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

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