The Markos Giannopoulos Blogbe better than yesterday

Software as social hacking

Finding out how you site/app/whatever is being used and percieved by the users is as important (or more) as your original specifications for it. This is what Grupper (a social service that sets up up drinks between 3 men and 3 women) discovered when they realized that cancellation rate for their events was extremely high.

On paper, they had done everything right. They had made cancelling an event very easy in order to provide a great customer service. What that meant though was the their system was allowing people to cancel for insignificant reasons. While this is was convenience for the person who was cancelling, it was quite the opposite for the other five persons who had their plans cancelled on them. So, if you could "sum the experiences", for each one good experience Grupper was creating, it was also creating five bad ones. And that terrible for the entire service, which could easily be end up being characterized as "site filled with %#%%!" In the end, Grupper made the cancellation process personal, by forcing people to call up and announce themselves their change. That dropped cancellation rates 90%

One might argue that this is just the case of a social site, and it can't be applied elsewhere. But the point is understanding how your users are actually using your software (application, site, anything), what they expected to do and what they thought they got from the result. For example, consider a search form in a database with 40 category choices. Presenting all 40 options to the user sounds like the way to go. But if 60% your data is in 5 of the options, this means that user will start clicking on options and mostly get few results. This instantly is a bad experience, blamed on the system ("I tried it but I got no results. The system is broken"). Obviously, there should be a better way for the interface to allow the user to get the data he was looking for.

In the end, it's good to remember that it's not you that is using the software, it's the user.

Read Grupper's article here http://bit.ly/GEPjuv (found via +Guy Kawasaki)
Somewhat related video: George Constanza on "It's Not You, It's Me" http://bit.ly/GCBZTs

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Through fluid grids and media query adjustments, responsive design enables Web page layouts to adapt to a variety of screen sizes. As more designers embrace this technique, we're not only seeing a lot of innovation but the emergence of clear patterns as well. I cataloged what seem to be the most popular of these patterns for adaptable multi-device layouts.

Full read: +Luke Wroblewski's article "Multi-Device Layout Patterns" at http://bit.ly/xo77F7

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I've been a long time user of the famfamfam.com icon library but recently I've been looking for something fresh. Here are some very nice choices for your icon greed

Entypo by +Daniel Bruce
Over 100 icons in EPS or as OpenType font. Free with attribution (you can donate, 50% goes to wikipedia)
http://bit.ly/wEuNiE

+GLYPHICONS by +Jan Kovařík
350 icons in 16×16 PNG. Free with attribution (royalty free options available with additional AI, PSD files)
http://bit.ly/xKQ1Dw

Fugue by +Yusuke Kamiyamane
A very large icon (16×16 PNG) collection with a total of 3.346 variations! Source files provided as well. Free with attribution (royalty free option available)
http://bit.ly/w5AWz3

Enjoy!

In album 2012-03-12 (3 photos)

Entypo

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Getting visitors to your site is one thing. But once they are there, you need to provide an exciting/useful/engaging/you-name-it experience if you are going to have results.

The good folks at conversionXL.com have a very thorough post on how to guide your visitors to the desired action (whatever that may be: sale, quote form, support information, etc). The article include actual examples on getting started with the described concepts.

Check the full thing at http://bit.ly/A5BbnO

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