Domain Authority: Your Online Thermometer - #Infographic

With over 1 billion websites on the internet today, how can you easily gauge if your website has the capacity to rank well in search engine results pages (SERPs)? Answer: Domain Authority Developed by the SEO gurus at Moz, Domain Authority (DA) is a score that predicts how well a website will...

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by Web Desk via Digital Information World

Understanding the Core Concepts of User Research

The following is a short extract from our new book, Researching UX: User Research, written by James Lang and Emma Howell. It's the ultimate guide to user research, a key part of effective UX design. SitePoint Premium members get access with their membership, or you can buy a copy in stores worldwide.

This next section is going to get a bit theoretical. Don’t worry: we’ll show you how to apply it later in the chapter. For now, though, you need the basic building blocks of research design.

In this section, we’re going to run through 10 concepts. Some may already be familiar to you, others less so. They are:

• What is data?
• Qualitative vs. quantitative
• Discovery vs. validation
• Insight vs. evidence vs. ideas
• Validity and representativeness
• Scaling your investment
• Multi-method approaches
• In-the-moment research
• Ethics
• Research as a team sport.

What is Data?

The research process involves collecting, organising and making sense of data, so it’s a good idea to be clear what we mean by the word ‘data’. Actually, data is just another word for observations, and observations come in many forms, such as:

• Seeing someone behave in a certain way
• Or do something we’re interested in (such as click on a particular button)
• Hearing someone make a particular comment about your product
• Noting that 3,186 people have visited your Contact Us page today

But how do you know what’s useful data, and what’s just irrelevant detail? That’s what we’ll be covering in the first few chapters, where we’ll talk about how to engage the right people, and how to ask the right questions in the right way.

And how do you know what to do with data when you’ve got it? We’ll be covering that in the final two chapters about analysis and sharing your findings. In particular, we’ll be showing you how to transform raw data into usable insight, evidence and ideas.

Qualitative vs. Quantitative

When it comes to data analysis, the approaches we use can be classified as qualitative or quantitative.

Qualitative questions are concerned with impressions, explanations and feelings, and they tend to begin with why, how or what. Such as:

• “Why don't teenagers use the new skate park?"
• “How do novice cooks bake a cake?”
• “What's the first thing visitors do when they arrive on the homepage?"

Quantitative questions are concerned with numbers. For example:

• “How many people visited the skate park today?"
• “How long has the cake been in the oven for?
• "How often do you visit the website?"

Because they answer different questions, and use data in different ways, we also think of research methods as being qualitative or quantitative. Surveys and analytics are in the quantitative camp, while interviews of all sorts are qualitative. In general, you’ll be leaning on qualitative research methods more, so that will be the focus of this book.

Discovery vs. Validation

The kind of research will depend on where you are in your product or project lifecycle.

If you’re right at the beginning (in the ‘discovery’ phase), you’ll be needing to answer fundamental questions, such as:

• Who are our potential users?
• Do they have a problem we could be addressing?
• How are they currently solving that problem?
• How can we improve the way they do things?

If you’re at the validation stage, you have a solution in mind and you need to test it. This might involve:

• Choosing between several competing options
• Checking the implementation of your solution matches the design
• Checking with users that your solution actually solves the problem it’s supposed to.

What this all means is that your research methods will differ, depending on whether you’re at the discovery stage or the validation stage. If it’s the former, you’ll be wanting to conduct more in-depth, multi-method research with a larger sample, using a mix of both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. If it’s the latter, you’ll be using multiple quick rounds of research with a small sample each time.

At the risk of confusing matters, it’s worth mentioning that discovery continues to happen during validation – you're always learning about your users and how they solve their problems, so it's important to remain open to this, and adapt earlier learnings to accommodate new knowledge.

Insight, Evidence and Ideas

Research is pointless unless it’s actually used. In some cases, the purpose of research is purely to provide direction to your team; the output of this kind of project is insight. Perhaps you want to understand users’ needs in the discovery phase of your project. If so, you need insight into their current behaviour and preferences, which you’ll refer to as you design a solution.

Often, though, you need research to persuade other people, not just enlighten your immediate team. This can be where you need to make a business case, where your approach faces opposition from skeptical stakeholders, or where you need to provide justification for the choices you’ve made. When you need to persuade other people, what you need is evidence.

And sometimes, your main objective is to generate new ideas. Where that’s the case, rigorous research is still the best foundation, but you’ll want to adjust things slightly to maximise the creativity of your outputs.

Research is great at producing insight, evidence and ideas. But… methodologies that prioritise one are often weaker on the others, and vice versa. It’s much easier if you plan in advance what you’ll need to collect, and how, rather than leaving it till the end of the project. The takeout: you should think about the balance of insight, evidence and ideas you’ll need from your project, and plan accordingly.

When it comes to planning your approach, bear in mind your analysis process later on. If you give it thought at this stage, you’ll ensure you’re collecting the right data in the right way. We talk about this more in Chapter 8.

Validity

Validity is another way of saying, “Could I make trustworthy decisions based on these results?” If your research isn’t valid, you might as well not bother. And at the same time, validity is relative. What this means is that every research project is a tradeoff between being as valid as possible, and being realistic about what’s achievable within your timeframe and budget. Designing a research project often comes down to a judgement call between these two considerations.

Let’s look at an example. You want to understand how Wall Street traders use technology to inform their decision-making. If you were prioritising validity, you might aspire to recruit a sample of several hundred, and use a mix of interviewing and observation to follow their behaviour week by week over several months. That would be extremely valid, but it would also be totally unrealistic:

• Wall Street traders will be rich and busy. They’re unlikely to want to take part in your research.
• A sample of several hundred is huge. You’re unlikely to be able to manage it and process the mountain of data it would generate.
• A duration of several months is ambitious. You would struggle to keep your participants engaged over such a long period.
• Even if the above weren’t issues, the effort and cost involved would be huge.

Undaunted, you might choose to balance validity and achievability in a different way, by using a smaller number of interviews, over a shorter duration, and appealing to traders’ sense of curiosity rather than offering money as an incentive for taking part. It’s more achievable, but you’ve sacrificed some validity in the process.

Validity can take several forms. When you design a research project, ask yourself whether your approach is:

• Representative: Is your sample a cross-section of the group you’re interested in? Watch out for the way you recruit and incentivize participants as a source of bias.
• Realistic: If you’re asking people to complete a task, is it a fair reflection of what they’d do normally? For example, if you’re getting them to assess a smartphone prototype, don’t ask them to try it on a laptop.
• Knowable: Sometimes people don’t know why they do things. If that’s the case, it’s not valid to ask them! For example, users may not know why they tend to prefer puzzle games to racing games, but they will probably still take a guess.
• Memorable: Small details are hard to remember. If you’re asking your participants to recall something, like how many times they’ve looked at their email in the past month, they’ll be unlikely to remember, and therefore your question isn’t valid: you need a different approach, such as one based on analytics. If you were to ask them how many times they’ve been to a funeral in the past month, you can put more trust in their answer.
• In the moment: If your question isn’t knowable or memorable, it’s still possible to tackle it ‘in the moment’. We’ll say more about this below.

Takeout: You want your research approach to be as valid as possible (ie, representative and realistic, as well as focused on questions that are knowable and memorable) within the constraints of achievability. Normally, achievability is a matter of time and budget, which leads us to…

Scaling Your Investment

Imagine you were considering changing a paragraph of text on your website. In theory, you could conduct a six-month contextual research project at vast expense, but it probably wouldn’t be worth it. The scale of investment wouldn’t be justified by the value of the change.

Continue reading %Understanding the Core Concepts of User Research%

by Emma Howell via SitePoint

How to Make Paper Prototypes

The following is a short extract from our book, Designing UX: Prototyping, written by Dan Goodwin and Ben Coleman. It's the ultimate guide to prototyping. SitePoint Premium members get access with their membership, or you can buy a copy in stores worldwide.

There are no rules for making paper prototypes––that is what's great about it. You need materials that are commonly found in any home or office, but if you have to buy them, they are relatively inexpensive.

What You'll Need

At the very least you'll require paper and a pen––this low barrier to entry is one of the best aspects about this approach. For more complex and interactive prototypes, though, you'll need a bigger arsenal, and if you're running workshops or doing a lot of prototyping, assembling a toolkit of the following items is a good idea.

We'd suggest the following items when undertaking a prototyping session:

• paper with a grid or dot grid (preferred)
• sticky notes (never leave home without them!)
• pencils
• eraser
• pens (Sharpies in different colors and thicknesses are ideal)
• scissors or craft knife
• glue (preferably restickable)

Items that are nice to have include:

• index cards
• mounting putty
• adhesive tape (preferably removable to move items around)
• highlighter pens
• double-ended marker pens with fine and normal nibs
• transparent sheets and markers
• a box for filing or transporting your prototype

We’ll look at the possibilities involved in using different materials later in the chapter.

Your Approach

Strictly speaking, you could just dive in and start making; however, a process we’ve found helpful at fffunction is to think outward-in, focusing on increasingly smaller pieces as you go, such as:

1. devices
2. screens
3. elements
4. interactivity or state changes

Devices

What size viewport or device are we designing for in this instance? Any available user research may inform this. Analytics data will indicate what an existing audience may prefer to use. A goal of the design work could be to prototype an improved experience on small-screen devices.

Desktop or Laptop

An A4- or US letter-sized piece of paper is suitable here, where you could use different orientations to mimic the device, such as landscape for a desktop or laptop. If you want a more realistic source, you could print out a browser frame graphic.

Tablet

A5- or US half-letter-sized paper should suffice, although if you're designing for a large tablet such as the Apple iPad Pro (12.9 inches), you might want to stick with the A4/Letter size. Again, you can choose an orientation depending on what you expect the user to have. If you want to make this more realistic, creating a dummy device is an option. The most lo-fi approach would be to draw it on a piece of card and cut out a hole where the screen would be, as depicted below.

Laser-cut and 3D-printed devices have been created specifically to help use paper prototypes in a more natural way, allowing the prototype to be part of a device.

Phone

As with the previous examples, you can sketch directly onto paper: A5- or US half-letter-sized, index cards, or sticky notes, and use different orientations. There are more options available for mobile devices, though, than any other form.

You could make a cellphone border with a cutout window for the screen, or use cards laid on top of the device to act as different screens.

As mentioned, there are also laser-cut and 3D-printed device models available. The figure below shows a laser-cut plywood phone model that we use in our work.

Plastic or card model devices with a channel to insert pieces of paper to simulate scrolling are also available. You could even place all the screens on a long piece of paper and slide it around to simulate navigation.

Another option is to use a small spiral-bound notebook to flick between screens, with tabs or colored dots forming navigation elements, as seen below. This is a nice approach as it mimics how people use their cellphone: held in one hand while the other taps it to interact.

Screens

Now we'll define what screens are required to communicate the design. It’s helpful to consider what steps in the journey the user will take. We can develop a list from existing work such as user journeys, task models, sitemaps, information architecture, or a functional specification. Some of this was covered in the Gather Resources section of Chapter 2, to which you can refer back if you need a refresher. Once you've developed a list, you can start to think about what elements will be required for each screen.

If you don't know the screen size, or have an incomplete picture of what you are designing, sketching the steps out on cards can be useful for working a product at a high level before going into more detail. We'd recommend beginning
with smaller A5 or index cards to help you focus on the individual interactions on each screen; aiming for one purpose per screen is a good way to start. You can then arrange them on a table to experiment with different flows through a process.

Elements

When looking at the elements that make up your screen, consider how users will interact with them during the prototype process. What needs to happen when they touch that element?

In some cases, you may have a consistent interface with only one window changing based on interactions around it. A simple example would be a menu in a left-hand column that changes the content of the right-hand column. This could be represented with the same card on the left, and separate cards for each piece of interchangeable content on the right, as shown below.

Interactivity

All the elements you've established will each be interactive at various points. There’s a challenge here in how to replicate that functionality with paper. Again, there’s likely to be no “right first time” solution to this so it’s worth experimenting with different materials and approaches.

Continue reading %How to Make Paper Prototypes%

by Ben Coleman via SitePoint

Email Clients The Ultimate Guide to Challenges, Workarounds, & Usage Perspective - #infographic

Email Marketing can reinvent new opportunities for your brand if done right and the first requisite of making it work is to ensure good renderability across all email clients. With a plethora of email clients in the market, the major concern for any email marketer is that every subscriber uses...

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Do Different Age Groups Prefer Different Online Content? - #infographic

There is no single universal marketing strategy that could work for everyone. A 50-year-old non-techno person would have an entirely different reaction to an online advertisement as compared to a person in his late teens. That’s why it is impossible to run a successful online content marketing...

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by Web Desk via Digital Information World

halkaBox.js – Simple Javascript Lightbox

halkaBox.js is a simple and basic Javascript lightbox plugin.

Features

• Made with Javascript. No dependencies required.
• Simple and lightweight.
• Multiple galleries. Custom options for each.
• Keyboard arrow keys to navigate and escape to close supported.

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How to upload photos to Instagram from your PC [Video]

Instagram was not designed to let users upload photos from a computer. However, there are some clever workarounds and software that make it possible.

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by Irfan Ahmad via Digital Information World