Author: spiggott

Baymard Institute: 3 Key Design Principles for Product Listing Information

Baymard Institute just posted an interesting article about the importance of UX on product listing pages based on their e-commerce usability research.

Users select and reject products in the product listing pages based on the information available about each item. We’ve previously documented that 46% of e-commerce site have severe usability issues because they display too few product attributes in the product listings.

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Mary Meeker’s 2016 Internet Trends Report

Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends Report for 2016 came out last week. Some highlights include:

  • The global internet adoption rate was flat year-over-year at 9%, reaching 3 billion users or 42% of the world’s population
  • Smartphone adoption’s growth is slowing, while Android increases marketshare despite a shrinking average selling price
  • Video viewership is exploding, with Snapchat and Facebook Live showing the way, though video ads aren’t always effective
  • Messaging is dominated by Facebook and WeChat, it’s growing rapidly, and evolving from simple text communication to become our new home screen with options for vivid self-expression and commerce
  • US advertising is growing, with Google and Facebook controlling 76% of the market and rising, but advertisers still spend too much on legacy media rather than new media where the audience has shifted
  • Meeker predicts the rise of voice interfaces because they’re fast, easy, personalized, hands-free, and cheap, with Google on Android now seeing 20% of searches from voice, and Amazon Echo sales growing as iPhone sales slow
  • The USA could become the home of the auto industry again thanks to innovation from Tesla and Google despite US auto sales slipping since 1950, though car ownership will fall as Uber/UberPool sharing becomes mainstream

TV Drives Engagement

One out of every five engagements with brands on Facebook and Twitter is driven by television advertising:

Turner and 4C have released the first study to date that quantifies the impact of television advertising on social media brand engagement across Facebook and Twitter.

Covering more than six months of TV advertising and social advertising for 26 brands, our research found that TV advertising drives 1 out of every 5 social media brand engagements.

In addition to how TV ads affect social engagement for brands, the report covers the impact of premium vs. non-premium TV advertising segmented by type, and how cost factors in.

Get the full study here.

Working With Steve Jobs

Great article on working with Steve Jobs. By someone who actually worked with him – former Adobe, NeXT, and Apple employee Glenn Reid.

I can still remember some of those early meetings, with 3 or 4 of us in a locked room somewhere on Apple campus, with a lot of whiteboards, talking about what iMovie should be (and should not be). It was as pure as pure gets, in terms of building software. Steve would draw a quick vision on the whiteboard, we’d go work on it for a while, bring it back, find out the ways in which it sucked, and we’d iterate, again and again and again. That’s how it always went. Iteration. It’s the key to design, really. Just keep improving it until you have to ship it.

I think in many ways Apple still adheres to this philosophy of releasing an MVP and continuously iterating again and again and again until they have a polished, mature product.

Read the full article.

Revisiting OS X Public Beta

Wow! What a blast from the past. Check out these screenshots from the first public beta of Mac OS X (full article). I remember using this build (and the previous Developer Previews) and marveling at the stability compared to Mac OS 9 and Windows 3.1. Still, I was convinced in short order despite the dearth of available apps and began using it full-time with the release of Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah. Good times!

Project Comet

Adobe finally gets serious about UX design in it’s answer to Bohemian Coding’s Sketch app with Project Comet. Set to arrive in early 2016, it allows designers to “Take your UX designs from start to finish with the cross-platform app that lets you do it all — wireframing, visual design, interaction design, prototyping, previewing and sharing. And because it’s built from the ground up, Comet delivers innovative tools and breakthrough performance to help you design in record time.”

I’m hoping it has the best of Sketch combined with the prototyping and sharing capabilities of InVision. I guess we’ll see pretty soon.

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