Blog
e-shopping behavior: 2017 insights
Did you know Christmas day is the peak day for searching « store hours » on Google? The end of the year always highlights interesting trends and e-shopping behaviors. Google keeps analyzing search data, and offers precious insights on learning how consumers shop. A few selected insights and UX ideas to adapt.
The burger menu is not dead
Burger or not burger? These 3 parallel lines are an easy way to represent a navigation menu. Or at least they used to be for designers. This picto has been an object of doubt and controversy for some time. Blocking discoverability, not significant enough for users… I recently worked on a radio mobile application, and one of our concepts was relying on a burger menu for main navigation. Was it usable? Well, the best was to know was to ask users, so I conducted a little user testing on the topic.
Meet Johnny, my personal chatbot (or an introduction to chatbot UX)
Chatbots are everywhere. In a few months, these little entities of artificial intelligence have smartly conquered Internet. No wonder: putting a welcome end to interminable waiting songs and dead-end chats with overwhelmed contact centers, they are always available, answer in a matter of seconds, can process several conversations at a time and never lose their temper. And they are actually very easy to create. As a matter of fact, anyone could train a chatbot (as a living proof, I designed have my own chatbot, and it was super fun), with one of many online systems dedicated to that extent. Creating a chatbot is not about development or programming: it’s all about training. And as any training process, there are some guidelines. Here is a few things I learned about chatbot UX, from training mine, and benchmarking a few others.
Sticky menu in Axure: tutorial
A few years ago, I published a step-by-step tutorial to create a sticky version of a navigation menu in Axure, appearing once the user scrolls down. This is a great functionality for e-commerce (allowing to always display links to the cart, account, wishlist) and also content-heavy websites (like newspapers, for permanent access to search, share, back to top link, etc.) I now use a slightly different method to prototype a sticky version of a menu in Axure.
Data visualization: tables, graphs and augmented tables
One of my clients recently came to me with a big table of raw data. He was a bit challenged by the fact that all the right data was properly collected and presented in this table, though users did not seem to be able to read the data. Even more challenging was the fact that the data actually came from them initially, but they had trouble even understanding the table itself, let alone make the decisions it was supposed to help them with. What was the problem there? When it comes to data visualization, tables are more often than not underestimated, to the benefit of good-looking graphs. But the choice between tables and graphs is not always that automatic.
e-commerce: 8 product visual trends to improve customer experience
Applying best practices and standards is not sufficient for e-commerce any longer. Successful websites have to focus on customer experience throughout the whole process, and offer the best possible service. In this era governed by pictures, with stars like Instagram or Youtube, product visual is getting more and more important for e-shoppers. If a thumbnail can potentially still be sufficient for everyday groceries, the power of a high-quality, detailed and in-situation picture has never been stronger. And technology can support working harder and going further on product visuals, including 360° view, cinemagraph and augmented reality.