, and others.

ROI of UX: B2B Redesign Case Studies

Bank of America

The giant bank identified and funded a UX redesign project to improve its online enrollment application for online banking. In developing the business case, the design team identified yield (or the percentage of customers completing the process) as the primary metric.

Prototyping and testing various design solutions with yield as the primary success metric proved a successful design strategy. The week the new registration form went live, the yield metric nearly doubled, and exceeded the desired ROI benchmark. This was a win for the design team, as well as the business unit that sponsored the project.

General Electric Software UX Unification

Known for its industrial expertise, by 2010 General Electric Co. had quietly become the world’s 14th largest software developer by revenue. These capabilities had grown opportunistically, primarily in response to requests from specific clients. As a result, little software consistency existed across the company and significant development efforts were invested in problems already solved in other divisions.

Overall, users of GE software reported that the quality didn’t reflect the excellence of GE’s hardware engineering. GE leadership decided to make an investment in creating a common software platform for the company. The Software Center of Excellence developed a UX Center of Excellence that would guide GE management, and drive the culture change to ensure that their software user experience matched their well-earned reputation for stellar hardware engineering.

Leaders, engineers, and designers collaborated to build processes and tools to support culture change together with a core foundation of design tools and success metrics that would support its UX practice. In the first year after its launch, the IIDS generated a 100% productivity gain in development teams and saved an estimated $30 million for the company. These digital transformation initiatives provided the foundation for GE Digital—and GE’s leadership in the industrial internet.

Courtesy frog design

Cathay Pacific

Cathay Pacific Airways is known for its leadership in the adoption of new technologies. The airline was the first in the world to announce plans to install in-flight email, the first to link its Airbus aircraft to its maintenance centers electronically, and the first in the world to auction air tickets online.

For company employees, a staff of eight to ten people work full-time to answer questions and book travel. Working with a design consultancy, Cathay Pacific created a new online portal called TravelDesk, a one-stop shop for staff travel.

The portal design project resulted in significant cost savings for the company:

1. The online portal reduced call-center volume (employee benefits center regarding policy questions, and service center regarding flight availability).
2. It increased productivity. Ground staff at the airport previously spent significant time managing the listing and check-in process for employees using their travel benefits. This project reduced the time required for these tasks.

Virgin America Website Redesign

Virgin America was on a mission to make flying fun again. In 2014, the airline decided to reinvent the digital travel experience, and in order to meet the needs of modern travelers, create the world’s first responsive airline website. The company decided to design and engineer a new digital platform that could respond to modern travel needs and behaviors.

After successfully A/B testing the new design against the old, Virgin America’s reinvented responsive site was released. They announced an IPO following two successful quarters running the new site that had exceeded performance goals in the following areas:

• 14% increase in conversion rate
• 20% fewer support calls
• Flyers booked nearly twice as fast, on any kind of device

Virgin America responsive website design.

HubSpot

In a recent major iteration of HubSpot, the company decided to re-think the user experience on its site, starting from the ground level with user feedback. They tested entirely new conversion methods, copy messaging, and even visual treatments. As part of the process, they pushed countless experiments live, and iterated with each piece of feedback, putting the user in control.

The result? The conversion rate doubled (tripled, even, in some areas). As HubSpot receives upwards of 10 million visitors per month, one can imagine the impact this had on revenue.

Continental Office B2B Website Redesign

With a brand refresh just a few months prior, Continental Office, a customized workplace solution provider, needed to update its 6-year-old website. The team wanted to ensure they were integrating buyer personas to provide an engaging user experience complete with relevant content marketing.

The old website was fine at the time but wasn’t built around telling the whole story while understanding the customer journey.

“In creating that great user experience, you have to stay relevant with what people are looking for and then build your website around that, which I believe is what we did and has allowed us to have these successful results.” – Rachel Iannarino, Vice President, Marketing.

The results of getting to know customers and building a website around that speak for themselves. Through the redesign strategy, traffic increased by 103% year-over-year and net-new contacts increased by 645%.

“Even though we had such great results last year, it’s already up — the number of new contacts is up over 80% from last year already. And I can’t lie; I keep waiting for these numbers to kind of plateau, but fortunately for us, the results just keep trending in a positive way” – Iannarino said.

Music & Arts

Music & Arts sells musical instruments and comprises 150+ retail stores, and 300+ affiliate locations. Their sizable eCommerce site had numerous usability problems that hindered online sales.

There is a detailed case study of this UX redesign project on the Toptal Design Blog: “eCommerce Redesigned: How Minor Changes Made Major UX Improvements.”

After a three month UX redesign project that significantly improved basic usability issues (consistency, simplicity, user flow, system feedback) their online sales increased around 30% year-over-year.

Pubmatic

This ad-tech platform’s UX redesign project took over a year. The B2B platform was about 7 years old and was made up of a hodge-podge of UIs, a variety of different-looking web-applications that were created at different times. As the company was maturing, it needed a unified UX design and a brand-consistent look-and-feel.

As a result of the UX redesign, NPS increased from 6 (detractors) to 9 (promoters) over 3 months immediately after launch when measured against the old platform’s satisfaction data.

Final Thoughts

A very interesting experiment related to the ROI of UX was conducted by the Geoff Teehan, Director of Product Design at Facebook in 2006. They called it the “UX Fund.” The $50,000 fund invested in companies that focus on delivering great user experiences. The hypothesis was that the ROI of UX should be reflected in their stock price over time.

Over a ten year period, from 2006 to 2016—including a major financial crisis in the middle of it—the “UX Fund” returned 450% vs the Nasdaq’s 93.2% return (that’s 45% annual return over ten years which beats any other asset class). You can read more about this experiment here.

Despite the evidence that UX design investments enhance customer experience and address business problems, executives still find it a challenge to define the financial benefits using traditional ROI measures. UX designers best serve businesses if they can not only create great “designs that work,” but are able to articulate and convincingly demonstrate tangible business results and KPIs to executives and stakeholders.

In order to be convincing and really get to the heart of what executives need to hear, UX designers need to think in similar terms to business leaders. Think: how can we best provide business value? If we do this, what will the return on our investment be? What metrics will demonstrate that we’ve made the right choices?

If done well, design can help bring order and coherence to the disorder that is the current state of the B2B world and enterprise applications. A 2016 design study of 408 different companies found that the more a company focused on and invested in design, the more they saw sales increase and experienced higher customer retention rates—customer engagement soared, and they moved through product cycles faster. All this simply because they put UX design, and more importantly, the customer, at the very heart of their business.

Clearly, good user experience is good for business. Today it’s become part of a UX practitioner’s job to offer decision-makers a compelling demonstration of the true value of exceptional UX design, and that there is indeed an impressive ROI in UX.

Written by:  Miklos Philips, Toptal
Posted by: Situated Research

The post The True ROI of UX: B2B Redesign Case Studies appeared first on Situated Research.

In this article I will explain what that rule is, and what it means to product and service design. I’ll also raise the possible implications of this phenomenon on organizational management, collaboration, and general performance. The psychological phenomenon I will be discussing in this article is known as Miller’s Law. Rather than just tell you what Miller’s Law is, I ask you to take part in this exercise for a more immersive learning lesson.

The Exercise…

Step 1

Read the italicized instructions before starting. Grab a pen and paper. This is an exercise where you will try to recall words you’ve just read, off memory.

Below is a list of 20 words. Read them to comprehension , and try to memorize as many as possible. Try to keep the words ‘in your head’. Do not write the words. Spend about a minute. After you are done reading, scroll down until you see the word ‘STOP’. Then, read step 2.

STOP < ··············································

Step 2

Now, use your pen and paper to write down as many words as you can remember from the list. Think hard, but do not scroll back up to view the words. If you scroll up, the experiment is ruined. Give yourself about half a minute…Once you have finished writing the words you tried to recall, scroll back up and check how many you got right.

If you are like the vast majority of human beings, you will have remembered 5–9 of the words. Hundreds of experiments prove universality of this limitation on memory. When I first discovered this phenomenon, I knew it had huge implications on product design, because of the degree to which this limitation affects day to day tasks. This capacity for keeping ~7 bits of information ‘in the head’ short term, is known as Miller’s Law.

Miller’s Law · The Magic Number

In 1956 there was a paper written that became one of the most highly cited papers in psychology. Titled, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information, it was published in 1956 by the cognitive psychologist George A. Miller of Princeton University’s Department of Psychology in Psychological Review. The crux of the paper suggests that the number of perceptual ‘chunks’ an average human can hold in working memory (a component of short-term memory) is 7 ± 2. This is frequently referred to as Miller’s law. Here is a summary of the article, sourced from wikipedia:

In his article, Miller discussed a coincidence between the limits of one-dimensional absolute judgment and the limits of short-term memory. In a one-dimensional absolute-judgment task, a person is presented with a number of stimuli that vary on one dimension (e.g., 10 different tones varying only in pitch) and responds to each stimulus with a corresponding response (learned before). Performance is nearly perfect up to five or six different stimuli but declines as the number of different stimuli is increased. The task can be described as one of information transmission: The input consists of one out of n possible stimuli, and the output consists of one out of n responses. The information contained in the input can be determined by the number of binary decisions that need to be made to arrive at the selected stimulus, and the same holds for the response. Therefore, people’s maximum performance on one-dimensional absolute judgement can be characterized as an information channel capacity with approximately 2 to 3 bits of information, which corresponds to the ability to distinguish between four and eight alternatives.

Moreover, the human mind can remember ~7 bits of information when completing a task that requires cognitive effort. This is critical, because humans are constantly performing tasks, and trying to juggle various stimuli in the mind when doing so. One of the key concepts behind Miller’s Law is ‘chunking’, which basically means assembling various bits of information into a cohesive gestalt. For example, the word · p e n c i l · is actually a ‘chunk’ of letters, organized into a perceptual gestalt. If the letters were rearranged · c n l i p e · it would be six separate chunks of information. Chunking is a critical element of information organization, and is the basis for our UX and organizational rule.

The Rule

Always organize elements of information in categories no larger than 9, but preferably ~5 chunks.

The more chunks of information you add to an ‘interface’, the more difficult it becomes to ‘work’, using the information at hand. This is especially critical for first time users, because they haven’t had the ‘practice’ needed to encode the interface into long term memory, or, for the behaviour to become habitual. I constantly see this rule being broken by giants like Facebook, Google, and WordPress. Don’t even get me started on automobile interface design. The ~5 bit chunk rule also compliments minimalism as a rigorous design philosophy. To expound, due to the limitations of working memory, as a product becomes more feature-full it inevitably becomes more difficult to use, because the user has to manage more information while operating the product. This makes good information design so critical.

Millers Law also highlights the importance of foresight and proper planning in the design process, because as you add more features to a product — your interface must be able to accommodate those new features without breaking the visual foundation of what you built. Rebuilding a foundation takes immense time and resources.

Another perceptual phenomenon observed in relation to Miller’s Law is known as the primacy, and recency effect. These terms are used respectively to describe how we remember items sensed at the beginning and end of an experience, more than ones in the middle. For example, if I were to show you a list of words, you would more likely remember the words at the beginning of the list, and the end. This is also known as the serial position effect. From wikipedia:

Serial position effect is the tendency of a person to recall the first and last items in a series best, and the middle items worst. [1] The term was coined by Hermann Ebbinghaus through studies he performed on himself, and refers to the finding that recall accuracy varies as a function of an item’s position within a study list. [2] When asked to recall a list of items in any order (free recall), people tend to begin recall with the end of the list, recalling those items best (the recency effect). Among earlier list items, the first few items are recalled more frequently than the middle items (the primacy effect). [3][4]

This observation raises huge questions in business and design. If people remember more at the beginning and end of an experience, how do we enhance the positives, and mitigate the negatives at these respective times? When does an experience truly begin and end? Should we be organizing more important elements at the beginning and end of lists due to their increased retention? These are all valid questions that UX designers and executives should ask when inventing or developing their product.

Millers Law can be applied to any aspect of your life that involves performing a mildly complex task. By reducing the amount of elements in your reach/access — and keeping them organized by relevant chunks not exceeding 9 bits, your brain will be able to remember exactly where things are so you can access its functionality. When lists of items grow too large, they become very difficult to mentally map them, requiring the user to do more cumbersome searching.

The adherence to Miller’s Law is especially relevant in the light of lean methodologies and recent trends in tech and UX. Users want and need a trial before they purchase something — it’s that simple. If they don’t experience the value within the first day or week of using it — they won’t buy. Since new users do not have lengthly time to learn where everything is — information design needs to be planned and well thought out before development happens.

Millers Law Beyond Information

We live in a world with an exponentially increasing amount of information. By not organizing it properly, or eliminating some completely, it ultimately degrades our ability to complete critical tasks for the purposes of survival (navigation/gaining income). That is why it’s so useful to omit items, products, and services from your life that aren’t giving a quality return on investment. This falls in line with the Pareto principle, the idea that 80% of your outcomes comes from 20% of your investments. Are you juggling too many tasks per day to be efficient? Is your team using too many tools to collaborate? Do you have too many members on your team? Are you overloading your new employees with information, leading to confusion?

Millers law teaches us that humans have a finite amount of information they can process, and that information overload will lead to distraction that negatively affects performance. Companies should look for ways to organize information in a way that is much more digestible for their customers and employees. This could be by eliminating tools or applications that are producing cognitive overload, reducing the amount of members on a team, or even organizing your departments based on our knowledge of working memory.

This is especially true in new science of the concept of flow, made famous bypsychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is a word Mihaly coined to describe a state of concentration or ‘absorption’ with a specific task that humans ultimately find rewarding, pleasurable, and fulfilling. He describes it as an optimal state where we perform at our best and truly live ‘in the moment’. One sure way to kill flow is by increasing distractions in the workplace. So, do you think that by giving your employees more tools, that it actually enhances performance? Miller’s Law teaches us time and time again this is not the case. When it comes to completing tasks, less is more.

Actionable Insights

Turn off your desktop slack notifications. Get rid of the things you never use. Stop checking your various inboxes. Master one tool, not many. Now start focusing.

Written by: Jeff Davidson (via Prototypr)
Posted by: Situated Research

The post The Most Important Rule in UX Design that Everyone Breaks appeared first on Situated Research.

To help you understand the perception of the user, I will introduce some design principles which I think are the most important, and also provide common examples of these principles in practice. Let’s start with the Von Restorff effect:

Von Restorff effect

The Von Restorff effect (also known as the isolation effect) predicts that when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered!

Does this ring any bells?

This is the main reason why all call-to-actions (CTAs) look different from the rest of the action buttons on a site or application!

Von Restorff Effect Example

We want users to be able to differentiate between a simple action button and a CTA, in order for them to have a clear understanding what the CTA does, whilst also remembering it throughout their use of the application or site.

“When multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered!”

Serial position effect

The Serial Position Effect is the propensity of a user to best remember the first and last items in a series.

From left to right, Twitter, Medium, ProductHunt

This is why most applications nowadays ditch the hamburger menu and go for a bottom or top bar navigation, placing the most important user actions to the right or left. In the image above, you can see some examples from popular iOS applications. Each put the “Home” and “Profile” items all the way to the left and right, with serial position effect in mind.

Cognitive load

Cognitive load refers to the total amount of mental effort being used in a person’s working memory. To put it simply, it is the amount of thought you need to exercise in order to complete a specific task.

“Cognitive load is the amount of thought you need to exercise in order to complete a specific task.”

Cognitive load theory can be differentiated into three types:

1. Intrinsic cognitive load
2. Extraneous cognitive load
3. Germane cognitive load

I will touch upon the Intrinsic and Germane types as I think that these are the most applicable to UX design.

Intrinsic Cognitive Load

Intrinsic cognitive load is the difficulty associated with a specific instructional topic. It’s the main reason micro-copy and copy play a huge role in a good user experience.

For example most of the time on applications’ empty states, we prompt users to complete a task. Here, the copy needs to be short, simple and with the appropriate words in order for the user to be able to easily follow the instructions.

From left to right, Stayful, Serist, Lucidchart

Germane Cognitive Load

Germane cognitive load is the cognitive load devoted to processing information and construction of schemas. The schemas describe a pattern of thought that organises categories of information and any relationships among them.

One of the reasons we use design patterns is because they’re something we’re programmed to do by default – so it’s easier for the users to recognise and learn something new if they can discern it into a pattern from something they already understand.

“It’s easier for users to learn something new if they can discern it to a pattern from something they understand”

Hick’s Law

Hick’s Law is the most popular principle, along with the Gestalt Laws.

It’s also very simple to understand and practice. Hick’s Law describes that the time it takes for a person to make a decision depends on the choices available to him or her. So if the number of choices increases, the time to make a decision increases logarithmically.

A very nice example of Hick’s Law that applies to user experience design are lists:

Hick’s Law Example

Law of Proximity

Law of proximity is part of the Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organization, and it states that objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together. To put it in simpler terms, our brain can easily associate objects close to each other, better than it does objects that are spaced far apart. This clustering occurs because humans have a natural tendency to organise and group things together.

Law of Proximity Example

“The Law of Proximity states that objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together”

In the example above, there are 72 circles. We recognise the circles in groups, based on the distance between them. Categorically, we also perceive that there’s a group of 36 circles on the left side of the image, and 3 groups of 12 circles on the right side of the image.

I believe this example makes it clear that there is a need to group things together when designing a UI, as well as the importance of being careful when putting things together since users may naturally think they are associated with each other.

Written by: Thanasis Rigopoulos (via Marvel)
Posted by: Situated Research

The post The Psychology Principles Every UI/UX Designer Needs to Know appeared first on Situated Research.

Card sorting will help you to understand your users’ expectations and their mental image of your product’s use.

Card sorting allows you insight into your users’ thought processes allowing you to see why they organize content in certain ways. This is key for organizing your content and developing an intuitive structure for your product.

In-Depth Site Analysis

Card sorting exercises can help structure a website’s information, including site labels and navigation schemes. This boosts usability by making things easy to find.

Smart Design

By creating intuitive, mutually exclusive categories, your final product will be easier to use and more appealing to users with good labeling and navigation.

Work Through Discrepancies

Often, information can be organized in multiple ways. Card sorting will determine the best content structure with consensus on the most logical grouping of information.

We have helped clients early in their design process using card sorting sessions, where users are separately given cards with labels, then asked to organize them and assign category names.

Card sorting has many benefits: to learn more or get started, contact us today.

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt, VP, Situated Research

The post What is Card Sorting? appeared first on Situated Research.

Although some studies have shown that individuals working alone can generate more and better ideas than when working as a group, the brainstorming activity enables everyone in the group to gain a better understanding of the problem space, and has the added benefit of creating a feeling of common ownership of results.

Good brainstorming focuses on the quantity and creativity of ideas: the quality of ideas is much less important than the sheer quantity. After ideas are generated, they are often grouped into categories and prioritized for subsequent research or application.

The outcomes of brainstorming are:

• A list of ideas or solutions related to a particular problem
• The ideas or solutions organized into groups
• Some form of prioritization based on attributes like cost and feasibility

Idea Mapping

Idea mapping is a visual thinking tool that helps structure information, helping you to better analyze, comprehend, synthesize, recall and generate new ideas. We can help you from the most nascent idea up through prototyping and user testing. You’ll get our expertise in usability and business development.

UI Sketches

Low-fidelity prototypes are a great place to begin, and our team can facilitate UI brainstorming sessions where sketches and basic functionality can give your new product a voice of its own.

Market Research

In addition to prototyping and UI design, we can conduct market research to see where your idea fits into the marketplace. Client confidentiality is paramount and we’ll gladly sign a non-disclosure agreement.

Helping clients in the beginning stages of a project to help get ideas flowing is our forte. Our team specializes in translating high-level objectives into exciting new products and services, down to the finest detail.

From market research to product development, we’ve got you covered. We can work with any budget, so reach out and let us know what you have been thinking about doing.

We thrive on helping businesses launch new products, and would love to facilitate a brainstorming session for your new product. Contact us today to get started.

Written / Posted by: Michel Ann Sharritt, VP, Situated Research

The post How User-Centered Design Can Turn Your Concepts into Kick-Ass Prototypes appeared first on Situated Research.