If new products and services are to positively impact our lives, they must find a gateway into our daily routines. The familiar done differently is the way to users’ minds and hearts — and sometimes their stomachs.People Don’t Want Something Truly New, They Want the Familiar Done Differently.
Market research has shown that users have higher engagement with, and generally prefer both micro-form video (< 1minute) and cinemagraphs (stills with subtle movement), over longer-form videos and still images. Animated GIFs are great for user experience.Evolution of <img>: Gif without the GIF
For anyone involved in design decisions online, this study should serve as a warning to fight the natural tendency for pages - particularly home pages - to get cluttered over time. Think about which content is really important for users and focus on (only) that content.Study Results: There's a clear relationship between “clean” web design and user engagement.
The more content you present on a page, the more is competing for your users' attention. Attention however is a limited budget that needs to be spent wisely. There's only so much that will stand out to a user in the first couple of seconds.The science behind why simple, uncluttered design works best
Start with two metrics: One user acquisition metric at the top of the funnel that measures how many new users are signing up and taking their first action. And then one user engagement metric further down the funnel that measures how often these new users engage with the product over time. What To Do If Your Product Isn’t Growing
Just keep in mind that the sample data you’ll receive on launch day may be skewed. A massive amount of visits can bring a lot of people who aren’t good fits for your offering, which would negatively impact conversion rates, retention, etc.The modern web design process: launch
A couple examples of this are Snapchat and Musical.ly, both products that are immensely popular but have fairly friction-full products. As Josh Elman argued over a year ago, the genius of these services was that they were optimizing for shareable design over intuitive design. In other words, instead of reducing friction, some friction was intentionally inserted to create opportunities for users to show and teach other users how to use the product.In Products, as in Life, Not All Friction Is Bad
