The sign-up form is potentially one of the biggest barriers between you and potential customers. The longer the form, the more effort your visitors will have to make before becoming members of your website or, perhaps, paying customers. To speed up the process you need to minimize the barriers. This means removing all optional elements from the form and leaving only the core essentials. The optional stuff can be gathered later.
I saw in a message that I was copied on where a client asked what a lightbox was. Put simply, some applications include a lot of images that users may want to browse. Displaying every image on its own page may not be the most efficient way to do it — both for your visitors and your server. As visitors navigate back and forth the server incurs additional hits, which can be avoided with lightboxes because images are displayed without having to load a new page.
I discovered this on the site Boston.com and thought, “Wow, talk about offering users more responsive and interactive user interfaces, this is sure one cool technique.” Just as with classic applications, this little feature of integration of keyboard shortcuts for navigation can significantly improve the work flow for users and make it easier for them to find what they are looking for.
I found this little tid-bit interesting. Published by Paul Fitts in 1954, Fitts’ law is a model of human movement which predicts the time required to rapidly move to a target area, as a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target. This law can be applied to the movement of the mouse visitors have to perform to get from point A to point B. For instance, the rule can be important to place the content areas in a more usable way to maximize their accessibility and improve click rates.
A lot of people start looking for a search box as soon as they land on your website. Perhaps they know exactly what they are looking for and don’t want to spend time navigating around. These people are search-dominant users. Useit.com conducted a study: Continue reading »
