So what was the problem?

Expedia analysts realised the site needed to be changed after investigating why many customers who clicked the ‘Buy Now’ button on the company’s site did not complete the transaction.

“This is someone who was on our site, found the right location and hotel, put in all their billing and travel information and clicked the ‘Buy Now’ button,” Megibow said.

“As far as leading indicators of purchase intent go, this is as good as it gets and yet we weren’t taking the money.”

Analysts began examining and correlating information about these failed transactions to identify what traits they had in common.

The answer, it turns out, was quite simple: “We had an optional field on the site under ‘Name’, which was ‘Company’,” Megibow said.

“It confused some customers who filled out the ‘Company’ field with their bank name.”

What did they try?

“After we realised that we just went onto the site and deleted that field – overnight there was a step function [change], resulting in $12m of profit a year, simply by deleting a field.

“We have found 50 or 60 of these kinds of things by using analytics and paying attention to the customer.”

I love data.

 Comments | Comment

From Kicker Studio: Big, huge gestural interfaces aren’t all they are cracked up to be:

Oh sure, they  look really cool, and certainly  companies are doggedly trying to create them.  Bloggers and tech geeks love them. (Any time you put Minority Report into a title, you’re bound to get traffic.) But I guarantee you very few of those people have actually  used one for any length of time. If not done well (and sometimes ever if they are), they are exhausting. Human beings aren’t meant to hold their arms out in front of their bodies making gestures for long periods of time. It creates a condition called  Gorilla Arm (aching muscles, stiffness, a swollen feeling) because it violates  basic human ergonomics. Tom Cruise (who, let’s be honest, is in better shape than 95% of us) was reportedly tired from just acting out the scenes in the movie.

I loved the Surface when it came out, but the first question was — how do I use it?

It makes sense in a mobile device to have a lot of gestural interfaces, or the iPad for example. But in a bigger stage, waving your hands around just doesn’t seem like fun. Like Dan Saffer pointed out in the article, it’s the places where a subtle gestural interaction can be used it makes sense.

 Comments | Comment

About design:

f you haven't seen the Oatmeal comic  How A Web Design Goes Straight To Hell, you need to go read that first, and then come back here – it's a perfect summary of the problem. The ultimate post on this problem has also already been written, so I'm not going to spend too much time on it – just go read every word in  Why Design by Committee Must Die in Smashing Magazine. I do want to highlight a couple of areas in that article, and add some of my own comments.

One of the main problems we have in web design today is that everyone thinks they're a designer. With coding it's different – not everyone can code. But design is different. Like art, everyone has an opinion on design. You like it or you don't. And because you have this immediate visceral reaction to a design, it's tempting to confuse that with knowing what makes a design good. But that's simply not true.

As posts like  Designing for the Mind and  Gestalt Principles Applied to Design have shown, what makes a design "good" has very little to do with taste, and everything to do with the proven psychology of visual perception. "Pretty" is a small part of design compared to applying the principles of solid user experience design to an interface. So please, let's leave design to the people who are trained in this stuff. Have I mentioned the importance of trust?

 Comments | Comment

Thanks to Ha Phan.

 Comments | Comment

Great article.

Usability Findings:

• Form labels work best above the field
• Users focus on faces
• Quality of design is an indicator of credibility
• Most users  do know how to scroll
• Blue is the best color for links
• The ideal search box is 27 characters wide
• White space improves comprehension
• Effective user testing doesn't have to be extensive
• Informative product pages stand out
• Most users are blind to advertising

 Comments | Comment