Hot answers tagged user
52
Here's a must-read article -- BestBuy saw a $300 million increase in annual sales via their online store by not requiring users to register at all to buy products (this means they would have to enter their address, etc. every time they bought something). If that's not enough,
Later, we did an analysis of the
retailer's database, only to discover
45% ...
33
All of them except "e-mail" and "Password".
This is the minimum information you need to uniquely identify a user and allow them secure access to your site. The only other piece of vital information would be their address if you were shipping them something - but you can ask for that when they actually order something and not before.
All of the other ones ...
23
If the form was rejected by Server-Side validation, the password should be blanked out since it shouldn't be sent back to the client.
This problem is easily solved with inline validation though, you simply shouldn't be able to submit a form until it won't be rejected, and then no form data will be lost.
Passwords should only be lost in the rare situation ...
23
It's an interesting question, but not one that has to be dealt with directly.
You should allow people to delete their information / accounts at any time. Passwords can be reset if you have access to an email account, and so as long as loved ones can gain access to the email account, this is not something that you have to deal with directly.
Email access ...
19
My wife is a Certified General Accountant, so I asked her about this question.
The standard accounting way is always to show negative numbers in parentheses. If you want to appeal to primarily financial professionals, that's the accepted practice.
She also cautions against using red or drawing attention to a negative number. Highlighting a number ...
19
Fun Solution: Translate the entire site into Farsi with English at the top that says "Not Afghani? Select a new Country"
Less fun solution: Put the top 5 countries that visit your site as the top 5 choices. People chose the first when they realize they will have to dig through dozens of countries.
19
Usability is a subset of the whole User Experience.
I would argue a product can not have a good UX without good usability; see Simon J. Hill's piece on Usability Vs. Experience. He frames the problem in a "problem solution ladder," where usability is a low level (but vital) rung, and too often it's considered the only important element by some companies. ...
18
I would guess that users can't see why you require the country and so are picking the first one in the list just to get through the form.
Perhaps you need to explain why you need this a bit more clearly. I notice you have:
Please tell us where you live so we can show you books that are available to you
at the bottom of the form, but this could be easy ...
17
Put the most common countries first, as someone else already said.
Also, consider setting an initial value based on IP lookup? It won't be right all the time, but it won't go wrong as often as your current method. :-) Definitely accompany it with something like "we need your address because... and have made a guess based on your IP address".
15
The answer is in the question.
You said: They're descriptions of fictitious people designed to represent the common traits and attributes of a broader audience demographic.
Traits and attributes. Plural. They are made up combinations of several traits and attributes. Most people might have one or two, maybe even none. You might well spend a while finding ...
15
User confirmation is almost always a bad solution. It breaks the user's flow and there's a real risk of habitually clicking yes on the confirmation. It basically makes 99% of the actions require more attention to catch the 1% that go wrong. And it works poorly. This article explains it better than I can:
http://alistapart.com/article/neveruseawarning
Of ...
14
Your users are sending you a clear message: they don't want to tell their country at this point in the process (the control is straightforward and other users do specify their country, so I don't think they select Afghanistan by accident). You'll either have to convince them to tell it anyway, or listen to them.
Looking at your website, I can think of ...
14
Take a look at the Boersema T-Model of user experience, and you'll see UE is one of the branches/stems of specialisation within the wider UX field of practice.
An exploration of this, with regard to a different stem (IA) is in this excellent article: The T-Model and Strategies for Hiring IA Practitioners: Part 1
14
CAPTCHAs are implimented for security not UX reasons (though a site with much spam is a site with poor UX), and they are extremely effective at stopping scripts, and other measures to stop scripts are usually worse "play this video and tell me what word you saw!" or not accessible (add the numbers in the picture!).
CAPTCHAs win out in security for numerous ...
12
I think the best-case scenario is this:
Don't ask for any information until the moment you need it.
Make it always easy for the user to give you whatever information they feel like sharing.
These rules apply to both initial registration and acquiring additional details after registration.
12
The end-user is a tricky term which has a variety of meanings depending on when and where it's used.
Whereas in economics the end-user is the person who uses the product, in contracts this term usually refers to the non-reseller, who does not necessarily consume the product at all.
For example, if Cheesecake Inc. sells cookies to your grandmother, who then ...
12
A soft delete, such as a strike-through in the user name, is the best option for preserving the overall content of the site (like contests and discussions). Deleting some comments out of a thread can make the remaining comments incomprehensible, after all. This option works if it's ok to preserve the fact that such-and-such user once existed in your ...
12
The only place where I've seen something similar is with Facebook's Memorialization Request where the Memorialization where users themselves need to report the demised providing proof of death (Unless the user becomes a Zombie and acts on his own behalf).
This Time Article (dated Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2009) says:
(Read: "How to Manage Your Online Life ...
12
Good designs ! I would recommend going for Option B. The reason being :
Option A: Even though your users might know that your email has been truncated,the lack of a visual affordance such as ellipsis might confuse them and someone might accidently take it as the full email. Also they might not know that they have to hover over the email to see it ...
11
Consider the lazy registration design pattern. Basically, it defers registration until it's absolutely needed and can even fill in some of the information for the user based on their previous interactions with the site.
Here are some examples:
Lazy Registration Pattern
explained by UI Patterns
Lazy Registration Pattern
explained by Ajax Patterns
12 (10) ...
11
What standard? Standard for Safari, Mac, Windows, Chrome, w3c, iso ...?
Some browsers do this automatically as 'standard'.
Some websites add the functionality so it's available in all browsers.
But it's not always possible (in all browsers on all platforms) to detect that caps lock is on whilst visiting a website although there is a workaround that ...
11
There are 2 reasons I can think of:
Confirming an email address before letting them in.
Making it slightly easier for a new user to set up their autofill username + password while their password is fresh in their mind.
If you don't care about their email address, then I would log them straight in. See reddit's sign up process, for example.
There are ...
9
Definitely yes, mention in the FAQ and wherever possible. This will likely turn some users off, so I hope you specialized site has a good reason to keep them coming.
One way to remind them and perhaps make it a bit more fun: do some sort of calculation and display a note on posts/images that will be deleted soon. For example, if you've reached 2,000 images ...
9
Many others have attempted to define the roles within user experience, but there are no hard boundaries.
Jesse James Garret descibes in his book The elements of User Experience (See overview) includes Usability as part of the Strategy Plane, although I'm sure he would agree that as in so many situations, the components of user experience do not fit neatly ...
9
Two examples from Dutch communities: both Tweakers and Partyflock make it possible for friends or relatives to send and e-mail requesting to memorialize profiles. Both websites request a form of proof, such as an obituary or memorial card, to prevent pranks.
Tweakers and Partyflock both have an index of memorialized profiles. Tweakers adds a ✝ symbol (with ...
8
In Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users Jakob Nielsen suggests:
The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.
However, rather than focusing on the number of users, it might be better to focus on the number and quality of the tasks:
Usability test tasks are so critical that some people ...
8
The book The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman really taught me about what usability means to people. Don's second book Emotional Design taught me about user experience. They are wildly different subjects and I strongly suggest reading them.
Some examples:
A Porsche is no more "usable" than a minivan. In fact many things in a minivan are MORE ...
8
Neither is universally better, but you don't have to choose. Use both.
It's trivial to test whether an input field is an email or a username (check whether it contains @), so you don't even need a separate field for it. Just have an Email / username field.
Each has different strengths, so if you have to use one, choose what matters most to your ...
8
The notion of blocking users is inherently thorny, and is often resolved in the way that presents the least potential for social friction possible. Consider the use case in which one individual is being pestered by another, and wishes they could continue using the service as though the offending party didn't exist. They don't want a confrontation, they just ...
8
Novice users comes to mind, but you can also use terms like non-tech savvy, computer illiterate, or just new computer user. But this doesn't specify the level they are at.
For situations like this I would create a persona that more fully represents the demographic that you want to refer to, and then refer to that persona instead of trying to name a ...
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