UX Design

Integrate  visual components to support your content  to increase engagement and information retention.

Not a bad article, a few good reminders. Sorry for the ads in the site, they're quite annoying. 

mobile and pc also Important

amazing!

Glad we're understanding more about what makes UX strategy what it is. The more designers understand this and explain it well (as in this article), the better organizations will also value the work that is done in user experience. In the future, the UX strategist will join the organization as a leader of integrated environments in order to serve customers in the best possible way and provide the value and ROI that is needed to stay competitive. 

Building Engagement In

There are ways to BUILD engagement into a website's design. Here are three secrets to promote engagement not included in this excellent Slideshare:

* Place Email Subscription High Up and Prominent. 
* Include curated User Generated Content on every page.

* Create CTAs with CONTRAST.

Email Subscriptions
When your "Subscribe To Our Email List" Call to Action is high on the page in a Can't Miss It spot you communicate a clear "we want YOU" signal. 

UGC Everywhere
When you curate User Generated Content to your site you communicate how well you listen and care for community members. The website isn't all about YOU and what you think the inclusion of UGC says.

CTAs
I see to very common mistakes in websites I'm asked to review as Director of Marketing for Atlantic BT in Raleigh (http://www.atlanticbt.com ): NO CTAs or poorly contrasted CTAs. I PREFER CTAs to be buttons and usually test red, orange or green (depending on the background color). I'm convinced there is no ONE magic CTA color but the contrast is what makes a Call To Action helpful or not, clicked on or not, converting or not.  

I actually love this article from Robert Hoekman. I think his approach is right on point with agile practice of design. As a grad HCI student, we are taught to use deliverables as part of the process to arrive at the final design, not to use them as deliverables, because they are not. I am a bit confused if this approach of design deliverables is being overused in practices, giving it this bad reputation. Those of you in agencies, how do you treat your "design deliverables" - do you actually put them down in your proposals? How do you account for the time to arrive at the big idea when you have to produce these to ideate?

If you feel overcome by what you might test on your website, here is a list of  relevant things to test.

Source: Jeff Sauro, Mesuring Usability

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. And a good User Experience (UX) is not magic; it is the result of a good process.

I find journey maps a great exercise, especially when the experience is poorly understood at first and user research has been done to understand it. The problem I see with them (from practice) is that while it is easy to illustrate a general user journey, it is difficult to account for every user mental model and contextual behavior; therefore, it is important to understand that journey maps illustrate generalities. In my opinion, complex user journeys better be backed up by good user research.