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

As I’ve noted many times before, people do not necessarily read left to right—and certainly, not in anything that is reliably like an F-pattern. However, once people find your content, they do reliably read it from top to bottom.

Wrapping text to the next line, continuing line after line, and presenting lists of discrete items of information are the two safe, reliable ways of designing digital content, especially for small mobile devices.

But what about when your content goes on and on? While there’s great concern about the right way of displaying arbitrary amounts of information, people make a lot of design decisions on the basis of hearsay, opinion, fear, or inertia. Plus, they assess existing design patterns based on incomplete data or bad implementations. Read More

The next wave in Web site design is persuasive design, designing for persuasion, emotion, and trust. While usability is still a fundamental requirement for effective Web site design, it is no longer enough to design sites that are simply easy to navigate and understand so users can complete transactions. As business mandates for Web site design have grown more strategic, complex, and demanding of accountability, good usability has become the price of competitive entry. So, while usability is important, it is no longer the key differentiator it once was.

The future of great Web design is about creating customer engagement and commitment in a way that clearly impacts business results and measurable goals. Whether a Web site is e-commerce, informational, or transactional, it must motivate people to make decisions online that lead to conversion of one sort or another.

The interactive online environment offers far more opportunities to influence customers’ decision-making than traditional advertising or marketing channels do. By leveraging the science of persuasion in new and insightful ways and designing specifically to optimize the elements of persuasion, emotion, and trust, we can systematically influence customers’ online behavior. Read More