Your users rely on link text to navigate through your site. These small and unassuming bits of UX copy contribute substantially to the findability, discoverability, and accessibility of your content.
The links that best fulfill those roles are:
Specific
Sincere
Substantial
Succinct
Specific
A link’s primary purpose is to communicate to users what they’ll find on the other side of a click. Vague or repetitive language fails that purpose.
One of the most common link failures is the generic and unhelpful Learn more.
Not Specific: Mailchimp used vague Learn more links throughout its site.
I’m generally impressed with Mailchimp’s copy. (I even use it as an example of good writing in the...
January is the time to initiate in-depth user research to identify the deeper reasons that people leave your site without buying, as well as how to increase shopping cart size for those who do buy. Most likely, you'll find that your site and its content require substantial changes. By getting an
However, using just those common filter categories across your site won’t be enough to help people make choices. You’ll obviously need different filter categories for appliances than you’ll need for adoptable pets or rental cars. But even then, you’ll want different filters for washing
We live in an era of experiences, be they services or products, and we’ve come to have high expectations for these experiences. They are becoming more complex in nature as information and technology continues to evolve. With each evolution comes a new set of unmet needs. While design thinking is
5G and Blockchain: What to Expect
However, since all devices must have individual addresses and on-chain transactions, scalability needs to improve on both layers. Blockchains can benefit from the massive increases in bandwidth and range as well as the reductions in latency that 5G networks provide. These network improvements could
Is Bitcoin Accelerating Our Global Warming?
And everyday innovators are taking up this task to do just that. Plus, computer chips also continue to advance by the day, improving the efficiency of computation in relation to power intake. However, the main downside of this approach is as long as there is money to be made, more miners will
Blockchain Success Stories Show Valuable Opportunities
If you look past the origins of old-line companies, however, some projects display the breadth and depth of the ways that blockchain will continue to be adapted to solve some significant global business issues. That, in turn, can serve as a valuable primer for tomorrow’s blockchain
Beyond Usability: 3 User Experiences Reshaping Their Industries
At first, you might think that such an innovation in the field of reverse logistics should not be discussed in a UX article, but many pieces of the user experience are improved by optimizing this backend operation. A traditional UI-only solution to the problem of high demand would be to clearly
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UX Mapping Methods Compared: A Cheat Sheet
Think of service blueprints as a part two to customer journey maps. Similar to customer journey maps, blueprints are instrumental in complex scenarios spanning many service-related offerings. Blueprinting is an ideal approach to experiences that are omnichannel, involve multiple touchpoints, or
Five User Requirements for Online Ads
This dimension refers to physical obstruction of content. For example, a modal advertisement with a dark background will obscure the primary content, and a persistent banner will physically occupy many pixels on a page, thus pushing information below the fold — especially on a mobile device. On
Contextual Menus: Delivering Relevant Tools for Tasks
Swipe gestures are not deployed consistently in all lists, so people don’t always think to use them and as a result, the gestures become less discoverable. Swipe actions are accelerators intended to speed up interactions for power users, but the actions available through the gesture should also
When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods
While most usability studies should rely more on behavior, methods that use self-reported information can still be quite useful to designers. For example, card sorting provides insights about users' mental model of an information space, and can help determine the best information architecture
UX Research Cheat Sheet
When deciding where to start or what to focus on first, use some of these top UX methods. Some methods may be more appropriate than others, depending on time constraints, system maturity, type of product or service, and the current top concerns. It’s a good idea to use different or alternating
WP Engine Participates in the Day of Understanding
Diversity has long been an important topic for WP Engine. CEO Heather Brunner often says “diversity attracts diversity.” This means that as a company naturally attracts and retains diverse talent, that diversity is sustained from the inside by employee referrals. Ultimately, the
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Fortune Names WP Engine a Best Place to Work in 2018 .
At WP Engine, we believe our people are the core of every success, award, milestone and every achievement. That’s because employees who truly feel empowered and validated by their workplace are energized to delight and inspire the customer in every interaction. When new employees walk through the
WP Engine Participates in the Day of Understanding
Diversity has long been an important topic for WP Engine. CEO Heather Brunner often says “diversity attracts diversity.” This means that as a company naturally attracts and retains diverse talent, that diversity is sustained from the inside by employee referrals. Ultimately, the
Better Link Labels: 4Ss for Encouraging Clicks
For example, one link from Emory University’s homepage reads, Restoring vision and hope. What does that mean? Hope for what? Vision for the future? The meaning only becomes clear when the text below the link is read. That descriptive text is necessary for the reader to understand that the link
UX Guidelines for Recommended Content
The higher these individualized recommendation areas appeared on the site’s homepage, the more likely it was that users noticed and used them. For example, Amazon included several clearly personalized content areas near the top of the homepage, as well as throughout the long-scrolling page, and
Journey Mapping in Real Life: A Survey of UX Practitioners
Perhaps the most important shared insights from the professionals surveyed were the responses to the question, “When does journey mapping fail?” Respondents shared their stories of when journey mapping was a fruitless endeavor because it was not shared, no buy-in occurred, the map wasn’t
CSS conversion of my Radio weblog
I’ve done a re-design of my Radio weblog, using CSS. Look ma, no tables! Yes, it’s now a tableless design. I’m doing my bit for the web standards cause, although I haven’t yet achieved 100% XHTML validation. For my re-design I used a CSS Zen Garden design by Michael Landis
The Way Forward: Responsibly Deployed Facial Recognition
At Trueface, we are partnering with like-minded businesses to enable them to make immediate, informed decisions by applying pattern recognition technology to their existing camera infrastructure. Like many facial recognition companies, we acknowledge the implicit bias in publicly available training
Data Lake vs. Data Warehouse: Which Is the Best Data Architecture?
Complicating things further is the “data marketplace.” Unlike the first two concepts, this isn’t an architecture but rather an interface to a data lake that enables those outside of the IT team, such as business analysts, to its contents. Through a search function, it allows users
Production Quality Over Cost: What Really Generates Engaging Video Advertising
The research found that the $10,000 video ad performed twice as well across all ad formats compared to the $1,000 and $100,000 video ads. The $10,000 video only had about half the Cost Per Install (CPI) compared to the other video ads. For example, on YouTube, the $10,000 video ad had an average
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A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
Finally, Hathaway sees this as a unique opportunity for the United States to work with countries around the world, and with organizations on an extremely local level. “We cannot succeed if our government works in isolation,” she added. It requires “leading from the top” from
Elements to Help You Develop Emotional Intelligence
You took some time off work to get some extra chores done around your home. You need a break and decide that a 15-minute break is what you want to take. During your break you became lost in your thoughts and you’re in a quasi-hypnotic state. You glance over at the clock only to notice that it
Better Link Labels: 4Ss for Encouraging Clicks | TV Meets the Web
TV Meets the Web
The figure shows one of the ideas we developed in SunSoft's Worlds Without Windows project as a user interface for hyperlinks from a TV show to the Web: The anchor of a television show ("Jane") tells the viewers that there is more information about some story at their website. She makes a throwing
Beyond Blue Links: Making Clickable Elements Recognizable
With that said, the flat-design trend (a style of interface design that emphasizes 2-D flat illustrations and is well exemplified by iOS 7 and Windows 8) has some website designers taking the minimalist approach to the extreme. The idea behind flat design is to simplify the interface. However
Top 10 Enduring Web-Design Mistakes
Users on BAM Construction’s site wanted details about construction projects, but weren’t sure if the information would fall under Who We Are, What We Do, or How We Do It. Most started in What We Do, but that section contained overviews of the type of work the organization offered to clients
