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Alex Horstmann’s user experience, usability, design, eCommerce and design bookmarks for November 19th.

• How To Use the “Seven Deadly Sins” to Turn Visitors into Customers
  Since the beginning of time, people have exploited the human desire to sin so that they could achieve their goals. Finding out what causes people to sin helps us understand the triggers which prompt people to take an action. The Web has made it even easier to exploit these tendencies to sin, in order to build user engagement and excitement about your service or product. In this article we’ll show examples of how successful companies exploit the tendency to conduct all the famous Seven Deadly Sins, and in turn generate momentum with their website visitors. Ready? Let’s roll.
• Expedia Acquires FlightTrack App Developer Mobiata
  Expedia has just announced that it has acquired developer Mobiata, the creator of popular mobile travel application FlightTrack. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!

Alex Horstmann’s user experience, usability, design, eCommerce and design bookmarks for November 18th.

• Weary of online booking, clients return to travel agents – USATODAY.com
  Vacationers who hire Suzanne Burr book their travel the old-fashioned way. They tell Burr where they want to go and what they need when they arrive, and leave it to her to make it happen.
• Google AdWords: Website Optimizer Help
  This handy calculator helps you estimate the potential duration of your experiment. Try out various numbers of combinations and see how they affect the length of the experiment. For pages with very high traffic, the differences may be negligible.
• The Battle Between Thoughts and Emotions in Persuasion — PsyBlog
  Nowadays people tend to use 'I think' and 'I feel' interchangeably. For some this is a linguistic faux pas, but what about psychologically? Does it make any difference whether what you say is couched in 'thinking' or 'feeling' terms?
• Mobile User Experience Trends on the Horizon | UX Magazine
  The majority of the world's digital experiences now happen through mobile devices linked by wireless networks. It is this untethered medium that is defining future trends in user behavior, sweeping away the legacy of interaction methods established for fixed computing scenarios.
• Verified by Visa and Mastercard SecureCode are broken and need to be fixed | cxpartners
  Verified by Visa and Mastercard SecureCode are broken. At cxpartners we’ve watched hundred of users on e-commerce websites and seen some serious trust and usability issues that are hurting e-commerce. Our clients have seen conversion rates drop because of it. E-consultancy published an article over a year ago with specific examples of 3D secure harming sales.
• Failure by Design / FINCH
  Losses feel worse than gains feel good. Rationally we should treat losses and gains the same. But that isn’t the way we are built. Consider how people make decisions when buying and selling stocks. Most people will sell stocks that go up in value, but they will tend to hold onto stocks long term that are going down in value. Selling the losing stock will make the loss tangible and the feeling of that is much worse to deal with. No one wants to lose. It’s painful.1
• Introduction | The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web
  Robert Bringhurst’s book The Elements of Typographic Style is on many a designer’s bookshelf and is considered to be a classic in the field. Indeed the renowned typographer Hermann Zapf proclaims the book to be a must for everybody in the graphic arts, and especially for our new friends entering the field.

Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!

I bookmark a lot of pages and sites which I find interesting, inspirational and informative every day! I’d like to share some of them with you here. In general they are about user experience, usability, UCD, accessbility and design. In general, but not always!!

• Readability: the Optimal Line Length – Baymard Institute
  Having the right amount of characters on each line is key to the readability of your text. It shouldn’t merely be your design that dictates the width of your text, it should also be a matter of legibility.
• A List Apart: Articles: Art Direction and Design
  Glorifying the supposed arrival of art direction on the web is one of the latest trends in interactive design. There are several galleries devoted to it. There’s even a plug-in for it. Sadly, many designers don’t understand the difference between design and art direction; sadder still, many art directors don’t either: Art direction gives substance to design. Art direction adds humanity to design.
• How to Communicate Value and Engage Users Instantly | UX Movement
  Does your web site offer value to users? The chances are that it does, but users can’t see it. If users can’t see the value of your web site, there’s no chance they’ll stick around for long.
• Usability for Handheld Devices Versus Computers :: UXmatters
  Many people now use different mobile devices—including smartphones, digital cameras, MP3 players, eReaders, and GPSs (Global Positioning System)—in particular contexts. How are users interacting with these devices when they are away from their computers? How does the design of a device—including the controls its hardware provides, its interaction models, and its form factor—determine the design and usability of the software applications that run on it? How can we understand user experience on the move?
• Conversion Room: Introducing Web Analytics TV
  We’re excited to introduce Web Analytics TV – a fun and interactive source of information for everything Analytics related. This exciting series of YouTube videos is presented by Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski from the Google Analytics team. You can ask questions, and vote for your favourite questions from other viewers, via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and then have our experts answer them in the next installment.

Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!

I bookmark a lot of pages and sites which I find interesting, inspirational and informative every day! I’d like to share some of them with you here. In general they are about user experience, usability, UCD, accessbility and design. In general, but not always!!

• 54% of H.264 Web Video Now Available in HTML5 – Mac Rumors
  Media search site MeFeedia today released the results of a new survey showing that 54% of H.264-encoded video on the Internet is currently available in HTML5 format, double the share of just five months ago. The rapid increase has been driven by the explosion in the mobile industry, led in part by Apple's iPhone and its lack of support for Adobe's Flash platform.
• Customer Service: A Culture, Not a Department
  As the iconic Nordstrom Inc prepares to open its newest store in Cincinnati’s Kenwood Towne Center It seemed logical to reflect on the essence of what makes great customer service.
• HOW TO: Build an App for Your Small Business
  So, you’re a small or medium-sized business, and you want to build a Facebook, mobile or web app. You’re undertaking something that’s both simple and ambitious, and you’re probably looking for a bit of help.
• Wireframes Magazine » Site Architecture Stencil for OmniGraffle
  Austin recently came up with a sitemap or site architecture OmniGraffle stencil that makes room for some extra description. In the stencil, beside each page title there is now a little space for an explanation of what the page is about. He shared the downloadable stencil which can be obtained right from his site. Awesome. Thanks!
• Persuasive purchase behaviour – Understanding the power of the Goldilocks Effect
  Persuading people to commit to a transaction online can be achieved by applying any number of psychological techniques. And although the term ‘persuasion’ may, at times, been seen to have certain negative connotations there are plenty of ways in which we can encourage behaviour through a well designed interface without resorting to deception or the use of ‘dark patterns’.

Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!

I bookmark a lot of pages and sites which I find interesting, inspirational and informative every day! I’d like to share some of them with you here. In general they are about user experience, usability, UCD, accessbility and design. In general, but not always!!

• State of the Internet: Mobile Web’s Explosive Growth: Tech News "
  In 1999, it was the rapid growth of wired web services that was the top story. Fast-forward to today, and it is all about the massive and seemingly unstoppable growth of the mobile Internet that is all the rage. The demand for the mobile Internet (and its subset, the mobile Web) is upending all expectations and predictions. Between Apple and Google, about 500,000 new portable Internet devices are getting connected to the Internet.
• Do iPhone or Android Users Watch More Video? (And Other Video Trends)
  Mobile video optimization firm Bytemobile has just released its most recent "Mobile Minute Metrics" report, a look at wireless users' video consumption trends and behavior based on metrics from a cross-section of nearly 2 billion Bytemobile customers in 58 countries around the world.
• The Value of an Existing Customer / Flowtown (@flowtown)
  The value of an existing customer
• Thoughts on UX Design – By Jon Searle
  I carried out a survey with 200 people to investigate the emotional values associated with certain colours, the results are shown below followed by a brief discussion. You can get the basic outcomes of the research just through studying the image below, however.
• LukeW | Killing Sign Up Forms
  In my recent Sign Up Forms Must Die presentation, I outlined a few solutions for getting people engaged with digital services without asking them to fill in a bunch of input fields up front. In case you are interested in trying one of these alternatives to sign-up forms, here are some resources to get you started.

Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!