Design: Web Site Design

Recently, Office Depot redesigned their search user interface, adding attribute-based filtering and creating a more dynamic, interactive user experience. Unfortunately, Office Depot’s interaction design misses some key points, making their new search user interface less usable and, therefore, less effective. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the Office Depot site presents us with an excellent case study for demonstrating some of the important best practices for designing filters for faceted search results, as follows:

1. Decide on your filter value-selection paradigm—either drill-down or parallel selection.
2. Provide an obvious and consistent way to undo filter selection.
3. Always make all filters easily available.
4. At every step in the search workflow, display only filter values that correspond to the available items, or inventory.
5. Provide filter values that encompass all items, or the complete inventory.

By following the attribute-based filtering design best practices this article describes, you can ensure your customers can take care of business without having to spend time struggling with your search user interface. Read More

In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our expert panel discusses the purpose of site maps. Web site design has come a long way since designers slapped a Site Map link at the bottom of every Web page to help users who were perplexed by a Web site’s organization—or has it? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Our experts cover exactly what constitutes a site map and how site maps differ from other UX design deliverables. They also consider the evolution of the term site map over the years, how site maps apply to increasingly responsive Web designs, and how agile development has impacted the use of site maps.

Every month in Ask UXmatters, our panel of UX experts answers our readers’ questions about a broad range of user experience matters. To get answers to your own questions about UX strategy, design, user research, or any other topic of interest to UX professionals in an upcoming edition of Ask UXmatters, please send your questions to: [email protected]. Read More

Psychological factors such as thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition directly correlate with our customers’ online advertising experience. Making customers feel like wanting to do something requires us to offer a completely enthralling experience, not one that has negative connotations for our customers. Today, we often see advertisements that clamor for our attention, begging us to view them. Customers’ past experiences with the Web set their expectations for online advertising today. How can we shift this prevalent advertising paradigm to one that instead has psychological appeal?

In this article, I’ll discuss the cognitive elements at the intersection of advertising and human behavior. By taking an approach to advertising that looks at the impact psychological factors have on customer behavior, I’ve learned that customers respond directly to online advertisements, as we can see from their emotions, behavior, and interactions on the Web. Read More