Hot answers tagged content
25
The best method is to use the lower bound of a statistical confidence interval.
I won't go into detail about how to do this, as Evan Miller has a great post on How NOT to sort by average rating for a Bernoulli distribution - which is what you have.
The main reason that you would use this method is to find a balance between the average vote and the number ...
22
Taking all the nuances into an account I still think that you should not remove the search functionality, but make search field smaller instead (or change it somehow so it still be functional but within a lesser space), so visitors who would like to use it will still be able to do it.
An example:
20
Now considering these two things: the low percentage of searches per visit and the queries being used I lean to the idea removing the search functionality altogether to un-clutter the navigation bar (the search function takes up 25% of the navigation width).
My question: is this reasoning sane? Or am I overlooking something?
The Search feature ...
17
I vote A. I read the result/s initially as result per second.
Result(s) seems more natural, but I would prefer the option were you'd detect if the number is larger than 1 and change result to results.
Maybe take a look here: english.stackexchange here the (s) seems to be the standard.
Another option is to put it like this:
Matching results: 1
With ...
11
I think the question you should be asking is what should be my content strategy and how should I define that to drive my site navigation..
That said, there are multiple steps in defining your content strategy :
Plan your content:
This is the initial phase of any site and should involve the questions such as the objective of the site, the user group which ...
10
I've solved this task using card sorting in a low tech, hands on session with my client and/or users.
Write down all menu items onto index cards and let the participants sort the cards in a way they think it is correct.
You will find a lot more information on the internet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_sorting
9
I am going to go with Schroedingers Cat's answer but I would recommend keeping the tabs active and present a notification such as there are no bookmarked people or something along those lines. The reason being some people might not understand that a tab is grayed out or inactive and might try to click it and get confused.
From an anecdotal point of view, I ...
9
A corporate site re-design is full of more design by committee pratfalls and pitfalls than you even realize exist just yet, which include:
Deprecated content that still needs to be supported
Brand guidelines you have to adhere to
Political history behind the current design (which will affect your ability to make changes)
All those sub-brands that need to ...
7
I would not link the abbreviation only. The abbreviation should be placed in brackets after the first (and only) use of the full phrase which is abbreviated. The abbreviation is therefore in brackets as an advisory of the contraction and of its subsequent use in exchange for the full term. The abbreviation is not in itself the item that requires linkage, it ...
7
Whatever you do, telling someone that they can't access certain content is always going to be a poor experience. The only thing that you can really do to deflect the negative feeling is to explain why you can't show it.
"... due to US sanctions, we are not legally allowed to show this content in your country"
"Copyright agreements with XYZ publisher mean ...
7
If you are using English, then the most common way is option A. 100 matching result(s).
However I would strongly discourage using this, as it makes it very difficult to internationalise your application. I would suggest finding a way of wording it that does not require a reference to a singular or plural noun. I would rather use:
Matching results: ...
6
As a rule, hiding and showing things is a bad idea, because it changes the users navigation without them doing anything. Disabling them is a good idea, or showing them without content - depending on how you implement them.
My personal preference would be disabled tabs, with rollovers to tell me why they are disabled, but your user base may have other ideas.
...
6
I am actually in the middle of a large redesign project for Cisco.
The first thing I did was ensure I had a master list of all pages. Most pages are templates, and have the same page structure. So I could group similar page structures together.
I then analyzed our site analytics database to see what users are using. This may not be as straight forward, so ...
6
Understanding the content
To be able to understand the content currently available on the site you can't only rely on the navigation menu, tagging systems or search which is where you start. Get your view of where content lives before you ask the users and editors of content today. You need to interview and observe content editors and content consumers ...
6
There's no such thing as content strategy for mobile.
That's the first line in the introduction of this book.
It then goes on to say - as you will find out when you get the book:
There is such a thing as a content strategy that plans for how you’ll
publish and maintain your content across all these new and emerging
platforms: smartphones and ...
6
JohnGB's answer works well at the top of a ratings list, but it causes problems further down the list. For an example, using 95% confidence intervals:
A has 100 upvotes, 3 downvote (97%). Confidence Interval: (0.917, 0.990)
B has 10 upvotes, 0 downvotes (100%). Confidence Interval: (0.722, 1)
C has 180 upvotes, 100 downvotes (67%). Confidence Interval: ...
6
The landing page of your site is a chance to grab people's attention with something that they are likely looking for. You are choosing to not grab their attention with anything, and when you don't demonstrate why staying is interesting, people will leave.
As it stands now, your landing page amounts to a menu. I don't see anything that you are gaining by ...
5
The best reference I know of search patterns is Peter Morvilles and Jeffery Callenders book Search Patterns:
Search is among the most disruptive innovations of our time. It influences what we buy and where we go. It shapes how we learn and what we believe. This provocative and inspiring book explores design patterns that apply across the categories of ...
5
A few ways:
Make the content consistently relevant and helpful.
Actively work to counter ad-blindness, that is, don't show any ads at all on the right column.
Weight the right column visually with color, font, sizing etc so it feels like an important part of the page.
Have other parts of your site refer to the right column - in the main body, include ...
5
As the other answers generally agree, what you basically want to do is, in effect, to bias the rankings for items with low vote counts towards some "default" rank — which might be the mean rank, if you want an unbiased estimate, or a very low rank if you subscribe to the idea that an item should be ranked low until it's proven to deserve a higher rank.
...
5
This is a difficult one to answer but there quite a few myths out there. For example the previous answer says...
"For example, you may want people to use the mobile site to view all the products, but not necessarily to purchase or rate/review the products."
This is based upon the idea that people browse products but don't go through the whole checkout ...
4
It's a selling point. By showing that the search results were acquired in a short amount of time, they're advertising the speed and efficiency of their search algorithm.
This doesn't really affect the majority of users in a meaningful way, but from a UX perspective, they choose to show this off because it enhance (in a subtle way) the trust factor inherent ...
4
I assume you're speaking about which of your layouts is faster to perceive by the user. This depends on what you want to achieve with your layout.
If you want to tell that there are 3 equally weighed points the users should know on the page, the second example is the way to go. If you want to say: "Here are some interesting things", page one gets the ...
4
How splendid it is to make decisions with such hard figures!
Note that the 1.39% percent looks scant, but it means you are running the risk of hurting more than a 1,000 users.
Is reducing the clutter of the navigation bar worth it?
No one can tell without seeing your navigation bar...
4
Contrary to most answers I think the bar should be removed, looking to your numbers, it appears the bar is working properly but isn't helping the user get to their goal.
The users using the search field fall in two categories:
Users who could not find what they want in the navigation, and thus may search to broadly, and ends up with 0 results.
Advanced ...
4
What would be general number of paragraphs before before deciding to add a picture to a mobile site?
For a mobile site you'll generally want to keep images to a minimum - if not for screen real estate then for the added bandwidth premium of including images. In fact I know a lot of people that use mobile versions of websites on their regular browsers specifically because they often have fewer images and other distracting factors.
For that particular page ...
4
The ideal here would be progressive disclosure: only show the user functionality that they actually have access to. Then they don't feel ripped off by content they can't access because they never see it. (Even if they know it's there, it'll hurt their feelings less if it's not shown off.)
But in cases where content is frequently linked to directly, you ...
4
I worked on the Information architecture for a similar app so here are some pointers which can help
Define the primary objective of the app. I know its feature rich but it still will have a primary objective such as enabling hotel bookings or finding hotels
Define the secondary objectives of the app
Check how the app handles these primary and secondary ...
4
37signals has a great example of how you can make this interesting for the user and help them understand your story.
No offense to the HR professional who commented (though, it wouldn't be the first time I've offended HR), a history page that starts with the present is probably too much about what you want to say. Your current achievements are, hopefully, ...
3
At the risk of offending the search gods of UX, perhaps if the usage is so low it can be removed from the focus of the navigation (if the other suggestions of reducing footprint aren't acceptable) and could be placed in the footer where somebody might expect a site navigation. It may be non-standard but would prevent the frustration of not having search ...
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