Category Archives: Design

Weekly Links and Comments

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Mad Libs Increase Form Conversions with 25-40%

This week saw a lot of discussion on “Mad Libs” on how conversion for forms could increase dramatically by using forms with inline elements and a narrative format. LukeW writes about a test where vast.com saw an increase in form conversions with 25-40%

Ron and his team ran some A/B testing online that compared a traditional Web form layout with a narrative “Mad Libs” format. In Vast.com’s testing, Mad Libs style forms increased conversion across the board by 25-40%.

Read the full article on LukeW’s blog.

Mad Libs Do Not Increase Form Conversions

A guy named Patrick McKenzie tried  the Mad Libs technique on a form and came to the conclusion that in his case with his users, the result was the opposite. I think that he has a point in that you must test on your users and not just listenting to “facts” from others. But to be honest he could have set his test up better. The best thing with this post is the comments.

Read the full article at Patrick McKenzie’s blog

Buzrr

A colleague of mine, Dennis Hettema has released a Google Buzz Aggregator/Counter named buzrr that makes it easier to find trending and popular topics posted on Google Buzz. There are some tools as well for integration into you website. Interesting to see where this is heading. Good Job Dennis!

How to get better at UI Design

I found this good article at http://ui-patterns.com on how to get better at UI design. It categorizes parts of the job needed to build and design better UI’s.

Make sure you follow me on Twitter

I post links each and every day with focus on User Experience and Web Development on my two twitter accounts, make sure you follow me there: @uxs and @hising. UXS is more focused on design, user experience and usability while hising is more on web development in general and somewhat more personal. See you on Twitter!

JavaOne 2009 Day 2 – My Input

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Google Web Toolkit

I started out day 2 of JavaOne attending a session on Google Web Toolkit, GWT is one of those things I do not know if I actually like. On one hand it is a cool framework that makes a lot of UI coding unecessary, but on the other hand black-box-solutions is not my cup of tea. But, if you are a big team of developers it is a big advantage of course to use such a framework/toolkit making sure you are building the web the same everywhere in your corporation. The presentation was ok, I was a bit tired but I think I got a good idea on how I can start using GWT and still have some flexibility when it comes to the “magic” JavaScript parts.

Ajax Performance and Tuning

I was really looking forward to this session, it was a good session, but it was no news actually. They stepped through how to speed up your website using Yslow measures and guidelines, if you have read Steve Souders blog and his book High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers (his upcoming book on Web Site Performance: Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers)you know all those things already, but I am not from the Java-world, so maybe this is new news to the Java Community. Greg Murray from Netflix showed a framework named Protorabbit which takes care of all these steps for you, they used Protorabbit on stage to show how easy they could adapt the Java Pet Store to actually grade A on Yslow. The presentation was ok, and I found Protorabbit, that is extra plus.

Creating Compelling User Experience

Ben Galbraith from Ajaxian and Mozilla talked to the tech-savvy audience on User Experience, no code, just talk about responsive UI:s, perceived performance, look and feel and usability. I think it was a very important session as there are a somewhat technical focus on software development in general and trying to actually get traditional back-end developers to focus on front-end things is a good thing.

Functional and Object Oriented JavaScript

I have known it for 10 years, but it seems the rest of the world is just about to start loving JavaScript. For me JavaScript is the language closest at hand when thinking of solving a problem, and I am very glad to see how JavaScript have evolved from a crappy web script langugage to a well respected, and fast, language that runs on both clients and servers. This session focused on teaching traditional Java developers the core of JavaScript. Closures, anonymous functions and common problems Java developers could fall into when starting writing JavaScript (scope). The presentation is really good (academic) and goes into the real good and advanced parts of the worlds best language.  BTW, Prototype and Scriptaculous seems to be the bomb in the Java world.