If you’re an app developer, your app’s rating is the lifeblood of your app’s success. I wrote an article over at Mobile Orchard that outlines some tools and techniques for improving your app store rating.

Captchas are annoying and only exist to combat spam. I’ve been using a technique for the past year that doesn’t require a captcha and I haven’t received a single piece of spam email.

Here’s how:

1. Create a form and set the form action to # (we dont want spam bots to know where the form is being submitted to).
2. dont use a submit button, instead use an <a href=”#” class=”submit”>Submit</a>
3. Use jquery to trigger the post when the ‘.submit’ link is clicked.

Here’s the jQuery code I use to do the form post:

$('.submit').click(function(){
	  // get the text that the user put into the form
	  var name = $('input#contact-name').val();
	  var email = $('input#contact-email').val();    	
	  var message = $('textarea#contact-message').val();   
          // prepare it for an ajax post 
          var dataString = 'name='+ name + '&email=' + email + '&message=' + message;  
	
          // post the form to the page that hosts your email script
	       $.ajax({  
	       type: "POST",  
	       url: "/a/contact/",  
	       data: dataString,  
	       success: function() {  
	         $('.contactform form').fadeOut();
	         $('.contactform form').html("<h3>Thanks for reaching out!</h3>")  
	         .fadeIn(function() {  
	            $('#formage');  
	          });  
	            }  
	          });  
	        return false;
	    
	});

I’m really pumped with the innovations happening around mobile app development right now, and user experience is a growing focus as a driving factor in overall app store success. It’s one of the reasons I created AppifyWP.

I’ve written a guest post over at Mobile Orchard to help app developers build a great user experience for their apps. The principals of the article are fairly universal and can be applied to just about any project, mobile or not.

I’m excited to announce a side project that Derrick Petzold and myself have been working on that is finally ready to be consumed by the public.

The Problem

Browsing YouTube clips is a cumbersome task. The clips are short, and you spend more time clicking around than actually watching videos. You cant really just kick-back and watch YouTube like you can your TV. We need the best of the web presented like a TV show…like a continual Tosh.0 without Tosh. We need something on the web that you can turn on, kick-back, and be entertained with no cable connection required.

Welcome to CrowdTube.tv

With CrowdTube.tv we take the most entertaining and trending YouTube videos as voted by the masses, then present them back-to-back like a never ending TV show. Videos that you watch are crossed off the list so when you come back, you see fresh videos every time. Welcome to TV meets the web, no hardware or cable service required.

I hope you enjoy it as much as we have. We’d love to hear your feedback!

I was pleasantly surprised the other day when I fired off an email, and Gmail threw an alert saying “Did you mean to attach files?”

What a simple and brilliant piece of logic. We’ve all encountered this embarrassing problem countless times, and with a line of code, google engineers put an end to it. This is the type of stuff I’m talking about when I say “Make the system work hard so users dont have to”.

Awesome work Google.

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.