On designing the user experience

Links and quotes on ux design compiled by @david_z {Focused on search, shopping & social}

[ondux]

Having been involved in running thousands of controlled experiments at Amazon, Booking.com, LinkedIn, and multiple Microsoft properties, we share seven rules of thumb for experimenters, which we have generalized from these experiments and their results.

Seven Rules of Thumb for Web Site Experimenters

[ondux]

One of the practical skills that we do at the Institute for the Future is have people practice both positive and shadow imagination about any signal they encounter. Whenever you hear about something different that you haven’t heard about before, you force your brain to interact with it from both a positive, hopeful, optimistic side and also from the critical, pessimistic side. Most people have a bias about the future or about new technology, they default to either optimistic or pessimistic. If you don’t exercise both types of imagination, you tend to be really surprised. For example, they get surprised when something takes off and it’s really popular, or they can’t imagine that people would ever use this type of service.

The Unbelievable Future of Habit-Forming Technology

[ondux]

Measuring cognitive load with a tapping test

[ondux]

Bounce rates are usually considered in a negative light, but when it comes to search results, a higher bounce rate indicates that Google is doing its job. In its analysis, Searchmetics found bounce rates have risen for all positions in the top 20 search results and for position 1 have gone from 37% in 2014 to 48%. This suggests that users are being directed to the right result, meaning there is no need to look or search elsewhere.

How machine learning has made Google search results more relevant

[ondux]

The most common bias is to accept good results and investigate bad results. If an experiment made a change to some feature unrelated to revenue, but revenue improved unexpectedly, the inclination is to come up with some half-baked explanation and celebrate the success. Conversely, if revenue declined unexpectedly, the experimenter will be inclined to claim “noise” or attempt to find a segment that has a large decline and make some association (e.g., Tuesday was bad, but this was the day we had this other issue, so we can’t trust Tuesday). The best data scientists have a skeptical eye towards surprising results in both directions.

Ronny Kohavi on why we are still in the Alchemy days of influencing online behavior

[ondux]

what Facebook calls its “feed quality panel.” It began in summer 2014 as a group of several hundred people in Knoxville whom the company paid to come in to an office every day and provide continual, detailed feedback on what they saw in their news feeds. … Mosseri and his team didn’t just study their behavior. They also asked them questions to try to get at why they liked or didn’t like a given post, how much they liked it, and what they would have preferred to see instead. “They actually write a little paragraph about every story in their news feed”

Who Controls Your Facebook Feed

[ondux]

People don't just consume a lot of content on mobile devices throughout the day -- they also process it faster. Twitter eye-tracking research has found that across all demographics, people consume content faster on mobile devices than on desktop computers. Facebook testing confirmed this finding: On average, people consume mobile content on Facebook faster than on a desktop (1.7 seconds vs. 2.5 seconds).

Facebook and Twitter: Users Process Mobile Content Faster

[ondux]

All curation grows until it requires search. All search grows until it requires curation.

Benedict Evans, Lists are the new search

[ondux]

The stack fallacy is a result of human nature  — we (over) value what we know. […] The bottleneck for success often is not knowledge of the tools, but lack of understanding of the customer needs. … In a surprising way, it is far easier to innovate down the stack than up the stack. The reason for this is that you are yourself a natural customer of the lower layers. Apple knew what it wanted from an ideal future microprocessor. It did not have the skills necessary to build it, but the customer needs were well understood. Technical skills can be bought/acquired, whereas it is very hard to buy a deep understanding of market needs. It is therefore no surprise that Apple had an easier time building semiconductor chips than building Apple Maps. Google is a great example. It owned our email graph and our interest data (search), yet found it very difficult to succeed in what looks like a “trivial to build” app  — social networks. In fact, this is the perfect irony of stack fallacy. You can build things higher up the stack. It is just that often it is not clear what to build.

Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy

[ondux]

the user is always right… but sometimes it’s not what they say, but what they do. Of course you need to take user feedback into consideration, but remember that actions speak louder than words.

Don’t Listen to Your Users, And other lessons from building a consumer-facing app

[ondux]

In the Bayesian view, a probability is assigned to a hypothesis. In the frequentist view, a hypothesis is tested without being assigned a probability.

Bayesian vs Frequentist A/B Testing – What’s the Difference?

[ondux]

There are really four kinds of feature that we put in a product or service: Functional, acquisition, onboarding, and market development. If you’re building products, you usually have a list of features, which you prioritize. Most product managers treat the last three—those that don’t satisfy the needs of existing customers—as afterthoughts.

The thing I wish I’d known about product development

[ondux]

If your p-value remains stubbornly higher than 0.05, you should call it ‘non-significant’ and write it up as such. The problem for many authors is that this just isn’t the answer they were looking for: publishing so-called ‘negative results’ is harder than ‘positive results’.

The solution is to apply the time-honoured tactic of circumlocution to disguise the non-significant result as something more interesting. …

Still Not Significant

[ondux]

Our research and design instincts told us that a great online shopping experience revolves around the kind of organic discovery that happens in retail shopping. Serendipity. Surprise. Pinners want to explore a collection of objects that feels like it was hand-picked just for them.

Designing Buyable Pins

[ondux]

I needed a coherent experience across all those features. It’s the same shopper going through all these features, and I didn’t want anything to get in the way.

…

The product teams were meant to be these autonomous forces pulling in all directions as they saw fit, and then the design team was this counter balance that was meant to kind of cohere that effort and make sure it wasn’t going off in too chaotic and too fractured a mode.

Podcast: Peter Merholz Talks Product Design

[ondux]

In our efforts to keep up with Facebook’s rapid growth, designers regularly one-offed designs for new products or initiatives. This inefficient use of time also led to a very fragmented visual landscape. One of the first efforts to address this came at a Hackathon in 2009, when fellow designers Everett Katigbak and Mark Bixby joined me in an exercise to rethink Facebook’s wordmark.

http://officeofbenbarry.com/see/facebook-visual-identity

[ondux]

India’s largest e-commerce firm Flipkart Ltd and its unit Myntra have both shut their mobile websites in their first big move toward becoming a mobile app-only shopping platform. … Myntra already generates more than 90% of its traffic and 70% of its orders from its mobile app … Mobile and desktop websites are increasingly becoming more and more irrelevant and Indian consumers have showed that they are adopting the app way faster than consumers in the US and even China … With the app, customers can stay logged in to Flipkart at all times. … mobile apps allow companies to save costs on deploying people and technology on other platforms. Apps also enable companies to advertise and market to customers more accurately than websites, collect more detailed user data and potentially increase customer loyalty.

Flipkart moves towards becoming app-only platform