What a Month. Storms throughout the city, WAA excitement in the air, phones ringing off the hook… it’s like the world has woken up from hibernation and decided it’s time to kick ass.
This week we’ve got posts from mailchimp on how blocklist operators think, HTML5 cheat sheets, reducing your load time, segmenting keywords, the usability mindset, and more. So much for slow Mondays.
- We start the week off with email, specifically with a humorous post on how blocklist operators think, telling the story of several DNSBL operators guidelines.
- To juxtapose the humor of the last article, here’s Michael Gray being as serious as ever: how to choose a new domain name. Pretty much all of this is really great advice.
- Inspired Mag posted a pretty rad HTML5 cheat sheet. However, now the site seems to have gone down. Guess it was too good, and too many people hit the site.
- Brian wrote, a while back, about how load time can affect your users. Well, Six Revisions has a wonderful guide to reducing your load times.
- The GA blog is continuing their series on the GA API. This time, how client side authorization works.
- New to the roundup, L3 Analytics has put up a pretty cool post segmenting keywords by filters. A pretty good partner to my posts on custom reports, and advanced segments.
- .Think has a talk and slideshow on the importance of user friendliness by Ed Illig.
- Cennydd Bowles posted a rather contentious post on “the perils of persuasion” which hit a bit of a nerve with me. He puts user-centered design and persuasive design on a linear scale as opposed to each other and starts talking about each. Right off the bat, that should sound alarm bells. There’s just something about when someone simplifies the spectrum of discussion about a topic onto a one-dimensional plane, it makes it… well… one dimensional. This is no exception. On this scale, user-centered design is intangible and good and innovative and makes kittens purr and produces double rainbows, while the persuasive design is tangible and marketing and affects behavior, and is associated with right-wing politics for some reason that I really don’t understand. The problem is that, like with most linear scales, is that this oversimplifies to the point of a false dichotomy. He defines persuasive design as marketing, and UX as… well, not. As a marketing company that does UX work, I find this a somewhat odd distinction. UX, he says, is about opening up opportunities for users, persuasion is about directing them. I don’t agree.
I don’t think that there’s any particular reason to contrast persuasive design and usability as business goals and user enablement.
Let’s take a classic persuasive design rule: the power of people like us. We design a site with language, imagery, and what not which resonates with the user. user converts better, but also has a better overall experience.
Sure, persuasive design can be used to push people towards doing something, but it’s also something that needs to be understood in order to develop a proper user experience. We’re irrational creatures, and we make decisions based on silly factors. And if you’re not keeping that in mind while developing a user experience… well…
