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Posts Tagged ‘web design’
Feb 21
2011
Photoshop Tutorial: How to Make Reflections
“Reflections” are a cool, popular Web 2.0 trick that really makes your site look polished – literally. If you’re looking to have an online marketing presence, it’s important that your site looks as contemporary and as professional as possible – and subtle effects like this is what will achieve that image.
Last time you visited a car showroom, I’m sure you realized the floor buffed to a shine – to the point where you could see the cars’ reflections on the showroom floor. In fact, the cars probably were so clean, you could see yourself in them. “Reflections” indicate cleanliness, newness, professionalism and quality. Images, icons, and text on your favorite site designs (and even print/video designs) use this effect to have their brand give this feeling to their audience.
If you’re just beginning Photoshop, creating this effect is really simple:
- Isolate the image you want to reflect in its own layer. In the example below, I have the “e-nor” logo image in its own layer.
- Duplicate the layer by right-clicking on it and choosing that option. Rename the new layer to a meaningful name, such as “image reflection”.
- Select the layer by choosing the “selection tool” and right-click on the image. Choose “Free Transform”.
- Right-click again and choose “Flip vertical”.
- Move the reflection just below the original image.
- Add a layer mask to the reflection layer. Use the “gradient tool” to create a gradual fading mask. For the first gradient, reduce the opacity of the gradient tool to something in the middle, like 50%-75% so you get a light fade. Do that as many times till you get the right transparency.
- To create a more realistic effect, increase the opacity of the gradient tool back to 100%, then create a layer mask gradient from the bottom of the image till about the middle of the image to fade out the bottom of the reflection.
Note: you want to make sure the reflection very subtle and really transparent. An opaque reflection usually looks like a cut, unfinished image and comes out to be gaudy more than anything else.
Technorati Tags: web design
Tags: web design
Posted in web design | 2 Comments »
Jul 29
2010
 With the creation of smart phones and since your mobile device is conveniently available anywhere, mobile internet browsing has increased astronomically. As such, users have come to expect better experiences on their phone. Unfortunately, not all sites have a mobile version, which is a problem since there’s a good chance your site will look significantly smaller and possibly illegible on a mobile device.
This should raise a couple questions:
- Is your site compatible on all cellular phone platforms?
- Is the site being used on a cellular phone the same way it would be used on a desktop?
If you aren’t sure, don’t guess; check your analytics. Here’s a post on how to track mobile traffic.
Issues with Mobile Usability
The answer depends ultimately on the function of your site but of course regardless, browsing a website on your mobile is a much different experience than browsing on your desktop. That said here are some usability issues you may run into while browsing on your mobile:
- Excessive Scrolling – Phones have been getting smaller and sleeker over the past couple years, which means screens are even smaller. While the width of a standard desktop screen is around 1052px, the standard width for a mobile site is 250px. Unfortunately because of the small screen restriction, viewing a site is very frustrating because of scrolling and/or zooming in. I’ve run into this problem so many times, when I search on my blackberry, I always have to zoom into the site to be able to read, which of course means I have to scroll from right to left to read the content properly.
- Load Time – Non-mobile-friendly sites could take a long time to load.
- Page Height – Along with having to zoom, the page could be longer than necessary, causing the user to have to scroll down.
- Flash – If your site has flash, more than likely it will not be supported by all cell phone browsers.
- Mobile Location – Another factor affecting mobile browsing is location of the user. While computers are generally stationary, cell phones are used everywhere (hence the world “mobile”). The contrast of the colors and font size on a site may not be legible while using a cell outdoors.
Mobile Design Tips
Here’s a list of guidelines for designing a more-user friendly mobile site:
- Screen Size – Design your mobile site to be 250px
- Limited content – Since the width is limited, height may be used to fill in space that is lost with width. However, it’s best to avoid having a long page of content. After all, this is a phone and is still quite small. Whether its touch screen or keys based, it’s much harder to scroll up or down than it is on a desktop.
- Clear action buttons – Again, since the screen is small, it’s best to make sure if you do have images to make them clear, and if that means using the whole width that’s okay. Same goes for buttons, if there is a clear action, it will be seen, so the bigger the better. I highly recommend buttons over links; specifically for touch screen users. When trying to click on a link, it’s always so hard to actually click on the correct link. The link will usually be buried within text and other links.
- Create a separate mobile environment – administering a site that is optimized for a desktop that is at the same time 100% mobile friendly is very difficult since both natures are completely different. That would mean you’re essentially limited to the parameters of mobile (for example, when choosing the width of images for your desktop site, you’ll be nagged by the limits of your mobile resolution). It’s best to have a separate environment specifically catered to mobile screens allowing you to have freedom in both designs.
- Real Estate – Mobile “real estate” is very limited; to maximize the use of space in your design, simplify your site to the very basic functions of your company. For example, if your desktop has three panes; a side menu, content, and news. The side menu may not be completely necessary, especially since the navigation on mobile and desktop is completely different.
- Meet the user’s needs quickly – If the South Africa World Cup is the hot topic, and you’re cnn.com, make sure that story is visible above the fold right away.
- Clear functions – Make things clear and easy for the user to find. If you want someone to click on a button, make it large and bright to emphasize the action. For example, on a mobile site it would be smart to have a back button rather than a link because it’ll be easier for the user to find the button than a link since a link could easily get hidden through the text.
- Ease of use – The user shouldn’t have to waste time scrolling up and down looking for something that should be easy to find. For example, in tip #5, I talked about “real estate.” With a limited width, you lose a lot of space for content, but what you lose in width you can make up in the height. This makes it much easier for the user to read rather than having to scroll from left to right.
- Browsing Links – Use only basic browsing links such as home and back, you don’t need to include the whole menu that is on your desktop site. Make sure to add the browsing links at the top and bottom of the page.
- Search – For some sites, it is very important to have search because the site is search based for example, Google or Target. Google is search based links, while Target is search based products. If your site is search based, including two search boxes may be really helpful. Some companies have sites that are entirely search based such as Google, their desktop and mobile site is just a search bar. As for Target and Amazon their home pages have a search bar at the top of the page with browsing links below, which is another way to go because you can browse products as well as search for them.
- Testing – Lastly, make sure to test the usability of the mobile site on different phone browsers. This, of course, would be a separate checklist from launching your desktop site. Keep in mind, phones can be used in any location, for example, the contrast of a screen in the sunlight, has to be legible.
Having a mobile friendly site, will make it much easier for your customer to navigate, making for a better user experience, in turn, increasing your conversion. If mobile phones make shopping more convenient, you want to make sure your site takes advantage of that trend and make it easy for users to shop for your product as well.
And now that you have a mobile site, few things to keep in mind:
- Search engine optimization (SEO), here is a link from the Google Webmaster tool on how to Help Google Index Your Mobile Site. Mobile websites are often returned in Google mobile search results (and other search engines too) in preference to non-mobile websites.
- And once your mobile site is ready for prime time, you might want to drive qualified traffic through paid search (aka Pay-Per-Click) on Mobile, here are some ideas from the Google AdWords blog.
- Last but not least, you gotta measure! A separate mobile website is easier to track on all devices than an integrated website where the tracking code might not run on all devices. Try Google Analytics for Mobile.
We’re in the process of practicing what we preach, so keep an eye out for the E-Nor Mobile Site! 
References
For more info on mobile usability check out the following references:
Technorati Tags: google analytics, mobile marketing, pay per click, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, web analytics, web design
Tags: google analytics, mobile marketing, pay per click, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, web analytics, web design
Posted in web design | 6 Comments »
Dec 23
2009
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Would you like to increase your sales or number of leads by 10%, 20%, or even more, without increasing your marketing spend? I’m sure most of us wouldn’t mind that extra bit of sales and revenue . Well, there is no better time to do it than now. Roll up your sleeves, summon your web designer and your web analyst and then marvel over data available from Google’s new tool: Browser Size, with data from Google Analytics, and then start rockin’ n rollin’. |
Google Browser Size
Google has recently introduced a new tool called Browser Size to help web designers “ensure that important parts of a page’s user interface are visible” by a wide audience. You basically type your URL in the tool and it’ll then load your page and show what percentage of users see what sections of the page, without having to scroll i.e. giving us a visual view of what is seen “above the fold”. The idea is if more people have to scroll to find your “calls to action” they are less likely to click and convert. For example, Google applying this method on Google Earth download page layout had an impressive 10% increase in their download rates by moving the download button up by 100 pixels.
So what does the Browser Size look like? Here is how our home page appeared in the Google Browser Size:
As you can see, 90%+ of the web population can see our “Optimize Your site” Call-to-Action, the green button (surrounded by a red box for you to see it in this above snapshot, but the home page doesn’t have this ugly red box ). Kudos to our creative director and web designer (luckily we recently distributed Nordstrom’s gift certificates for the Holidays, otherwise they both would be asking for a bonus after reading this post:)).
Design Best Practices
Now that you have a visual view of your most important page elements, it’s time to put this useful information into action. We do know that design best practices for usability and conversion teach us that your important information should be immediately visible and easily accessible to users. An example of such an element is a conversion button, such as “Buy Now” for an ecommerce website.
Let’s say you have a “Buy Now” button at the bottom of the page, where only 20% of users can see it. And say your “add to cart” rate is 5% for all the visitors that come to this page – so for 1000 visitors, that’s 50 starting the purchasing process.
If we know that according to design best practices, a visible “Buy Now” button that catches your users’ eyes will entice users to buy, thus, “above the fold” is the way to go – that is, making sure this button is visible to as many users as possible (not requiring them to scroll down) could significantly increase your “add to cart” rate. That is, if 20% of your users seeing the “add to cart” button is leading to a 5% “add to cart” rate, imagine what 90% of your users immediately seeing the button may do. Even if that causes a 5% increase in “add to cart” (the new “add to cart” rate will now be 10%), you’re looking at doubling the number of visitors that start the purchasing process and you are likely to double your sales/revenue.
So with the help of this tool, if your page is being designed for 1280×720 and you realize 20% of your users can see that resolution while 90% can view 800×600 – though you don’t have to change your design to be tailored to fit the smaller size, at least the important elements should take this into account.
It’s worth mentioning that some folks have other views about the benefits of the “above the fold” concept, for example we really shouldn’t be cramming too much information up “above the fold” and we should keep in mind that “less is more”. Nonetheless, the Google Browser Size is still very useful.
Google Analytics offers additional data points & insights
The data in the Google Browser Size is collected based on visitors to Google.com. What you can also do is to use screen resolutions data from Google Analytics on your own site . Here is how to get the data in Google Analytics:
- Click on the “Visitors” tab
- Click on “Browser Capabilities”
- Then click on “Screen Resolutions”
You’ll get a report on screen resolutions that visitors to your own site use. You can then optimize your site based on this information. Here is a look at the report for our site:
So it appears that from our own screen resolutions data, most of the visitors can more or less view the entire page (a very good thing!).
Now, if you had a site that had a different screen resolution distribution, like the one below, you’d want to review the current design/layout of your pages and tailor them to the different visitors’ pattern.
Segmentation, Segmentation Segmentation
And as always, don’t just look at data in aggregates, use segmentation to your advantage and zoom in on the data segment that is most important to you. Here are some examples of how to slice your data before you start your analysis and fact finding:
- If your targeted audience is only in US & Canada, then run the Screen Resolutions reports on an Advanced Segment for the US & Canada audience
- You might want to also segment by buyers and non-buyers and monitor any interesting trends between these two distinct groups of visitors
- If you have different page layouts on your site, for example, your blog, your home page and category pages, you’d want to run the above analysis on each unique layout and make sure the messaging/calls-to-action are where you want your visitors to see them
Testing with the Google Website Optimizer (GWO)
One last note. If you are used to running tests, whether A/B or Multivariate, then it’s probably a no-brainer to run an experiment before you make massive (or small) changes across your site. If you haven’t tried testing yet, then this is a perfect opportunity to take the data and analysis to your manager and convince them to support you with resources to begin testing and realize site and revenue improvements! You can use the powerful and free testing tool from Google, the Google Website Optimizer (GWO), or another testing tool of your choice, to confirm (or disprove) your hypothesis before your roll out the design and layout changes.
Hope you find this post helpful. Feedback, comments and questions are most welcome!
Related Posts
Technorati Tags: google analytics, web analytics, web design
Tags: google analytics, web analytics, web design
Posted in web design | 5 Comments »
Jun 09
2009
Web 2.0, THE popular style and standard for contemporary web design, utilizes the use of clean, bright colors, and gradients. A key visual indicator of Web 2.0 design is the use of large, 3D buttons that grab the user’s attention. Buttons can be used to promote a sale, contact, and/or have a slogan such as “Lose Weight!”, while at the same time, tempt the user into clicking and going where you want them to go. You know you couldn’t resist pressing the red button when your mom told you not to!
The impact of having a button is far greater than just having a link on your site. For example, if your site said “Contact Us” at the bottom within the content, the viewer would most likely have to read through the content until they get to the “Contact Us” to even know its there since its buried in text. But a button that clearly states “Contact Us” is more likely to visually attract their attention.
In this post, I’m going to go through how to make web 2.0 buttons that “pop”, even if you’re not that Photoshop savvy.
I just learned how to create web 2.0 buttons a couple months ago. It usually takes me a couple hours to get the right effect and gradient exactly the way I want it to look. Luckily, I stumbled upon an awesome resource for gradients and styles that made making buttons much easier than I could’ve imagined. I was searching around various blogs trying to find a post that was interesting and useful and found this BIG TIME TIME SAVER!!!
After downloading these photoshop styles/button templates, all you really need to do is minor tweaks, and your button is ready to go.
Here’s how:
- First thing you have to do is download the zip file from dezinerfolio.com, who shared their styles on their blog.
- After you download the zip file on this page, upload it into your Photoshop,
- Open up a new Photoshop file and go to Window > Styles to bring “Styles” into your toolbox (shown below).
Now that you have uploaded the style, you’re ready to create a web 2.0 button in little to no time!
- Open a New Layer on your file and find a style you like best.
- Once you’ve found a style you like, simply click on the style and the settings of that particular style will automatically be implemented onto the layer.
- As you can see in the images below, the image on the left shows the styles in the toolbox and the one on the right shows how the styles effects automatically updated into the layer.
- Next, choose a shape for your button; I like using the rounded rectangle tool for a button.
- After you’ve chosen a button shape, click and drag the mouse to make the rectangle as big as you want. As you can see in the image below the color of the style/gradient I chose fills in the rectangle.
- After you have the button, color, and style you want all that’s left is adding text and layer effects. Below I have an example of the button with text. I have put some layer effects on the text to make it pop out of the button.
- After you have stylized the button how you want it, you can trim the white space around the button.
- And there you have it, a button! That didn’t take long at all!
Technorati Tags: web 2.0, web buttons, web design
Tags: web 2.0, web buttons, web design
Posted in web design | 1 Comment »
May 05
2009
A very basic but extremely vital part to web design is understanding your users’ logical thought process and flow. You want to take this into account as early as possible in your design phase so that you create a very familiar flow to the user. Putting a link or information in the next logical place makes the process intuitive and thus, more likely will lead the user to convert. The more familiar the flow, the less they have to figure out where to go which betters their chances of getting from their starting point to your ending point. The your end-point could be them submitting your form or buying your product.
While missing this boat can make you question “Why isn’t my page converting?”, getting it right can change your page from an occasional “hit-or-miss” to a conversion machine. In some cases, simply changing your design to make a button or link more intuitively available might end-up increasing your conversion rate by 100′s of percentage points. That small design update just grew your business astronomically.
There are two main aspects when it comes to understanding logical user-flow:
- User-interface and page yayout – actual elements of the page that the customer will be interacting with.
- Site structure and navigation – how your pages are organized.
In this post, I’d like to go through the first item – UI and page layout.
User-Interface and Page Layout
As I said, it’s important to remember the way your user will interact with your page while designing your page layout. Take into account your users’ natural reading pattern – which in the U.S.A is left to right, then top to bottom. Thus, the top-left-most content will be the first thing they see then and they’ll be moving in an “F” pattern down your page.
Here’s an example of a login form that does poorly at following user-flow:
Can you spot the issue here? ANSWER: The “Login” link is in a bad place (you see it at the top right).
- A user will go to the “Customer ID” field and enter their ID.
- Moving left to right, they will move on to enter their password.
- Resetting now like a type-writer (I don’t know if people still remember those), the user will move to the “Language” field below.
- Ok, now were ready to login. When I move down and to the left…where the heck did the “login” button go?
The placement of the login button is not in the next logical place, and not only breaks up the user flow, but is also hard to find (aside from the fact that it is not a clear clickable button).
Now this may not seem like a big deal here cause there’s not much going on in this form. But what happens when the form is longer down the page and they have to scroll back up to search for this login/submit link? Should we assume the user knows to do this?
No. You’ll be surprised the percentage of people clicking such a link decreases or increases based on simple logical placement of this button. Remember, a as surfers, we do not want to think. We do not want to search. It is as easy for us to close the page, and move on to the next site in a blink of an eye.
Worse – let’s say this is a “Checkout Now” button and your site makes $10k a month in revenue on this product. If the placement of this button even affects conversion even by 10%, that’s enough to make a difference. Larger sites that make significant online revenue a month would be greatly impacted, where even a small percentage of decrease would hurt (or a small increase could pay-off big time).
In the case that you are a smaller/medium size online business, online conversion may be your businesses only means of survival, so a small design detail like this could even make or break your business.
Technorati Tags: usability, web design
Tags: usability, web design
Posted in web design | No Comments »
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