Comics of the week #355

Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…

The comfortable designer

Storing up fat

 

Thanks for the quarter, but…

Can you relate to these situations? Please share your funny stories and comments below…

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How to Use Release Notes to Drive Feature Adoption

Companies are understandably excited to tell the world when they push new features. New developments can take months and they are the hope for more users, greater engagement, and achieving milestones towards success.

So how do teams communicate these big announcements to their users? A blog post, an unread notification, an email, and… that’s it. They sit back and wait for impact, but are disappointed if the anticipated uptick in usage doesn’t arrive.

Here we’ll explain why standard feature announcements are missing the mark, and how to drive new feature adoption amongst your users.

The Standard Feature Announcement

The BJ Fogg behavior model is a big component of our thinking on user experience. It explains that new behaviors form when three elements align:

• Motivation—the user wants to perform the action.
• Ability—the user has the capacity to perform the action.
• Triggers—the user is nudged to perform the action.

You can see how these three elements intersect in this graph:

When people have high motivation, they are more able to do hard things. When people have low motivation, they will only take action for easy to do behaviors. Triggers will push people into performing the actions, as long as there is sufficient motivation AND ability (above the action line curve).

When trying to change user behavior to adopt a new feature, an announcement serves as the trigger.

However there are three problems with conventional feature announcements:

1. Users miss them or forget about them because those channels are noisy and are out-of-context.
2. Announcements focus on HOW to use the feature and emails are a terrible way for this: we learn by doing, but emails are not interactive. We explain more here.
3. Announcements don’t actually help a user adopt the new behavior, because they don’t improve a user’s ability (they don’t make the new feature “easy to do”).

In these cases, the feature announcement email or notification or blog post is a trigger below the action line, and so it doesn’t cause users to act and adopt the new feature or workflow.

Blog & Email Announcements

Blog and email messaging can help motivate users, but they don’t help them adopt any new behavior. What’s more, when a user is going through their inbox or reading a blog, they are away from the context of the app. Even if they see information about a new feature, it is difficult for them to internalize the new actions just through reading.

Automation tool Zapier has a whole section of their blog devoted to product updates:

They post once a month about new updates to their product. This is great information for new and current customers alike, but it isn’t actionable. They are in the wrong place and the wrong frame of mind, so don’t have the ability to make any behavioral changes. They are just reading a blog, not thinking about using the product.

Following this up with an email highlighting the feature is also common. This is an email from email marketing tool MailChimp announcing improvements to their A/B testing tool:

Image Source

This email does tell you all you need to know about the new features. These type of update emails are great for maximum reach as you can send the update to the thousands of users on your email list. If any currently aren’t finding good use for your product, this might be enough to bring them back.

But this doesn’t help the user actually use the product. The call-to-action at the end of the email is to read more, even though they have just read a very long email about the product. Reading doesn’t help the customer internalize the idea of the new feature. Though they might be giving use cases for the new features, the only way people can really learn is by using the product. MailChimp missed the opportunity here to direct the user into the product and to a tour of the new features.

In-app notifications

Ability is slightly higher with in-app announcements. In this case, the user is in the product and they are familiar with how it works.

But they are still way below the threshold needed to get the new user invested in the product. They are often delivered at the wrong time to the wrong user. Also, they just give the user more to read, instead of guiding the user through actions they need to take to get value from the new feature.

Most in-app notifications have this fatal flaw. For instance, if you’ve ever used project management tool Trello, then you will be familiar with Taco the Husky and his announcements:

Image Source

If you were to click on that link though you would be taken away from the product and to their blog:

This is the opposite of what you want. Users have been moved to a detailed description of your product, possibly raising their motivation, but lowering their ability. Plus, there’s no guarantee users will come back once you send them away from your app. How many times have you clicked through a link thinking you’d just read one blog post or article and get back to what you were doing, only to disappear into a hours-long timesink? This is the fate Trello is tempting with this kind of feature announcement.

Instead showing them what to do in bitesized chunks through tooltips and product tours is much more effective. Users can internalize each new concept and start to use that feature, without being overwhelmed.

Increase Adoption with Targeted Product Tours

In each of the feature announcements we’ve looked at, users are simply told about the new feature and then left to find it themselves. They have low motivation and low ability. You need to get to your users when they have high motivation and high ability. This means teaching users with a product tour within the product.

Some products do this. For instance, Instagram’s new Stories feature comes with a quick in-app tour that is easy to find, and pushes you towards using the feature:

These tours work best when they are in-context of what the user is doing at that very moment. For that, you need to segment users by both time and behavior.

Targeting the Right User

Sharing a new feature with all your users may seem the best way to increase engagement. But the truth is that each of your customer personas will have different use cases for your product. They will favor some features over others. Therefore, they will want to hear updates about some new features more than others.

Using behavioral data you can look at how different subsets of users have used a certain feature before, how engaged they currently are with the feature, or if they have used adjacent features recently.

You are looking for a behavior they have exhibited that demonstrates they are ready to learn about your new update. For instance, you could use Kissmetrics Analyze to identify specific customer journey’s through your app and target different features to these different journeys.

Another example is the MailChimp feature above. If MailChimp want to increase the use of their improved A/B testing they could target a tour towards users who exhibit the following behaviors:

• Have previously created five regular campaigns — this shows they have the motivation to continually create campaigns, but perhaps not the knowledge of A/B campaigns.
• Have two or more saved templates — they have the ability to start testing each of these templates immediately with A/B testing.
• Have 1000+ contacts in their list — they have enough users to make a test statistically useful.
• Are currently creating their next campaign — they are in the position to start their next campaign.

These are the users that will be ready to use A/B testing in their email campaigns. Users who are just starting out with a single campaign, don’t have templates ready, or only a small readership will not find value in this new feature.

Targeting at the Right Time

Targeting at the right time is as critical as targeting the right person. In the MailChimp example above, pinging that ideal customer just as they start generating their new campaign with “Hey, there’s a better way!” can be just the trigger to move them to the new feature.

This isn’t as simple as targeting someone the moment they sign in or start using a feature. It depends on what the new feature is and how it corresponds to the current feature they are using. Look at this example from survey platform Typeform. They show the announcement at the start of building a new survey:

This is a lost opportunity. At this point I have a form to build. That is my main motivation. I am going to immediately dismiss this tour and continue with my main task. By the time I’m finished, I’ll have forgotten about these “cool features.”

If instead this was targeted after I had finished my main task then my motivation could be to check the new features out. Once I had successfully completed one task, I would then be ready to learn more.

Conclusion

Emails, blogs, and in-app notifications all have their place when it comes to feature announcements. Each messaging channel can be used at a different point to inform, teach, and highlight features to users.

But the in-app tour is the most powerful tool at your disposal for engaging users with new features:

• You can target the right people: New features will appeal to a certain segment of your users most. Using behavioral data, you can find out who uses the features you’re upgrading or aligned features and target a brief tour of the release only to them.
• You can target those people at the right time: in-app tours let you get your new features in front of users at the exact moment when they would find them most useful. This might be just as they finish a task, or just as they start another. But timing an in-app tour allows users to have the context needed for them to find value in the feature, as well as the ability and motivation to learn more.

When you target a tour to the right people at the right time you will have them when both motivation and ability are high. Then it only requires a small trigger to push them into action.

If you get this targeting right, then you have introduced the best customers to the most valuable features to them, meaning you are building success for them and your product.

About the Author: Pulkit Agrawal is cofounder & CEO of Chameleon, a platform for better user onboarding. He believes that first-user experience is a hidden treasure to drive improved user activation and retention. He writes on the Chameleon blog, which contains great resources on the psychology of effective user engagement. You can converse with him on Twitter.

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Poll: Should designers just…design?

Every single designer reading this runs a blog, or at the very least a Medium account; around 5% (wildly anecdotal statistic) actually post on it. Most designers reading this speak at conferences, or at the very least have an opening slide mocked up in a sketchbook. Most designers reading this have a startup, a side-project, or an idea that will shift them from design professional, to owner who designs. In short those of us that design, spend a lot of time aspiring to not design.

We’re often told to “get our name out there” in order to be successful. That writing about design, speaking at events, contributing to the community, building our own projects, will get us “noticed”.

Good work begets good work

However, managing a blog can be (trust me on this) a full time job. Speaking regularly means being away from home, and office, for days or even weeks at a time. Every hour that goes into a side-project is an hour that doesn’t go on client work. They may be beneficial, but they carry a cost; they all take time.

Design is a craft, it takes practice. Do too little and you get rusty. Spend too much time getting noticed, and there’ll be nothing to notice. A few years ago a very experienced designer, with an extremely high-profile client list explained to me why he’d won very few awards: “To win awards,” he said, “you have to design for awards. I’d prefer to win clients.”

Clients seek the surety of high-profile, award-winning designers

Good clients, in my experience, come from one place, past clients. Over the years I’ve been lucky enough to stumble onto some great clients and they nearly all had one thing in common: word of mouth. You do a good job for a client and their contacts will ask them who they hired for it. Not only do you get a lead, but a lead with zero competition. Good work begets good work.

But how many clients are really qualified to judge good design? Many clients seek the surety of high-profile, award-winning designers, to avoid making an uneducated decision. So, whether you’re aspiring to be a designer, or aspiring to continue being a designer, should you spend time writing, speaking, engaging with the community, or focus all your energy on doing good work?

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People Pay, Not Pageviews. Here’s Why People Are Leaving Your Website Without Converting

You’ve rolled out a lot of marketing tactics to boost traffic for your website. After copious amounts of content production, sharing, social engagement, and even paid ads, you feel like you can finally celebrate because your site is now pulling in tens of thousands of unique visits every month with a ton of page views.

However, if your conversions are bottoming out and growth is sluggish, then don’t celebrate just yet.

I hear about this problem on a regular basis. Unfortunately, pageviews don’t pay the bills. Purchases do.

If you’re struggling and want to improve your conversion rates, you should look beyond the traditional CRO recommendations and A/B testing recommendations for bottlenecks.

Here are some reasons why your visitors might be bailing on you:

Your Design is Turning Them Away

According to data from SmartInsights, more than 80% of people use smartphones as their primary method for accessing the web. You’ll see similar rates of mobile usage if you review visitor device information on your analytics platform.

It’s important to be aware of this trend, since 30% of mobile users admit to abandoning a transaction if the website isn’t fully optimized for mobile browsing.

Personally, I find it incredibly frustrating to visit a site on my phone, only to be greeted by a site that requires me to zoom in and scroll horizontally. It goes from bad to worse when a pop-up designed for desktop users suddenly fills my mobile screen and I’m unable to close it. That site is basically dead to me on mobile and I’ll never try to go back after that bad experience.

Responsive and mobile-compatible designs fit content to a mobile display, greatly reduce the need to zoom. Image Source

Google understands that frustration, and they have updated their algorithm to make mobile compatibility a ranking factor. If your site isn’t currently using a responsive, mobile-compatible design then it’s time to fix it. Otherwise you’ll miss out on conversions and risk a significant drop in organic search rank (and subsequent organic traffic).

Mobile usability aside, there are other on-page elements that can repel your visitors like:

• Multiple calls to action that prevent them from taking action (analysis paralysis)
• Poor navigation
• Sliders and rotators
• Too many steps in navigation to reach content/products
• Confusing or cluttered content

Rather than guess at what makes a good user experience, you can quickly identify and work to eliminate a lot of usability issues by working with UserTesting.com. You can submit your site to be reviewed by real people and watch videos of how the interact with and react to your site.

Autoplay Videos Hijack the User Experience

Don’t you just love the autoplay feature on ESPN and CNN.com? You land on a page to read an article, a video loads (with an ad) and you scramble to hit the pause or mute button so you can read the article.

With that being said..

Implementing video on your website could work wonders for conversions. According to a Liveclicker survey among major retail brands, the more videos a visitor watches, the more likely they are to spend within your funnel.

According to a survey of major online retailers, the use of video on product pages lifted conversions an average of 9%.

But setting videos to autoplay could potentially harm your conversions. It’s potentially a major disruption. According to W3C (the group responsible for setting standards for web design best practices), autoplaying audio can interrupt the navigation process as a user has to search for the source of the audio to shut it down.

Certain groups of people, especially those with attention disorders, can be easily distracted by motion which can disrupt the user experience and make it difficult for them to focus.

Worst case scenario, the visitor has a negative reaction to the disruption and closes the page.

Instead of autoplaying the video, create a call-to-action that draws visitors’ attention to it and persuades them to click the play button on their own. Another option is to run the video on silent in the same way Facebook autoplays video in a user’s feed.

Your Value Proposition is Unclear

If you’re not clearly communicating the value and benefits of your offer, then your visitors won’t feel compelled to click or make a purchase.

Why should they, if they have no idea what they’ll get out of the exchange?

Here’s a great example from Help Scout where they reference the launch of the Apple’s early iPod product. Not every member of their audience is tech-savvy, so trying to leverage storage capacity (a feature) would be meaningless to many people.

Instead, they communicated the real value and benefit of the product: 1,000 songs in your pocket.

Make sure your value proposition is crystal clear on your landing pages. Test different variations to see which phrasing gives you the best conversion lift.

Content Doesn’t Match Audience Intent

The first conversion opportunity isn’t on your website, it’s wherever your visitor came from. In most cases, this will be organic search or an ad elsewhere on the web. The headline and description make a specific promise to the reader and set their expectations.

If they arrive on your website and find something completely different, such as copy or offers that don’t match their intent, they’re more likely to click the back button.

For example, if you’re targeting enterprise businesses and your audience is mostly CMOs and upper-level marketers, they’re not likely to opt-in if you’re only offering a free e-book on local marketing strategies.

Make sure the copy, design elements, offers, and calls-to-action all line up with user intent to lift conversions on your landing pages. This is where audience research pays off.

Understanding the specific needs and pain points of audience segments will help you create more targeted offers to keep your visitors engaged.

Site Load Time is Terrible

Kissmetrics produced an infographic that shows us just how load time can impact your bottom line. Not only is load time a ranking factor for organic search, but it can also have a pretty significant impact on conversions.

As many as 47% of consumers expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less. If they’re met with prolonged loading graphics or a hanging white page then you risk losing them – and their patience can be short.

In fact, a delay of just 1 second in load time can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.

Do everything you can to reduce page load time on your website in order to avoid negatively impacting your conversion rates. I recommend:

• Optimizing/compressing image files to reduce size by using a tool like ImageOptim or TinyPNG. Lossless compression ensures quality isn’t compromised
• Enabling browser caching
• Combining multiple style sheets
• Reducing the plugin load on your website
• Loading your scripts from the footer, below the fold, so they don’t all try to load first

Opt-Ins Aren’t Optimized

The old trick for improving conversions with opt-in messages was to reduce the number of form fields. This advice was based on a study from 2008 so by now, it’s obsolete. In fact, ConversionXL examined another study by Unbounce that compared shortened forms to optimized forms.

The result?

The forms with fewer fields performed worse. Meanwhile, the forms with improved label copy instead of reduced field counts saw a 19.21% lift in conversions.

So which method is the best approach?

The answer is “it depends.” There’s no concrete answer here. If you’re experiencing friction with opt-ins, then your ideal approach is to test variations and see what works best for your audience. Optimize the labels, try different field counts, adjust the call-to-action, and continue testing until you’re satisfied with the conversions.

Trouble with the Calls-to-Action

You would think that crafting an amazing offer, telling a great story with visuals, and writing dynamite copy would send your conversions through the roof. It’s actually quite the opposite.

Even if your audience is in tune with your offer, your conversions are going to suffer if you don’t have a strong, compelling call-to-action. In many cases, customers just won’t engage unless you specifically tell them what you want them to do.

A bold call to action captures attention and tells the audience what to do.

If you’re missing a call-to-action altogether, then you’re definitely going to suffer from low conversions. One study from Small Business Trends found that 70% of B2B businesses lack a call-to-action on their homepage.

Such a simple thing can have a major impact and at least it’s an easy fix:

• Create a call-to-action that is prominent and stands out from other page elements
• Make it compelling and focus on the value; what do visitors get by clicking?
• Make your call-to-action relevant to match the audience’s intent
• Use verbs and actionable language
• Leverage urgency with words like “Now” and “Today”

Be sure test different versions of your call-to-action to determine which designs and copy offer the greatest lift in conversions.

There’s No Secret Formula

There’s no one specific thing you can do to suddenly make your conversions soar. While these individual items could hurt your conversions, making a single adjustment isn’t guaranteed to change or improve anything.

Rather than taking a tactical approach to improving conversions, identify the elements that could be creating problems and start testing. A/B testing small changes is more likely to help improve conversions over time and eliminate trouble areas like these.

What have you done to increase conversions on your website? Share your approach and results with me in the comments below.

About the Author: Andrew Raso is the co-founder and director of Online Marketing Gurus, a fast-growing, award-winning search company working with brands including HelloMolly, Baku Swimwear, and Forcast. Follow him on Twitter at @andrewraso1 or on LinkedIn.

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Prototyping for the web with Framer

Framer is a really powerful tool that can prototype anything you can think of but if you take a look at Framer’s Gallery you’ll quickly notice something:

Out of their 54 examples, 48 of them are apps, 4 for Apple Watch, 1 for iPad and 1 for Apple TV. Is Framer even meant for ‘traditional’ web/desktop design?

Absolutely.

At IBM Design most of my designs are made for enterprise desktop web applications. Most designers I work with use Sketch (including myself). These Sketch files are then prototyped using a tool like InVision or recreated and prototyped in code. As a front end developer on a design team I have a unique position where I both design and code prototypes.

After learning the basics of Framer, I decided to add it to my workflow and it’s really improved my design process. The single most powerful part is being able to import a static Sketch file into Framer and turn it into a realistic, interactive prototype in a relatively short amount of time.

With this, I don’t have to spend valuable time in the beginning of the process recreating designs in code. I can get ideas in front of stakeholders & users much faster. I can save coding for later on when the project is more solidified.

After using Framer for a few months here’s some things I’ve learned:

Plan and scope your prototypes

Before I start a project, I decide a few things:

What am I trying to accomplish?

Whether the prototype is for user testing or getting an idea conceptualized, what’s the minimum amount of work needed to get my idea across or to gain insight from testing? I’m not just being lazy , this helps decide the necessary interactions, animations and screens that are needed.

The more time you spend on your design the more you become attached. The more attached, the less likely you are to make the necessary changes.

Let’s use the prototype above as an example.

I was working on a new project and I wanted to explore what a card based layout with ‘shuffling’ animations in between states would look like. I sketched out the basic idea I wanted to make and used that as my starting point.

If you take a look at the finished prototype, only the first card is clickable in each step. There is no way to go back, no hover states, the content in the last screen isn’t complete, and it’s not nearly pixel perfect. None of those were necessary to get my idea across so I didn’t spend time including them. Framer can do just about anything, but that doesn’t mean you should try to do everything in your prototype.

Create UI flows using Andreas’ awesome ViewController module

You can use the ViewController Sketch plugin to create UI flows right in Sketch. Quickly turn your designs into clickable prototypes without having to write code.

This is great for presenting your work to stakeholders and is really quite simple to do. Instead of walking through a Sketch file with a dozen artboards or a .pdf, you can present an interactive prototype or share your hosted Framer project URL.

Depending on what I’m trying to accomplish I may end up writing some code for things like hover effects, animations and text inputs for an added touch of realism and interactivity. Again, as a designer, decide what’s necessary to get your idea across and implement appropriately.

Check out Andreas’ Create UI flows using Sketch and Framer article to learn more about the plugin.

Microinteractions

I think there’s a few reasons that mobile prototyping is really popular with Framer, one of them being microinteractions seem to much more commonplace on mobile. But it doesn’t have to be that way! I think as designers for the web can be better at making our work have more motion and Framer is really good at this.

This is just a simple example of a quick interaction I made using a Sketch file a designer on my team had already made. Exploring interactions like this takes a matter of minutes.

Sure, but why not just code?

As a front end developer, a lot of my projects will eventually end up with a coded prototype. I then use this prototype as a basis to write the front end code into the product, working along side engineering. So why not just code from the start?

As I mentioned earlier, speed. I can quickly flesh out ideas that either I or another designer have already made by importing them from Sketch into Framer. It’s great for the early part of the design process where you’re exploring ideas and implementing feedback quickly. I can move pretty fast in code, but Framer takes it to the next level.

Another reason is freedom. The simple fact that all of my code written in Framer will be thrown away is actually kind of great. It allows me to try things I wouldn’t otherwise and to be a bit more loose with my code. I can spend 15 minutes exploring an idea and then trash it without any remorse.

Some tips & tricks

You (or the designer you’re working with) will probably have to set up Sketch files a bit differently.

• Group your layers. Layers that are not in a group are ignored
• Avoid using spaces in your group names
• Hidden layers in Sketch are still imported, but their visibility will be set to false.
• Create simple, unique names for your artboards
• A minus (-) at the end of your artboard will exclude it from being imported into Framer

Flatten any layers in Sketch that will remain static. This will improve the loading time of your project, which is especially great when creating a heftier prototype. You can do this by adding an asterisk(*) to the end of the layer in Sketch.

It’s worth spending some time with the designers on your team to go over how to setup Sketch files to best fit the workflow and what works best for the team.

When you import a Sketch file into Framer, you’ll see something like this:

# Import file "design" sketch = Framer.Importer.load("imported/design@1x")

Replace sketch with $, and you can now use $ to reference your Sketch layers, saving yourself from writing the word sketch hundreds of times:

$ = Framer.Importer.load("imported/design@1x")

Use the ‘Normal Cursor’ snippet for a normal mouse pointer:

document.body.style.cursor = "auto"

I import my designs at @2x and then scale them down, so they’re extra crisp. Note that this doesn’t seem to get along with the ViewController module mentioned above.

Framer.Device.contentScale = .5

Sketch and Framer use different default artboards/devices for the web. Sketch uses 1440×1024 while Framer uses 1440×900. I opt for 1440×900. Don’t think you’re restricted to 900 pixels for height though, you can easily create scrollable pages in Framer.

 

[– This article was originally posted on Medium, republished with the author’s permission –]

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