In his new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman takes us on a fascinating tour of the brain, exploring two theoretical systems that drive the way we think and make choices: “System 1” is fast, intuitive, and emotional; “System 2” is slower, more deliberative and more logical. As experience designers, we want to appeal to both.

Read the full article at: http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/writing-for-cognitive-ease/

(My first article discusses the role of memory in user experience design.)

Why? I’ve been seeing a strange set of numbers in Page traffic reports in Google Analytics recently: when comparing traffic sources for the homepage, I’ve seen much higher bounce rates for direct traffic than for organic Google referrals.

Direct traffic is usually defined as traffic coming from:

1. people typing your address directly into their browser’s url bar
2. bookmarks, and
3. Google search auto-completion

When thinking of direct traffic in this way, it’s hard to understand why direct visitors to your homepage would bounce more often than those finding you via natural search. Surely people who know who you are and have taken deliberate action to visit you would be more likely to get beyond the homepage?

Possibly visitors are simply coming for your phone number or street address, finding it in your header or footer and then disappearing. Or maybe you happen to own a national daily newspaper and visitors are just scanning the headlines before leaving again. These behaviours might explain some of the direct traffic bouncing but surely not in the quantities I’ve seen.

As it turns out, Google Analytics, actually counts many more sources of traffic as “direct” than you’d think. In fact:

“…the term ‘Direct Traffic’… Google uses as a catch-all category of traffic that they simply cannot accurately measure the source of.” Wayne Lambert

Fortunately there’s a lot you can do about it. By understanding why Google can’t measure the source you should be able to take action to correct it. So, what other links can count as direct:

• Links from PDFs and Word docs
• Links from offline apps (e.g. Outlook, Tweetdeck, etc.)
• Missing tracking
• Untracked AdWords campaigns
• Untracked 3rd party shopping cart
• 302 directs
• Server stripping the gclid
• Javascript encoded links

Obviously broken or missing links and IDs should be fixed, but how about those links from PDFs, Word and other offline apps? Step forward the Google URL Builder. Simply by creating custom links via the URL Builder, you can easily share urls that will make much more sense in Analytics later.

In the following example:

http://www.t75.org/2012/06/when-you-should-ignore-bounce-rate-and-when-you-shouldnt/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=BounceRate

…I’ve created a link to my earlier article on bounce rates that I can share via Twitter. Breaking the url down, you see at the end the three attributes GA uses to differentiate this link:

• utm_source=twitter
• utm_medium=social
• utm_campaign=BounceRate

Using this bespoke link I’ll be able track visitors from Twitter much more effectively. Furthermore, these Twitter visitors will now be removed from the “catch-all” direct traffic pot, thereby making that collection of visitors much more accurate as well. Double win!

The Statement of Accomplishment is given to those who took the Apprentice track of the course and watched weekly lectures and took online quizzes. The full track looked great fun and quite involved but unfortunately time pressures didn’t allow me partake.

The course was run by Scott Klemmer, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, who did a really great job. So to him and the staff at Coursera (who experimented with some interesting teaching / learning methods), I say thank you!

(I should make clear that the online course does not affirm I was enrolled as a Stanford student in any way; it does not confer a Stanford grade; it does not confer a Stanford credit; it does not confer a Stanford degree or certificate; and it does not verify my identity! I just did it for fun!)

Fortunately there’s a shortcut key for that – Cmd+D. Very handy.

Just don’t use it in Finder! (It’ll delete the currently selected file/folder of course.)

Seems to be a bit of a conflict there?

This post isn’t about the various pros and cons of different wireframe tools or why or when you should wireframe. It is a quick “How-To” on something I’ve often wanted to do and finally had five minutes to learn. Hopefully, writing it down might help you (and help me remember how).

You’ll often have an object (a rectangle, a piece of text, etc.) that has styles applied to it that you’d like to copy to many other objects. In the example below I have a number of grey headlines (top and bottom bars) that I’d like to change to the new “Your-details-blue”:

Method 1. One-by-one

At the bottom of the main Omnigraffle document window, you’ll find the very useful “Style Tray” with individual style “chits” (to use the official Omnigraffle term):

In the screenshot above, I have selected my new heading and so the Style Tray shows each of the object’s individual properties, from left to right (starting with the purple box to the right of the cog icon):

• A summary of all the object’s styles
• Fill: Evening Blue (Oooooh, get me!)
• Stroke styles (in this case none are applied)
• Image styles (in this case none are applied)
• Shadows (in this case none are applied)
• Shape:Rectangle
• Text alignment

What’s really nice is that I can click and drag any of these chits over another object and that object will acquire that style. So for example, I could drag just the Fill chit to another object and that shape (or text) would become “Evening Blue”. Alternatively,  I could drag the first summary chit over another object and all the styles of my selected object would be applied (fill, stroke, image, shadow, etc.).

This is how I used to apply styles: slowly; one-by-one. If you’re only updating a few objects this is fine. When you have lots of objects to update it quickly gets boring.

Method Two: Using the Style Brush

I discovered the Format Painter in Microsoft Word many years ago and it quickly became a favourite. The Style Brush in Omnigraffle does much the same job:

• Select an object
• Click the Style Brush once
• Select another object

This will copy all the styles of the first selected object to the second. Very handy!

If you want to copy styles to more than one object (the purpose of this post!):

• Select an object
• Double-click the Style Brush
• Click on as many objects as your heart desires, one after another

Double-clicking any Omnigraffle tool selects it permanently so you can use it again and again (until you select another tool). So in this instance, I can copy all the styles of the first selected object to all of the objects I subsequently click on. To stop the Midas-like style-changing, click on any other tool to de-select the Style Brush.

Method Three: Using the Canvas Selection Inspector

I’ve only just discovered the Canvas Selection Inspector, but it looks really powerful.

The first square in the screenshot tells me I have 3 objects that have a grey background only (no text or borders etc.) and that none of them are currently selected (0/3). Clicking on that first square will select all three objects that match that style description (0/3 will become 3/3).

In the screenshot above I’ve clicked on the tenth square and that has selected the new Evening Blue heading style. (Unfortunately there’s no way to resize that Inspector so I can’t take a screenshot showing the whole of the third row, but rest assured the tenth square reads 1/1 indicating my one new heading is selected.)

So with my one Evening Blue object selected (and knowing that first square represents all my old headings) I can go back to my Style Tray (see #1 above) and drag the summary chit over the first square – and hey presto – all my boring old grey headings become Evening Blue in just a few movements!

Applying styles to multiple objects at once in Omnigraffle? Done!

As a UX designer, I use web stats a lot. Typically Google’s Analytics product is the go-to source with more site analytics than you can shake a stick at.

However I also have a fondness for StatCounter, especially after reading their Open Letter to Roger Capriotti of Microsoft, rubbishing his understanding of browser usage share data. I’ve been using StatCounter’s free service for years now and often recommend them to smaller companies because of the simplicity of their results and the ease with which novices can start to get some real insight on their sites.

For my own blog stats for this site, my favourite StatCounter page is undoubtedly “Recent Pageload Activity”. I have a modest readership and from this page I can easily see exactly where people are coming from (previous website & geographical location), as well as where they go next, where they exit, what browser they use and their ISP.

Increasingly, I’m seeing a Referring Link (the page the visitor was on before they hit your site) of the following form:

www.google.com.ua/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CGMQFjAC&url=
http%3A%2F%2Fwww.t75.org%2F2011%2F08%2Fhandy-finder-shortcut%2F&ei=ELLhT5SeLcXu-gavpbmdAw&usg=AFQjCNGqhzD-SwHsPkbxvXmjiAr_iM5n8g&sig2=vgJOia59rlFfYmszSkddzw

Clicking on this link takes me from StatCounter directly to my own website. That almost suggests that my site is self-referring visitors back to my site, or that people are searching for my exact url? Both situation are obviously very unlikely. For some time I assumed these visitors were coming from another Google property such as Reader.

What’s actually happening is that Google is hiding the referrer data through a redirect on the SERP. The links you see in the result listing look like they go straight to the website you’re interested in, but actually, if you inspect the link you’ll find a url of the type seen above. This allows Google to hide the q value from the referring string – used by so many stats packages.

Personally, I believe that as a user, that you should be able to hide your Google searches by using Google’s secure search (https). However, as Alex Wall says:

Paid advertisers continued to receive that data, however, a blow to integrity for Google, who claimed the switch was the sake of privacy. Sure, it was for the sake of privacy unless there was a chance that they could sell that data for money. Okay.
Read more

So what do all these url parameters actually mean? After some research I’ve tracked down the meaning of a few of these parameters and with your help, we might be able to track down the rest!

So that url again, broken down to it’s constituent parameters:

1. url?
2. sa=t
3. rct=j
4. q=
5. esrc=s
6. source=web
7. cd=3
8. ved=0CGMQFjAC
9. url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.t75.org%2F2011%2F08%2Fhandy-finder-shortcut%2F
10. ei=ELLhT5SeLcXu-gavpbmdAw
11. usg=AFQjCNGqhzD-SwHsPkbxvXmjiAr_iM5n8g
12. sig2=vgJOia59rlFfYmszSkddzw

1. url?

url is pretty easy. Google explains it themselves here:

The key difference between the [the old style url and the new] is that instead of “/search?” the URL contains a “/url?”. If you run your own analyses, be sure that you do not depend on the “/search?” portion of the URL to determine if a visit started with an organic search click. Google Analytics does not depend on the “/search?” string in the referrer, so users of Google Analytics will not notice a difference in their reports, but other analytics packages may need to adapt to this change in our referrer string to maintain accurate reports.

2. sa=t

Rank Panel have an useful table that lists a large number of Google’s parameters and certainly, if they had all of the parameter’s I’m seeing there wouldn’t be any need for this article! I’d urge you to read through it.

From that table, they define “sa” as a “User search behavior parameter” (where “sa=N”: User searched and “sa=X”: User clicked on related searches in the SERP).

But what about “sa=t”; t = true?

3. rct=j

I can’t find any information on rct. Interestingly, “j” is the only value I ever get. rct=receipt?

4. q=

This is meat of the query. Frustratingly this is absent  more often than present. Whether you believe this is to protect the privacy of Google’s users or an example of anti-competitive practice is up to you. Read a little more about it at SearchEngineLand.

Try searching by http (as opposed to https) and you’ll see all the q values are populated, reinforcing the idea that it’s the new secure search that hides your keywords.

5. esrc=s

It’s possible that esrc is linked to that blank query string. See http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2012/02/24/keyword-not-provided-esrc for more details. More conjecture from DC Storm:

Also included in the SSL search is an additional URL parameter, “ESRC”. This could be the indicator of the SSL search and also could be an acronym for “Encrypted Search”. However this is pure conjecture, but would be an opportunity for tool vendors to determine if the unencrypted or use SSL search was used. The accuracy of this remains to be seen.

And indeed, if I search Google via https I see esrc in the link parameters, if I search by http, esrc is absent. (Interestingly, when I search by http, all the q values (search query keywords) are populated, reinforcing the idea that it’s the new secure search that hides your keywords.)

6. source=web

Doesn’t take a genius to work this one out. But what would the other options be? Again, all my “source” values = web. There used to be a sourceid that coded for natural web searches, Google Tool bar searches, Firefox Tool bar etc. Ideas welcomed!

7. cd=3

This seems to indicate the ranking position of your link in the SERP. See SeoMoz for more.

8. ved=0CGMQFjAC

There has been some suggestion that the ved parameter refers to browser type. However, looking through my results, I see very different ved values for the same browser (browser as reported by Statcounter).

Update: www.seomanontroppo.com has some great insights into the codes used with ved, particularly with regard to News results. 

9. url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.t75.org%2F2011%2F08%2Fhandy-finder-shortcut%2F

This is the link to my site with various character encoded: e.g. %3A=”:” , %2F= “/” etc. Decoded to: http://www.t75.org/2011/08/handy-finder-shortcut/

10. ei=ELLhT5SeLcXu-gavpbmdAw

Obviously something that needs to be encoded. There’s some suggestion that this shows if the visitor has navigated the Google search pages by clicking “next”. But if “cd” really does mean I was ranked third, then the visitor wouldn’t have needed to click on the next link? Unless I was the third result on the second, third, etc. page?

11. usg=AFQjCNGqhzD-SwHsPkbxvXmjiAr_iM5n8g

Again, something too secret to share. USaGe? USerGoogle?

12. sig2=vgJOia59rlFfYmszSkddzw

Nada.

Can you help?

Bounce rate: represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and “bounce” (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site.

It’s easy to see why bounce rate is seen as important, after all, it’s featured prominently in all stats packages and it’s easily understood: if a person lands on your website and then immediately leaves, it feels like something is wrong.

But consider the customer who needs to find your telephone number or postal address. They hit your home page and because you’ve conveniently provided all of this information right there in your header, off they go, happy that your site has answered their question immediately – especially if they were in their car, on their smartphone, trying to find directions to your office. This is why it’s important to consider the source of your visitor in conjunction with their landing page. Your high bounce rate might just describe the single biggest category of visitor to your website: people coming from Google looking to get in touch.

And indeed, Matt Cutts agrees; when asked “Is Bounce Rate a Signal in Determining What Content May be Spam?”:

No. Cutts said the Google web spam team doesn’t use Google Analytics data. “It’s not a bad thing when someone finds their answer right away and bounces”, Matt said.

(via SearchEngineWatch)

Also consider that it’s entirely possible to reduce your bounce rate without any associated increase in conversion or increase in revenue:

• Moving key content onto a second page, e.g. your offer’s sign-up form
• Breaking a single landing page into two
• Adding tempting links to eye-catching, sensational content
• And most damagingly; replacing paid-for offers with free ones that give no long-term value

All of these techniques encourage visitors to move on to a second page (and therefore not “bounce”) but without any gain in value. It’s just a statistics trick and has no place in your conversion optimisation strategy.

This gives us a clue that bounce rate can be very misleading. Chris Rand has done some thinking on this:

I run many AdWords campaigns where the bounce rate can be 80% or more. You might think this means a large percentage of the people being attracted to the site aren’t finding what they wanted. What a waste. Hang on a minute though; AdWords allows you to send people to exactly the right page on your site, and it’s quite possible the page concerned has all the information you’re trying to give them. Indeed, I’d suggest that’s just what a good landing page should do! So the bounce rate includes everyone who found the site wasn’t what they wanted, plus everyone who found it was exactly what they did want. It’s just the total of the best visitors and the worst ones: a useless figure in isolation. [My emphasis]

This is the real kicker for me: if I have a stat that combines my perfect visitor with my least preferred visitor, what can I gain from obsessing over it?

Over at Orbit Media Studios, Andy Crestodina has some interesting thoughts to share:

Your bounce rate doesn’t matter, at least not for most sites. Why not? Because some of the most important activities in content marketing – blogging, social media, email marketing – result in a higher bounce rate.

If your bounce rate is below 65%, it’s too low. You’re not active enough in web marketing. Get blogging, get your newsletter out, be more active in social media, and your bounce rate will increase. [Again, my emphasis]

Mr J Spool at UIE suggests it might not be any more valuable that counting how many times the letter E is used on the home page.

Also consider the slightly separate example of blogs. As Avinash Kaushik points out at Occam’s Razor:

[Blogs] are a unique beast amongst online experiences: people come mostly only to read your latest post, they’ll read it and then they’ll leave. Your bounce rates will be high because of how that metric is computed, and in this scenario that is ok.

WiderFunnel.com also has some interesting examples to share (slightly rewritten here so they make more sense to me!):

Example #1: Consider a web page that has high natural search ranking (i.e. it appears in the first few results on the search engine’s results page (SERP)) for keywords that don’t result directly in sales. This page brings in visitors that you’re not specifically targeting (because they don’t make you any money). However, these non-target visitors aren’t hurting you so you can safely disregard them (unless you can figure out a new way of converting them into buyers of course!). Therefore your true bounce rate for your target visitors may be lower than you think.

Example #2: Another page is doing a very good job of communicating your message, so more visitors that aren’t ready to convert can leave rather than navigating the site to try and figure out what you sell. This isn’t a bad thing and, conversely, it might allow for a relatively high lead generation or purchase conversion rate.

So it seems clear that bounce rate shouldn’t be relied on too heavily. However there are times when it can be useful.

When to use bounce rate

Measure the bounce rate for your traffic sources

It might well be useful to see the quality of traffic coming from different sources. You may discover that Google is sending you visitors who just aren’t right for your product or are too early in their purchasing journey. Instead you might discover that some great prospects are coming from your Facebook page because you’ve interacted with them and they have a great feeling about your company. Remember to consider your source/landing page combination though – maybe Google sent these bouncers straight to the content they needed (e.g. your contact details – see above).

Compare bounce rates across similar pages

Your bounce rate can be a useful comparison tool. Use it to compare similar pages or the same page after you’ve made changes to it. What’s important now is the change in bounce rate, not the rate per se.

Other examples

Please let me know when you use bounce rate and why you find it useful.

It used to be fairly universal that an asterisk (not an Asterix as many people want to call it!) marked fields as mandatory (sometimes the label text is also made bold, and possibly even coloured red). However this question was raised again recently in a discussion following a bout of user reviews. Throughout our user reviews, the majority of users correctly identified fields marked this way.

However, we’ve recently been recommending a different approach. Instead of marking out the required fields with an asterisk to denote a mandatory field, we’ve turned this on its head and now we suggest marking only those fields that aren’t required - as optional.

Hasn’t this recognisable pattern been around for long enough that we shouldn’t mess with it? The “Consistency and standards” heuristic states:

Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions.

Couldn’t the “required asterisk” be considered as a platform convention?

My thinking goes like this:

• The users usually comes to a form expecting to fill things out – it’s implicit in the nature of a form
• We should only include fields the user has to complete (why are you even showing your users fields that don’t have to be filled out?)
• If you have to add optional fields, it’s more helpful to label them as optional because it reduces the amount of stuff the user feels they have to do
• Seeing lots of asterisks is distracting and leads to messy layout

UX Movement agrees:

Users will also tend to search for all the red asterisks on a form to make sure they have filled out all the required fields before submission. The red asterisks make users more fearful about making errors, which can affect your form completion rate. While filling out forms isn’t an activity to get excited about, users should at least be able to fill out a form without stress or confusion. Red asterisks put users on edge before they even begin.

Doesn’t sound so great, does it?

As Luke Wroblewski writes:

Literally including the phrase “optional” after a label is much clearer than any visual symbol you could use to mean the same thing. Someone may always wonder ‘what does this asterisk mean?’ and have to go hunting for a legend that explains things.

For further reading, see Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks - it’s a great resource for all things <form>.

So that’s how to do it: include only the fields you really need and mark the optional ones “(optional)”. Also make sure your error messages are clear – but that’s for another post.

Mark optional fields as such

Update: Rian van der Merwe has written about this and a few other great usability no-no’s on his blog.

I’d love to hear how you approach this issue, let me know in the comments.

In the past I’ve always put it down to hardware performance, multiple Apps being open, my internet connection or just the age of the phone.

However, after listening to the always fascinating Peter-Paul Koch talk with Jen Simmons on The Web Ahead, I’m now much better informed. 

My daily commute is pretty quick now but it does mean these extra long podcasts take a lot longer to get through than when I was commuting to London. However, it’s really worth listening to this one all the way through. As you would imagine from PPK, there’s plenty of information to take in but it’s always relevant and insightful.

So rather than try and summarise the whole interview, I thought I’d highlight one section that I found particularly interesting – where PPK explains why you experience a delay in clicking links in smartphones. (This isn’t going to be a word-for-word transcript but it captures the parts that interested me. For the whole interview head over to The Web Ahead on 5×5).

“In principle, a touch event is very simple. If the user touches the screen… a touchstart event fires, if a user moves his finger a touchmove event fires, if he releases the screen a touchend event fires. And that’s basically it.”

“The complicated part of this is, what do we do with the mouse events, like mouseover, mouseout, etc? In theory we should say these events don’t make any sense on a touchscreen device because it doesn’t have a mouse. The problem is there are far too many websites out there that depend on the mouse events, so mobile browser vendors are required to support them too.”

“So what they do now, is that when you touch the screen, a touchstart event fires first and then all the rest fire; mouseover, mousemove, mousedown, mouseup, mouseclick, they all fire once at the start of your touch on a touchscreen device. Which basically means that the mouse events are hopeless on mobile…but the click events are fairly safe. So if you have a website that depends on click events, don’t worry, that will work fine on a mobile device.”

“However, if you’ve done some testing with the click event on mobile devices, you may have noticed that it usually takes a little while, around 300 milliseconds, for the click events to actually filter through. So basically you touch a link and you expect to be taken to the next age immediately, that does not happen, the browser waits for a little while.”

Research into response times tells us that at 300ms is at the “level of responsiveness [that] is essential to support the feeling of direct manipulation. In other words, “the outcome feels like it was caused by the user, not the computer.” So this is an acceptable delay and I am left feeling that yes, I did cause the link to open, but the delay is definitely noticeable. It’s fortunate that this delay is acceptable because there’s nothing we can do about it:

“That is the main problem we’re seeing right not with touch events…that touch action is overloaded. Because at the moment you do that, the OS has no clue as to what you might do next. You might release the screen immediately again which means you clicked on this and I should follow the link, or submit the form or whatever; you can start to move your finger which means you’re going to scroll now; or you can add a second finger to pinch/zoom.”

“The point is that the OS has to wait for a little while to figure out what you’re actually trying to do and that is something that cannot be avoided. That’s why it’s always the case that when you click on a link it takes a little while for the browser to figure out that you have actually clicked on a link and that’s absolutely insolveable.”

You can find out more by downloading Peter-Paul’s presentation on touch events, given back in April 2011.

Have you ever walked into a room and completely forgotten what you came in for? Judging by the various websites and Facebook pages dedicated to the phenomenon, “Roomnesia” is a familiar occurrence.

Recent research by Gabriel Radvansky et al [1] goes some way to explain this phenomenon and in doing so, suggests methods to overcome the temporary amnesia we suffer. In this post I’ll outline his research, his team’s findings and discuss the application to the field of user experience design.

Psychologists believe that memories are laid down in the brain in a way analogous to the chapters of a book. Information stored in the current chapter is much easier to recall than information stored in a previous one. Psychologists call these discrete sections memory episodes. Radvansky’s findings suggest that the simple act of walking through a doorway creates a new memory episode, thereby making it harder for us to recall the previous episode – i.e. what it was we came into the room for.

In their experiments, Radvansky and his team had participants walk from room to room, through doorways, picking up objects from a table and depositing them on a subsequent table in another room. Once picked up, the object was hidden from their view in a bag or box that accompanied them. Participants were then questioned about the objects they had with them at regular stages: on entering a new room through an open doorway, or after crossing halfway through a room. Radvansky then showed the participants an object and asked them to recall if it was either the object they were currently carrying or the one they’d just set down.

The outcome of their research showed that: “…walking through doorways serves as an event boundary, thereby initiating the updating of one’s event model – i.e. the creation of a new episode in memory”.

To counter alternative explanations provided by contextual memory theorists, Radvansky ran the experiment several times and with a number of variations. (Contextual memory theory suggests that it is easier to recall information in an environment similar to that which we first stored the memory than in an environment that’s very different – remember your teacher’s advice not to listen to music when revising!). Interestingly; in two of the three variations, Radvansky tested subjects in virtual environments – three-dimensional recreations displayed on a computer monitor. In other words, you don’t need to be physically active to create new memory episodes.

If memory is affected in this way, what impact does that have on the journey our visitors take through our websites? Should we avoid making visitors walk through form split across multiple pages? Should we cram everything that’s important on the homepage? Be constantly reminding them why they’re here and where they are?

The booking summary

A lot of my work focusses on keeping the user engaged throughout a booking path. There are many reasons why customers will drop-off during the course of a booking:

• they might find the final price too expensive
• account creation is too taxing
• the number of fields is daunting
• shipping costs are excessive
• they’re distracted by the possibility of a voucher discount and never return
• And possibly: they forget how great the product they are about to buy is!

And so one of the key elements we always display in the booking path is a summary of where the user is now. Going back to Radvansky’s experiment above – I like to think we’re reminding customers what’s in their bag.

Other techniques

So with the research fresh in our minds, what other techniques can we employ to improve the user’s experience?

Don’t expect the user to remember codes (voucher codes, trip codes, product IDs)

Product SKU‘s and trip codes might mean something to you but your user doesn’t care. Never make them remember information from one screen to another, there’s simply no need.

Ensure page titles match links leading to them

A lot of things can happen between clicking on a link and landing on a page – make sure it’s obvious why the visitor is at the resulting page. This could be a “design thing” (the branding matches) or a “copywriting thing” (the page titles are meaningful), just make sure it’s a “done thing”.

Use natural language that your customers understand

Forcing users to learn and remember new terms isn’t a great strategy. As well as creating doubt in their mind and making them feel stupid, having to remember a new definition will add more friction to the experience.

Make your site memorable as the repository of information

Recent research [PDF, 200Kb] suggests the Internet is becoming an external part of our memory and that we are experiencing “reduced memory for the actual information, but enhanced memory for where to find the information.” Simply put: we can’t remember the name of the director of Memento but we can remember where to find the information (e.g. IMDb). By making your website memorable as the store of relevant information, you might gain return visitors. Read more at UX Mag.

In summary

It’s easy to forget what you went into a room for. Make your visitors journey through your website less painful by offering memory prompts and reducing the cognitive load.

This post was considerably re-worked for publication at UX Booth - read the updated version there.

[1] Radvansky, G., Krawietz, S., and Tamplin, A. (2011). Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Further explorations. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64 (8), 1632-1645 DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2011.571267