For 24 Hours, Get Yourself Any UX Mastery eBook for 5 Bucks

Spring weather has sprung (at last! Hurrah!) here in Melbourne, and after a confusingly long winter we’re celebrating the blossoms with a 24-hour ebook sale…

For the next 24 hours, we’ve reduced the price of the entire library of UX Mastery ebooks to just $5.

After all, there are few things better than enjoying some sunshine with a great book.

If you’ve had your eye on one of our insightful, practical and easy-to-apply titles, but have been sitting on the fence about buying, now’s the time to take advantage of this once-off special deal.

Choose from our five books:

Think First – A no-nonsense approach to creating successful products, powerful user experiences + very happy customers.

Everyday UX – 10 successful UX designers share their tales, tools, and tips for success.

Get Started in UX – The complete guide to launching a career in user experience design.

A Practical Guide to Information Architecture – Simple steps to tackle your own IA projects, large or small.

Bonus! Grab a copy of our UX Sketchnotes ebook, not usually available for sale. A collection of over 50 sketchnotes covering UX talks from around the world.

Get in quick, though, as this deal only lasts 24 hours. After that, all ebooks will revert to their original price. If you’ve been thinking about adding one of our titles to your library, grab a sunshiny bargain now.

The post For 24 Hours, Get Yourself Any UX Mastery eBook for 5 Bucks appeared first on UX Mastery.

by Luke Chambers via UX Mastery

How to Run an SEO Test in 5 Steps

This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

As with articles on most other digital marketing channels, a great many SEO guides, checklists and how-tos include a line, paragraph or section about testing. Make sure you test any changes you make to your website. Constantly test various optimizations to find the ones with the biggest impacts. Whatever you’re doing, testing is an integral part of digital marketing. But what exactly does it mean to "test" something for SEO?

Fortunately for other marketers, paid marketing is pretty straightforward to test: Split test an ad, landing page or offer and draw a direct line between change and ROI improvements. Unfortunately for SEOs looking to increase search rankings, search engines operate as black boxes, and rank sites relative to each other and the search term. Your ranking may have gone up, but was it because of your new title tag, or did your competitor get caught paying for links and penalized?

Lucky for you, if you follow this four point guide to SEO tests, you’ll be able to isolate variables, measure the effectiveness of changes and optimize for increased search rankings.

1. Choose the Right Test Subjects

It’s important to start off any SEO test by picking the right test subjects. First of all, you don’t want to go around messing with your most important pages: your homepage and pages that already rank well for highly competitive keywords that get lots of volume. If you end up making a change that isn’t exactly an improvement, it could be difficult for you to recover your lost rankings.

Start by going back to your SEO strategy and keyword research to make sure your keywords are targeting the same types of user with the same, or very similar, search intent.

Your best keywords to use in tests generally rank in the top 20 or 30 search results. Anything lower than 30 tends to be too volatile to get a good data set. You could jump several rankings one day, only to lose them the next. This will result in very noisy data. You should also avoid testing with pages that rank in the top seven or eight results for their keywords. The reason being that it can be very difficult to cause any movement in the top five results by changing just one thing at a time. Most of the top results have also acquired a lot of links, which you can’t control, that could outweigh any on page optimizations you make.

Ranking stability isn’t the only selection criteria when it comes to test subjects. You also need to take stock of the test environment: The SERP. Check your Google Search Console Search Analytics and find a keyword that has a stable search ranking over time.

Avoid using keywords with landing page rankings that vary widely, or have unpredictable search volume.

Sadly, Google recently throttled search volume data in its Keyword Planner tool. But there’s good news: You can still find search volumes in the WooRank SERP Checker tool, on top of tracking your keywords over time.

If you don’t have a WooRank account, you can carry out the process manually: Using Ad Preview and Diagnosis set your target location, language and Google domain, then do an actual search using your target keyword and make a note of the first page results. This prevents your location or search history from affecting the results. This tool often only provides the first 50 results, so another free tool is isearchfrom. Do this for a couple of days, or weeks if you’re really thorough, and keep track of pages displayed in the results. SERPs with a lot of volatility generally mean there’s outside forces at work you can’t control or isolate. While you’re doing this, check for any featured snippets. The presence of a Google Answer Box in SERPs will throw off your results.

Google Search Console’s Search Analytics report also allows you to track keyword positions for up to the last 90 days (or compare based on the last 7 or 28 days compared to the previous period). Use the filters to include only your keyword, then tick the Position checkbox to see how the position changed over time. You can also filter to only include queries from a specific country or device and rankings for a particular page.

Conduct a quick link audit of your candidates and choose pages that have similar link profiles in terms of both quantity and quality. Ideally, all of your subjects for each test will have similar content, rankings, traffic and link profiles.

Why go through all this work just to find pages you’re going to tinker around with? It’s because you can’t run a true split test for SEO. In a real split test, you could create an exact copy of your landing page, change one thing and then let it run. But you can’t do that because the second page may not even get indexed due to duplicate content, much less outrank the original. Plus, trying to create an exact duplicate link profile is most likely going to blow up in your face and neither page will rank (and maybe incur a manual penalty from Google to boot).

2. Establish Test Groups

Once you’ve come up with a list of test subjects, it’s time to establish which ones will be the control and which will be for experimenting. There’s no set number of pages used in each group, but just remember that the more subjects you have, the more reliable your analysis will be.

Start by randomizing your subject pages. This is very important because, as we mentioned above, none of your pages are exactly the same. Therefore, when you assign subjects to test groups, your implicit bias could wind up skewing the groups. You could accidentally wind up with your favorite type of content, like videos, overrepresented when testing a particular tactic or optimization. The best way to randomize your test subjects is to assign each one a number or letter, and then use a randomizer to assign each page to a variable group.

3. Run Your Test

Now it’s time to finally start making changes and measuring effects. The best way to conduct these tests is to use the two-sample t-test. In layman’s terms, the two-sample t-test is a method for calculating whether the differences between two groups are significant or due to random chance. The test process for a variable like using your keyword in the <H1> tag, for example, would look something like this:

Continue reading %How to Run an SEO Test in 5 Steps%

by Greg Snow-Wasserman via SitePoint

How to Lift Your UX Out of the Ordinary with Micro-Interactions

It's probably not a huge surprise to find out that car companies like BMW employ elite teams of sound engineers in their automotive design divisions – after all, cars are noisy things.

What might be more of a surprise is that they often spend more of their time 'tuning' the car sounds, than they do dampening them.

For instance, though the 'car door closing sound' is an accidental side-effect, car manufacturers go to incredible lengths to engineer what they call the 'the perfect car door closing sound'. They change the materials, fillers, joins and hollow spaces to great just the right 'note'.

As designers, we get that. It's a UX thing, right? It's not just about the outcome of closing the door. It's about how the process feels. For BMW, that's a kaTHUNK! that sounds safe, reliable and luxurious. Micro-interactions in web design cover similar territory.

What are micro-interactions?

Micro-interactions are subtle “moments” centered around accomplishing a single task, such as hitting the submit button on a form with the intention of logging in or favoriting a tweet with the intention of social engagement.

“Micro-interactions” might be a newish term – micro-interactions can be found literally everywhere from flipping on a light switch, turning up the volume on a speaker), but the one thing they all have in common is that they accomplish a specific task.

[caption id="attachment_142000" align="alignright" width="400"] Twitter Fav by Brian W via Dribbble.[/caption]

Some tasks require a series of interactions, such as filling out form fields, selecting options, and so on. If an interaction involves the action of submitting data in a web form, then the micro-interaction is the specific action of hitting the submit button.

Micro-Interactions != Animations

Micro-interactions are about much more than animations. You also have to consider the obviousness of the interactive target and the language used in the response; the user experience should be more of a concern than the visual aesthetics, although animation can contribute heavily to the user experience if used correctly.

“Because they look cool” is the absolute worst reason for using animations in web design, especially if the sole reason for creating a micro-interaction is so show off an effect.

Since the birth of HTML5 and CSS3, the web has been taking advantage of these native animations and transitions, however, many designers are still using them to add fancy effects to their web designs without ever really considering how it affects the users’ experience. Let’s discuss when to use micro-interactions and how we can offer an optimal user experience for them.

When to Use Micro-Interactions

If an image (for example) doesn’t do anything useful when clicked/hovered/tapped (i.e. it’s not linked to another webpage and it can’t be zoomed or anything), then nothing more needs to be done to it — no animations, no fancy hover effects, nothing.

It’s a static element and anything “more” will lead the user to believe otherwise (confusion = bad user experience). Now let's consider the submit button again; this needs to be a micro-interaction because we need to visually communicate that…

1. the button can be interacted with now, or
2. the button can be interacted with soon, or
3. the button is being interacted with already

…in order to guide the user towards submitting the form.

[caption id="attachment_141999" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Submit Button by Tamino Martinius via Dribbble.[/caption]

Micro-Interactions Are Like Conversations

Micro-interactions begin with the trigger, which by default is a click or a tap on the users’ behalf — this is your communication to the interface. After that, the website or app listens to your request and decides whether or not it can complete the action according to the rules and then lets you know what it ultimately decided. In the case of a login form, the rules would consist of the credentials being correct.

If everything is a-okay, then we move into the feedback stage, and this is where the user interface communicates its decision back to you. If your request is sound, then you should receive a confirmation saying so; if not, then we move into the loop stage — this is where the user interface explains what went wrong and how you can re-trigger the micro-interaction.

In order to offer an optimal user experience during a micro-interaction, the user interface needs to maintain a clear, intuitive communication with the user at all times.

Designing the Target/Trigger

First of all, interactive elements need to look like they can be interacted with. If links aren’t underlined, for example, they can be confused with ordinary text, or if an input field looks too minimal, the user might not know it’s an input field. It’s lovely to see designers driving their craft to the very edge, but user experience needs to trump visual aesthetics every time.

Interactive targets may even sometimes require hints, such as labels next to form fields and front-end validation so the user instantly knows if they’ve done it right — this help to reduce the users’ chances of form errors and being looped back.

[caption id="attachment_141998" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Form Flow by Leonardo Zakour for Bons via Dribbble.[/caption]

Another example might be disabling or graying-out certain targets so users’ know they can’t be interacted with yet.

[caption id="attachment_141997" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Toggle Control by Piotr Petrus for Pilot via Dribbble.[/caption]

How Rules Help to Articulate a Contextual Response

So your trigger looks like a trigger and it’s been triggered…awesome! Now the user interface needs to respond with something informative. In web forms this can be quite complex as there are typically numerous conditions that need to be met before the data can be sent, however even in simpler requests (such as clicking a link to a “404 Not Found” webpage) things can still go wrong, and when they do, the interface needs to explain what happened and try to help you move forward in any scenario.

Helpful — explains the issue and uses red to emphasize it.

[caption id="attachment_141996" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Contact Form by Kadir via Dribbble.[/caption]

Not helpful — vague error message and unclear button.

[caption id="attachment_141995" align="aligncenter" width="400"] Sign In by Rogie 👑 for NeonMob via Dribbble.[/caption]

Helpful — offers alternative user flows.

[caption id="attachment_141994" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Oops! by Airbnb via Dribbble.[/caption]

Not helpful — offers a dead-end.

[caption id="attachment_141993" align="aligncenter" width="800"] 404 by Jonathan Patterson via Dribbble[/caption]

In the case of forms, a bad error code would be “Error #8418764: your request could not be completed”, whereas “You must agree to the terms of service” is much better because it tells the user exactly how to correct their mistake. By anticipating where users might go wrong you can design interfaces that are not only more helpful but can appeal to the user on a more human level.

Responding With Helpful Feedback

Communicating feedback is a lot like designing triggers as a lot of the same design concepts apply: green means “acceptable” or “go” or “completed”, red means “not acceptable” or “stop” or “error”, so these concepts need to be combined with a contextual response in order to design clear, humanlike responses.

[caption id="attachment_141992" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Login Overlay by Kyle Thacker via Dribbble.[/caption]

Speaking of humanlike, we need to discuss animations once more and how they aid the user experience when used correctly. When displaying a response to a micro-interaction, may that be a dialogue, a visual change, whatever, animation can help the user notice it. When something happens on the screen in an instant, the human brain can completely miss it, so subtle transitions can introduce visual cues in a way that our eyes will see.

Movement should always be fast enough that it doesn’t cause the user to wait too long, but slow enough that the transition can be registered in our brain. Animation can redirect our line of sight to somewhere else on the screen, such as an input field with an invalid value, or a fixed-header that appears after a certain amount of scrolling. Without a subtle transition, the responses to these micro-interactions can go unnoticed.

[caption id="attachment_142016" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Header animationb by Cam Runcie via Dribbble[/caption]

Continue reading %How to Lift Your UX Out of the Ordinary with Micro-Interactions%

by Daniel Schwarz via SitePoint

ScrollReveal

Slick One Pager for 'ScrollReveal' - a tiny JS library by Julian Lloyd that allows easy scroll animations for web and mobile browsers. What a beautiful way to showcase a JS library - tons of color, gorgeous animation and of course a perfect demonstration of the product.

by Rob Hope via One Page Love

Spinlist SongShare

Colorful landing page promoting 'Spinlist SongShare' that allows you to share/play any song in iMessage for free. Very cool video demo within the centre device.

by Rob Hope via One Page Love

Hook

'Hook' is a multi-purpose WordPress theme with several One Page layout options. Featured here is an architectural portfolio but make sure you see the other demos that include digital agencies, photography studios and app landing pages. Features subtle parallax scrolling, AJAX loading portfolio items, Google Maps integration, Twitter Feeds, Big Images slideshows and great to know the WordPress theme comes with the Visual Composer page builder valued at $34.

by Rob Hope via One Page Love

Getting Started With Paper.js: Animation and Images