Archive for November 2009

I love the overuse of the word “fuck”.

Enough said.

The Associate Producer will work closely with the production team in scheduling, resource management, budgeting, and planning. They manage the site production process for assigned projects from pre-production through development, QA, launch, and post-launch updates. The Associate producer is also be responsible for the day-to-day maintenance of existing sites helping produce content updates and troubleshooting efforts.

Qualifications

• 2-3 years project management experience in the Internet field, preferably in the entertainment industry
• Experience and knowledge of web site technology, design and production
• Ability to use online traffic tracking tools to report and help interpret data for editorial decision making.
• Ability to use online publishing and content management systems for programming and reviewing web pages.
• Must be able to multi-task in a fast-paced environment
• Must be proactive and able to prioritize projects based on business and promotional goals
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to work closely with other producers artists, content developers, engineers, QA testers, and webmasters on day-to-day production; established people skills
• Ability to create and maintain accurate schedules

Skills Required

• 2 to 4 years experience in website production required; working with children‚s or branded content preferred
• A college degree or equivalent work experience with website, digital or entertainment production and development
• Superior organizational skills
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Understanding of Brand development very helpful, understanding of (and passion for) the brand extremely helpful
• Self starter with high level of initiative
• Ability to manage multiple projects, set priorities and meet deadlines
• Proficiency with managing external developers and contractors
• Familiarity with project management tools, e.g. Microsoft Project and Visio
• Established presentation skills and familiarity with Microsoft PowerPoint
• Ability to analyze and provide solutions to complex technical problems

Email your resume to jobs@usabilitycounts.com.

From Adaptive Path. Good presentation, yo.

Untangling brand and customer experience, in 10 minutes or less from Brandon Schauer on Vimeo.

That’s about right.

Building a website is easy, right?

Uh, no. Most clients are prepared to really handle a website, and don’t limit themselves to what they are capable of within a budget.

Here’s the first 10 of 72 questions to ask web clients from bonfx.

1. How does your company handle email?
2. Do you need any password protected areas?
3. Do you have the Pantone numbers for your current company colors?
4. Did you take a look at our portfolio?
5. What is your time frame?
6. Is this a brochure site, or a blog?
7. Who is your audience?
8. Do you have any specifications?
9. What are the website addresses of your competitors?
10. How many other companies have you talked to?

Read the complete list here.

I was on a mailing list today and this came across:

“Use red asterisks — they’re the standard for showing required fields.”

Standards are wonderful; but if I asked my mom what is the international symbol for a required field, she would look at me like I was on drugs (not much different than today, but still).

This was something even the great Jared Spool mentioned as gospel at an event and showed an example in his PowerPoint, which I still haven’t received – but that’s another blog post. He was explaining how another client had used asterisks to show optional fields.

Here’s a few truths about form design that I’ve discovered in my time by testing actual users.

Most forms are hard to read.

Does anyone find it interesting the note for required fields is after the fields?

There have been a few books and web posts, but for the most part, web form design hasn’t changed that much since 1996. Form fields are left on a white background with a grey line around them. Some sites, like this WordPress blog software I’m using, have a lighter grey line around the form fields for design purposes.

On other sites, form fields are in columns so that they’re next to each other, making the user to really have to work at it.

Given eight form fields, users will fill out all eight.

I’ve run countless of tests and the result in most of them is that users will try to fill out every single form field. This includes the second address field we all know so well even if they don’t have a second address.

Form fields are one of those things that users expect to fill out every single field, because they don’t want to have to figure out error messages when they are wrong. They have been trained that most web forms are ineffective, they do as much work as possible (bad solution number 1) or walk away (worse solution number 2), leaving either a frustrated user, a lost sale or both.

The red asterisk and even the explanation text that reads “Required Fields” are marked as (*). No one’s going to read it.

It’s usually at the top of the form, in line, and all users skip it to dig right in. Users rarely read instruction text, and because most form design is so poorly thought out, users rush through it to make it as painless as possible. Users need visual cues next to the field or at the field they are working on, not 300 pixels, at least, away.

Additionally, the “Required Field” line is usually small and hard to read (read: Designers License), so in the grand scheme of watching users browse the site, they skip right over it.

Solutions to the required field paradox

Disney Shopping

This was a solution we used at Disney Shopping: the word Optional was placed to the right of the field and required fields were colored yellow so users could spot them.

I’m using this particular design pattern on other sites, because at Disney Shopping and a few other sites I’ve worked on, this is the design pattern I’ve enforced. It’s doesn’t interfere with the form because the error messages are usually below the form field, and it’s easy to scan for it.

Why am I enforcing it?

Because, changing Required Fields from the asterisk to this example increases form completions across the board. We’ve tested it, and it works.

Any questions?

One of the way cool, nifty things that you get by working for an online marketing education company is access to great tools that are just a bit beta. That’s just the sort of thing we needed over at Online Marketing Summit as we do usability testing and other analysis work.

Enter Attention Wizard. Attention Wizard is a tool that shows possible eye tracking without the human part. The smart folks over at Site Tuners (Thanks Tim, for the invite) have written an algorithm that produces an “attention heatmap”, a way of saying here’s some possible areas that the users are paying attention to based on color and Gestalt theory. All you have to do is upload a screen shot, and in five minutes, it gives you results of what it could look like.

I did it with Online Marketing Summit (click on the thumbnail) to show you what one of their results are.

Their sales points

• Can be used with actual screenshots or page design mock-ups
• Instant results – no eye-movement or mouse-tracking data collection needed
• Tells you what people are paying attention to, and what they ignore
• Easily identify landing page problems & increase your conversion rates

Our take aways

• People’s eyes go right to the schedule tab, which is a good thing.
• We have this photo image in the first paragraph of text that does nothing. It’s providing no value to the user while attracting a lot of attention.
• The testimonials are getting a lot of attention.
• I think Attention Wizard is giving too much weight to the photo.
• Overall, the eye is scanning the page well.

We’re going to make more changes, but the goal is to get results quickly and increase conversion rate on the site, and that’s what we got with Attention Wizard.

My honest opinion about Attention Wizard?

I wouldn’t take this as gospel science (is eye tracking that now, anyways?), but it’s a good first cut at “well, let’s see what we have.” They claim a 75 percent rate of matching eye and mouse tracking, and that’s good enough for me. It’s much better to do several tests with this tool (which would be great as a subscription model site) than spending $5,000 for an eye tracking system that no one’s going use because, well, it’s hard to use.

It’s a great tool that’s only going to get better once they work out the kinks.