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The User Experience of Data Collection and Data Analysis

The User Experience of Data Collection and Data Analysis

How you gather data matters.

The data gathering experience and the data input experience matters and will shape the insights you gain from your data analysis.

I’ve seen data collection experiences that will influence data gathering. Some examples:

The way data input user interfaces are laid out and designed influences data input

Instructional text is ambiguous or confusing

Data labeling is…

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A common mistake in digital business

A common mistake in digital business

Would you have a house painter create the blueprints for a building?

Would you have an interior decorator (focused on fabrics, textures and colors) define how a building should be structured to meet the demands of business operations?

Would you have a sign painter define the business processes and flows that will serve your customers?

If the answer to any of these questions is “No” then you have…

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List of 23+ Square Competitors

List of 23+ Square Competitors

Payment solutions are a commodity

Once a market is saturated with similar offerings and all the offerings start to look and sound alike, you pretty much have a commodity.

It doesn’t matter much if you choose option A or option B. They’re pretty much the same.

Market differentiation is pretty low.

Why?

They copied each other

They don’t integrate big picture business strategy with big picture user…

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Emergency Hashtag Guidelines

Communicating over social media in cases of emergencies, (disasters, fires, political attacks, etc), can easily downgrade into chaos. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Hashtags on social media can become noisy, confusing and can lead to unverified information that may actually make matters worse. We can leverage information architecture to help us.

Hashtag guidelines

If a hashtag emerges…

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Are You Hiring? New Job Board for UX, Digital Marketing, Product Management If you are hiring UX staff, digital marketing staff, product managers, or related positions, please consider posting an ad on my Jobs board. Look on the right column of my blog or send me an email message: [email protected]

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Customer Retention Depends on Your Onboarding Experience

Customer Retention Depends on Your Onboarding Experience

How do you define the onboarding experience?

Ask yourself these and other questions to help you define what the onboarding experience is.

Where does the onboarding experience begin? Where does it end?

How do you know if you’re supporting a good onboarding experience, or not?

Which metrics are you using to track the onboarding experience? Are these the right ones?

Which strategies and tactics are…

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Are You Making Critical Mistakes in Your Free Trial Experience?

Are You Making Critical Mistakes in Your Free Trial Experience?

You can’t do both: “fail fast”, at the user’s expense and then cry over your customer retention rates — choose one.

The Free Trial experience is key

The Free Trial experience can make or break your product. It’s often the only change your users will have to evaluate your product. If that user experience goes wrong for most of your users — your product will fail — very fast.

The users who persist…

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Take Our Poll

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6 Ways UX Can Help Improve Customer Retention

6 Ways UX Can Help Improve Customer Retention

UX and customer retention

Functional design is a good start, but not enough to design a lasting, good user experience

Unfortunately, a lot of UX professionals get tunnel vision and get stuck in thinking of UX as a  functional process, that ends the moment an user is able to navigate through a product to complete a task successfully.

This is a very narrow notion of what user experience can bring…

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7 Ways eCommerce Websites Devalue Your Products

7 Ways eCommerce Websites Devalue Your Products

Whether you’re buying toilet paper or a luxury item, you’ll encounter the same generic shopping experience

How eCommerce websites devalue products

They destroy your product differentiation through generic presentation

They ignore your carefully crafted brand experience

They ignore your customer segments and their specific needs

They render your brand mute by silencing targeted messaging

They…

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Dynamic web layouts and the challenges they create

Dynamic web layouts and the challenges they create

When was the last time you attempted to tell a friend to visit a website and then look “on the left side” or “in the middle row to the right” for a specific thing?

Providing directions to the “place” on a website today is an unreliable method of guiding someone. As you can probably guess, the main reason is that responsive design changes the way content is displayed depending on the browser…

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The User Experience of Business Partners

The User Experience of Business Partners

Reminder: business partners are users of your business system

Your business partners are users need to interact with your business and you need to consider their user experience.

Most business websites are focused only on potential customers and customers. These websites fail to address the needs of the different kinds of business partners a business has.

In the cases, where the websites do…

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Presentation Slides from UX DC 2015 Conference

Presentation Slides from UX DC 2015 Conference

User Experience Slides

A couple of slide decks shared at the User Experience DC conference 2015

http://www.slideshare.net/DesignforContext/first-impressions-matter-onboarding-for-first-time-users?ref=http://www.designforcontext.com/insights/first-impressions-matter-onboarding-first-time-users

  http://www.slideshare.net/michellechronister/shifting-structures-changing-how-we-work-to-support-struct…

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The User Experience of Product Demos

The User Experience of Product Demos

Product demos are often an afterthought for developer teams and for user experience teams. Often, UX teams are not involved in the demo process. This is a big mistake because demos are a key touch-point that define early perceptions of the product’s user experience.

Why product demos matter

Primary demos define early product expectations — often beforeusers can get their hands on the actual…

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Selecting the wrong CMS can be a very costly mistake

Selecting the wrong CMS can be a very costly mistake

The wrong Content Management System, (CMS), can cost your company hundreds of thousands of dollars every year — and in some cases, millions of dollars. (These expenses are on top of whatever you already paid or are paying for the CMS. )

Why?

Structure and capabilities

Whether your CMS can do certain tasks will cost you or save you money in the long run.

For example, if your CMS is setup to help…

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Find the UX Gap - The Key to Your Startup Success

Find the UX Gap – The Key to Your Startup Success

Be 10% better. That’s all it takes for a competing product or service to enter a market successfully. One of the easiest places to find that 10% opportunity is in User Experience.

Companies that offer better user experiences are not only able to enter markets successfully — but they’re able to grow. I’ve seen how small startup companies position themselves next to large enterprise-level companies…

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