- Force yourself to design each and every page with one and only one primary objective. Make it obvious. Fight the urge to be all things.
- If you can segment your audience by what you know about them, you can give each group a different view of your world.
- Send your nonsubscribers to a page that focuses on subscribing.
- Send your first-time visitors to a more welcoming page.
- Send your subscribers to a more advanced page.
- Seth metioned in the book: "Engineers love using pull-down menus! They make you stop what you're doing, take your hands off the keyboard and grab the mouse. You have to scroll through Afghanistan, Lichtenstrein, Oman--but don't get to Zanzibar, that's too far--and then you see United States." So it's extremely important to build the dropdown menus with accessibility in mind so it can be accessed by keyboard, in terms of huge dropdown menu like country list, a search input would help a lot as I see many sites do that.
- In the online world, why not have a failed search lead to a page that lists the ten most searched for items? Or a page of discounts? Or...
- This one just came to my mind, not from the book: "Quite frankly, most site visitors won't bother telling you if they see a broken UI, so I think developers need to make it as easy as possible for visitors to provide feedback."
- If you have a long form like census or something similar, divide that into multiple steps. Give users encouragement as they go thru each steps of the form. Automatically fill in blanks with good guesses. Give them a reward for answering nonessential questions.
- Rule of thumb: Make it easy to start, easy to keep going, easy to finish and easy to stay with. The minute it's not easy, lazy people will flee. And everyone is lazy sometimes.
- Don't use a hammer when a rock will do. Choose what's best for the site you're building, instead of reaching for the hotest framework everyone's talking about.
- When you make a mistake, own up for it. Apologize. And do it with a smile.
- People don't want to get mail from you about you. They want to get mail from you about them.
Brandon Zhang
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10 Tips I learn from book "How To Make Any Website Better"
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