When designing a UI or landing page that has a desired action, I like to revisit the principals learned in an excellent book by Barry Schwartz called ”The Paradox of Choice“.

There are three main principals I’ve taken away from The Paradox of Choice:

1. The more options people consider, the more buyer’s regret they have.
2. The more options people consider, the less fulfilling the ultimate outcome.
3. Most important: The more options people have, the less likely they are to make a choice.

These three principles can be tough to use when designing a UI or a web page because our instincts tell us that more = more when in reality it is quite the opposite.

Here’s a few tips for improving your user experience using these principals:

Strip out the bells and whistles.
Unless they directly aid in getting your users from Point A -> B, loose em.

Get rid of fluffy copy.
Face it, when trying to accomplish something, people don’t read, they skim. Fluffy copy just slows them down and waists precious time. Chances are that if you need lots of text to describe something, that something is too complicated. If you must have a block of copy, re-write it down to the point where is says the same thing in as few words as possible.

Dont give users a bunch of different ways to view the same information.
Determine the best way and present it that way. Any time I’ve ever built a UI with lots of views types, usability testing forces me to choose the best and strip out the rest.

Present one task or call to action per screen.
Every screen should have one clear call to action or end goal. It’s better to have many screens that lead the user down a path than one page that does it all.

Using a CSS reset has saved me a lot of time and frustration with cross-browser styling. It is annoying however that most reset style scripts reset every element in the html spec…most of which you’ll likely never use on your project.

Tuhin over at Inspiring Pixel wrote a good post on the pros and cons to using a css reset, and also provides a bunch of different reset scripts based on your needs. I’ll definitely be referencing this for future projects.

This makes me wonder though, is there a tool out there that can generate a reset script for you based on the elements you know you’ll be using on your project? If not maybe I’ll go build one.

Smashing Magizine published a great list of thought provoking user experience presentations by the industry’s top experts. A few of my favorite are Jesse James Garett’s (Adaptive Path) “The State of User Experience“, Nick Fink’s (Blue Flavor) “UX Best Practaces“, and Leah Buley’s (Adaptive Path) “A UX team of one“, which I had the pleasure of attending in person at SXSW in 2009.

It’s an exciting time to be in the user experience business!

I’ve been working for some time on revamping the user kind site and my portfolio with a fresh look and some fancy jQuery. Today I’m happy to launch User Kind 2.0.

This was a design idea I had many years ago for a flash site that never came to fruition. After working with jQuery over the past year, I wanted to see how far i could push it to behave like a flash site. As it turns out I was able to acomplish everything I wanted (and more). The biggest hurdle was ie7 (surprise, surprise), but was eventually able to bend the code to work for most browsers.

The best thing that came out of this effort was what I learned in the process. jQuery is a truly powerful tool and is shaping the future of the web…I’m really looking forward to using it every chance I get.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of “The Tipping Point”, “Blink”, and the new book “Outliers”, gave a TED talk that I find really interesting.

For the past couple years I’ve been working on iLovePhotos with an amazing team of talented people. It has been a long and enlightening journey, and I’m really proud to announce that today is the day we launch!

Visit www.iLovePhotos.com and download your copy today!

Wow, I just learned the hard way what happens when you dont update wordpress. This blog was hacked and injected with about 2mb worth of spam links. The script also went in and changed the file permissions on pretty much everything, adding extra headache in getting things fixed.

I found out about this because google sent me an email saying that my blog was removed from the google index, stating exactly why.

Now that I’m running the latest wordpress, I’ve temporarily lost my custom theme, so I’m rolling with the  default for the time being.

UPDATE: I’m now using the "wordpress automatic upgrade " plugin, which makes updating a snap so you can retain your custom theme and plugins. Awesome!

Some of the best feedback you can ever receive on your product is the unsolicited and indirect kind. Lets face it, most people are more honest about their opinions when there are no hurt feelings at stake.  Have you ever wondered what people are saying about you, your company, or your product when you’re not around? I dont know about you, but if somebody says something about anything I’ve ever worked on, I want to know about it.

Companies are getting smarter about tracking what is said about them on them on web.

My good friend Greg over at Urban Monarch likes to write posts that go something like…”{ company name }, if you can hear me, we’d really like { product name } to review on our site”. 9 times out of 10, the company will contact them for an address of where to send the product. Hey Greg…post a comment if you find this post (i dont think he follows my blog).

Recently, i posted a tweet on twitter…”I’m excited to make my first screencast using Screenflow”. A couple of hours later, i get a reply tweet from the makers of screenflow saying “let us know how it goes…and be sure to post your work on our screencast site…”. I was floored and instantly compelled to provide feedback to them on anything and everything Screenflow. Hey Vara Software, post a reply if you find this post.

How are companies doing this? Are they telepathic?
What worked for Miss Cleo does not work for all (Miss Cleo, post a reply if you sense this post). The trick here is to get the feedback to come to you so you are not spending a lot of precious time scouring the internet for related feedback. There’s no better technology for this than RSS. Here’s a few of the most effective tools I have found so far:

1. Twitter
   You can track tweets on twitter by typing in “track” followed by “search term”….so “track user kind” will send me updates to any posts that contain “user kind”. You can also track any activity on your twitter username: “track @twitterUserName”.
2. search.twitter.com
   Search all tweets and subscribe to the results via RSS
3. FriendFeed
   FriendFeed aggregates information from a bunch of different social networks and websites…twitter, flickr, facebook, blogs, and 40 or so others. This is probably the most useful site for keeping track of what is said because you can type in any search term, and subscribe to the results as an RSS feed. For example, here’s what people are saying about Screenflow
4. Technorati
   Want to track what people blog about you? Try searching Technorati and subscribe to the results as an RSS feed.
5. Google Blog Search
   Another blog search engine where you can subscribe to the results via RSS
6. BlogPulse
   Track conversations and subscribe to the results via RSS

There you have it. You are now armed with some great tools on getting more in tune with what people are saying about you on the interwebs. If you know of any others, please post em!

We’ve reached a point on the internet where page loads are unnecessary and instant gratification is expected. AJAX has become the new standard for how we retrieve and post information. Pagination has always been one of those tedious and annoying necessities for breaking up information, and the time has come to put an end to it!

If there’s anything that iPhone email or Google Reader has taught us, it’s that pagination sucks. Once you use either of these products, going back to the “old way” of pagination will make you want to go do some yoga breathing exercises (or am I the only one?).

Why pagination sucks:

• when you’re on page 3, all the content you’ve loaded from pages 1 and 2 are now inaccessible without clicking your browser’s back button a few times…then scrolling back to the information you wanted.
• Target areas of pagination links are normally tiny and hard to quickly find.
• Pagination causes unnecessary server load when people request previously loaded information via pagination links.

A better way : AJAX “Load more”:

• Use AJAX to load additional content below existing content without refreshing the page
• Have two HUGE buttons: “Load next 20…” and “Load All…”
• For textual content, add a visual indicator to separate every 20 or so items to aid in knowing where you currently are in the list

I know you might be saying to yourself…”Dude, your blog still has this crappy pagination!”. Yes, I am fully aware that my wordpress site you’re viewing does not utilize this. My current endeavor of changing how we organize and share our photos takes up most of my time these days. That is why I would encourage you to go and write a wordpress plugin for me and the rest of the blogosphere to solve this problem

My good colleague Oliver just linked me to this awesome wirefaming stencil kit from Yahoo!. These stencils contain just about every common element you’d need for wireframing anything from websites to iPhone apps. They even provide all kinds of different formats (Visio, PDF, SVG…to name a few).

Here’s a list of the different stencils located in the zip file:

 Here’s some direct download links:
OmniGraffle
Visio (XML)
PDF
PNG
SVG