User reaction to a wait online is no different from that in the offline world. Studies based on the analysis of more than a thousand cases identify 14 distinct types of waiting situations on the web. Being dependent on your users’ loyalty, you cannot leave them facing a passive wait. In this final part, Denys Mishunov discusses pure passive waiting on the web, how you can deal with it and what can be done to keep user satisfaction high even when the service cannot be delivered fast enough. In addition to the studies on waiting online, your analysis will employ the psychology of waiting lines, customer satisfaction and other tools applicable to offline waiting.
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When we talk about the user’s perception of time, we mean psychological time, or brain time. This time is of interest to psychologists, neuroscientists and odd individuals like me. Objective time is dealt with by technical means, and those means have limits that become insurmountable at some point. As web developers, we should aim to deliver fast and reliable web services to make users feel comfortable. We can use technological means to control the objective performance of a website. However, technology and resources eventually hit a limit, at which point it becomes difficult to change objective performance. Then, we have to aim to exploit what psychology and neuroscience tell us.
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Building persuasive user experiences is like a relationship and you need to treat it like one. So, what do you want? A one-night stand or a lasting partnership? There are three common challenges when engaging users with a product: Sign-up challenge: seducing your users, first-time use challenge: falling in love with your product, and ongoing engagement challenge: staying in love. Your approach to engaging users should be appropriately adjusted to the relationship you have with them. We will examine the three stages of a user relationship and what tools are appropriate to use for each challenge. This article is a summary of Anders’ talk on designing with persuasive patterns at the Push Conference 2015.
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From specific usability testing and scrutiny of Google Analytics data to more generalized but larger-scale projects, you can quite easily gain access to statistics that illustrate how users interact with our websites. While such straightforward guidelines are emerging as we move forward in the mobile age, they are not the only behaviors that website visitors exhibit on mobile. Mobile users also use social media extensively, play games and download scanned coupons. When you look closely at the behavior of mobile users, it’s very surprising how much you learn.
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In this article, Denys Mishunov aims to provide you with the reasons and theories for why things function in certain way. He will use examples that are observable in the offline world and, using principles of psychology, research and analysis in psychophysics and neuroscience, he will try to answer some “Why?” questions. Denys will also cover psychological aspects of some practical cases, like performance optimization of an existing project, how to deal with the better performance of a competitor’s website and how to make users barely notice any waiting for your services.
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As designers on the web, we have a responsibility to create things that empower kids and make them smarter, not the opposite. In this article Trine Falbe will give you some insights about what kids are like from the psychological point of view, and how this affects the way they use the web. She’ll also cover practical design guidelines to create better web stuff for kids. We should be the ones who make sure that the kinds of things that go on in apps like Talking Tom and The Smurfs’ Village don’t become the norm. Designing with respect should be our norm.
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Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two highly regarded academics in the field of economics are responsible for much of what we know about heuristics. In psychology, a heuristic is simply a fancy word meaning mental shortcut. We have so many decisions to make on a daily basis; there is no way we could think about all of the pros and cons of each option. Our minds would be overloaded and we would stop functioning. People frequently use heuristics to make decisions; you should use them to your advantage in your design. Here, we’ll discuss four common heuristics that researchers have identified, with examples of how to address them in digital design.
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Knowing how groups influence people can help you to move from being a common designer to a strategic influencer of your target audience with relative ease, and social influence, particularly social identity theory, provides key concepts for you to address through UX design. You can influence people by thoughtfully incorporating social identity concepts into your design. In this article, Victor Yocco will focus on how concepts related to social identity theory can help UX professionals to more effectively incorporate social influence in their work.
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The psychological dimension that springs from a dialogue between two strategic conceptions that depend on the personality of each chess player has long been a mystery. How do Grandmasters think? The most successful strategies are rooted in our very own nature. And common to most Grandmasters is that they almost never take the easy way out. That creativity, that compulsion to look beyond what comes instinctively is what fuels successful strategies and explains why so few Grandmasters are out there.
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Designers can do plenty of things to counteract the technical appearance of the Web. In this article, Sabina Idler discusses different aspects of freehand drawing and writing in Web design and how they can enhance the user experience of your website.
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