5 Practices for Securing User Confidence

As UX designers, we are customer advocates. We design systems, products, and tools that are as beautiful as they are usable. We bend technology into new forms to compensate for gaps in human abilities. We act as a creative buffer between technical complexity, unreliability, and inelegant processes or patterns. We turn bad mechanics into better forms. It’s downright noble.

Products and services are always vulnerable to customer attrition, and users bail for many reasons. Much of UX design and product optimization focuses on acquisition and retention through continual improvements. We focus on usability, elegance, simplicity, functionality, and brand value. Typically, UX designers spend less time improving…read more
By Toby Boudreaux

UX Magazine

Win Free User Testing

Here at UX Magazine, we’re constantly beating the drum about the importance of user testing as a critical part of improving the usability of your product or site, so we’re proud to announce that we’ve partnered with Usertesting.com to give away the following three different packages of user tests.

• 2nd runner up – 1 Free UserTests (a value)
• 1st runner up – 3 Free UserTests (a 7 value)
• Grand Prize – 15 Free Tests (a 5 value)

Interested? All you have to do to enter is answer the following question:

If user testing was inexpensive, what would you use it to investigate?

Via Twitter

• Make sure you’re following UX Magazine on…read more
  By UX Magazine Staff
  

  
  UX Magazine

Metamemory and the User Experience

An article published in Science Magazine in June provides evidence that the Internet has become an “external part” of our memory systems. Rather than remembering information, we seem to have “outsourced” this effortful task to an entity other than ourselves.

On the face of it, this is not an astounding finding in that psychologists have demonstrated for over 30 years that we use outside sources, such as family or team members, to supplement our less-than-perfect memories. What makes this research remarkable, and of interest to the UX community, is that the researchers found that when we expect to be able to access information in the future, we tend to have reduced memory for the actual information, but enhanced memory for where to find the information. Thus, while we do measurably worse at remembering that the capital of Vermont is Montpellier, we apparently remember with…read more
By Cassandra Moore

UX Magazine

First Look at the Google Catalogs User Experience

Google Catalogs is a new iPad app that presents shoppers with a consistent user interface to a wide variety of retail catalogs. Shoppers can quickly flip through exquisite catalog imagery, view coordinated product layouts and individual products, save favorites and, of course, purchase products.

read more

UX Magazine

Overcoming Halfhearted User Adoption

In 1996, I was a database developer at AT&T Solutions (now defunct). AT&T Solutions had two separate payroll systems, one for AT&T Solutions and one for AT&T corporate. Both were excruciatingly slow. My colleagues used to joke that we needed a separate accounting code for the time it took to enter our hours into both systems.

Being young and cocky, I decided I would ignore the corporate payroll system. This went on for about two months until my boss finally noticed a discrepancy between the two systems. (How vital was this system if nobody noticed that I wasn’t using it for two months?) My act of defiance earned me the chewing-out of my life and cost me both a raise and a promotion, and from then on I used both systems.

That experience taught me two valuable lessons about user adoption:

read more

UX Magazine

Personas: The Foundation of a Great User Experience

Today’s consumers are demanding more from companies. Customers expect products, services, and information that are timely and catered to their specific needs and desires. Traditionally, companies develop and market products based on market segmentation and demographics, assuming that the features, functionality and messaging will meet the needs of all of the customers in that demographic—a “one size fits all” mentality. However, as the marketplace shifts from a mass manufacturing to a mass customization model, customers needs and desires are more accurately identified through the development of personas rather than through demographic data.

read more

UX Magazine

2016: The User Interface Revolution Underway

Looking at the next five years, the role of interface design will only increase in importance as companies compete to win market share worldwide. Ease of use is essential to winning hearts, minds, and customers. With consumer product companies in heated competition, I anticipate a surge of redesign and new design in the near term. These designs will focus on usability, which means we are likely to see breakthrough products over the next several years.

Yet these new interfaces are not going to be uniform; devices and applications will not possess common protocols. For users, each interaction will have to be learned, so despite the improved usability of products, individuals will find themselves learning the quirks and standards of more and more technologies just to get the functionality they seek.

read more

UX Magazine

Useful Plugins and Resources for Improving User Interactivity with WordPress

If there is a sense of community and vibrant life surrounding a blog it tends to be successful and ultimately popular – that is a fact. So, if you own a WordPress blog and you are looking for an effective way to create a real sense of user interactivity on your blog, in this post, I highlight some fantastic plug-ins and resources, that you may not know about, that can be of great help in creating a sense of involvement amongst your blog visitors.

Make Your Site Social

The Gigya Social optimization plug-in aggregates authentication and social APIs from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, LinkedIn, AOL and other OAuth & OpenID providers, giving sites the ability to authenticate users via social network and OpenID providers and increase site traffic by allowing users to easily share content with their friends and followers.
The plug-in is scalable and secure, using a standard authentication techniques to prevent account spoofing.

Make Your Site Social Resources & Tutorials

• Make Your Site Social Home & Downloads →
• Make Your Site Social Installation Tutorial →
• Make Your Site Social Plugin Demo →

Simple:Press – Forum Plugin

Simple:Press is a feature rich, completely integrated and fully scalable forum plugin for WordPress. It is fully customizable (packaged with various themes) and is fully scalable no matter what your sites membership number is.
Also included is a Private Messaging sub-system, the ability to link blog posts with forum topics, the capability to extend the forum display with custom code, a number of template tags for use outside of the forums, extensive online help that explains every option and full language support.

Simple:Press Resources & Tutorials

• Simple:Press Home & Downloads → →
• Simple:Press FAQ →
• Simple:Press Wiki →
• Video Tutorial: Installing Simple:Press Forum →

Commentpress

Commentpress is an open source theme and plugin for that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with Commentpress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog. This makes the overall discussion on the topic easier and also increases the level of interaction.

Commentpress Resources & Tutorials

• Commentpress Home & Downloads →
• Examples of Commentpress in action →

Digress.it

Digress.it is another interesting and useful plugin, similar in functionality as Commentpress, that allows your visitors to add any kind of note (visible to everyone) in the margin of a post, just like you can do in a notebook. It is geared toward in-depth discussions of longer documents: articles, essays or even book-length.
Now, this plugin can be used to write any kind of note, whether it is an explanation or any kind of criticism.

Digress.it Resources & Tutorials

• Digress.it Home & Downloads →
• Digress.it Help & Support →
• Video Tutorial: Download and set up a digress.it site →
• Video Tutorial: Planning the structure of a digress.it document →

WordPress Wiki

WordPress Wiki is an amazing plugin, from the developers of the WP e-Commerce plugin, that adds Wiki functionality to WordPress. It allows you to specify particular posts which can be edited by your users as a wiki page and leave other posts in the un-editable format.

WordPress Wiki Resources & Tutorials

• WordPress Wiki Home & Downloads →

Community Submitted News

The Community Submitted News plugin allows your readers to submit categorized articles directly to your site. The article submissions have their own dedicated moderation panel were you can review, edit and preview before publishing.

Community Submitted News Resources & Tutorials

• Community Submitted News Home & Downloads →

FV Community News

FV Community News, just like the Community News Plugin above, is a plugin that enables the users to submit posts from various resources to your site for inclusion. This very effective plugin has a user-friendly moderation panel (review, edit and preview) and will display the published news items via a sidebar widget or on a dedicated page (it does support pagination).
This plugin does allow for image uploading, offers configurable responses and comes with a built-in RSS Feed

FV Community News Resources & Tutorials

• FV Community News Home & Downloads →
• Create a Community News section in WordPress with FV Community News →

TDO Mini Forms

TDO Mini Forms allows you to add highly customizable forms that allows non-registered users and/or subscribers to submit and edit posts and pages (all configurable) . New posts are kept in "draft" format until admin reviews, edits, previews or publishes them (also configurable). It can optionally use Akismet to check if submissions and contributions are spam.
It is by far and away the most powerful and feature-rich plugin for news submission on this page – Not only can TDO Mini Forms be used as a to create a 'submitted news section', it can also be configured as a Contact Manager, Ad Manager, Collaborate Image Sites, Submit Links, etc.
TDO may be a little bit too much for most sites, but is certainly a plugin you should consider.

TDO Mini Forms Resources & Tutorials

• TDO Mini Forms Home & Downloads →
• TDO Mini Forms FAQ →
• TDO Mini Forms Tutorial – Build an Awesome Community News Feature for Your WordPress Blog →
• Tutorial Video for TDO Mini Forms →

Conclusion

So, here are some resources and plugins which can enhance your WordPress sites/blogs/ interaction. Go ahead and try them and do let us know how they worked for you, which one was your favorite? If I have missed something or you have better ideas in your mind, I would love to hear about them in the comments below.

You might also like…

20 Plugin Replacing Tutorials, Tips, Snippets and Solutions for WordPress →
Dummy Content Filler Resources for WordPress, Drupal and Joomla Developers →
10 Useful WordPress Search Code Snippets →
30 Grid-Based WordPress Themes →
40 More Stylish, Minimal and Clean Free WordPress Themes →
20+ Free and Stylish Typography WordPress Themes →
30 Brand New Quality WordPress Themes →
10 Blank/Naked WordPress Themes Perfect for Development →
25 Fresh, Clean and Unique WordPress Themes →
40 Awesome and Fresh WordPress Themes →
Essential WordPress Plugin Development Resources, Tutorials and Guides →
20+ Powerful WordPress Security Plugins and Some Tips and Tricks →

Speckyboy Design Magazine