iTunes Podcast
Listen to the PodcastWe all had an amazing time at the ZURBsoapbox with Bill Scott last Friday. We had a great turnout of folks, lots of sushi, and a passionate discussion about interaction design. A few ZURBians even won a copy of Bill Scott’s Designing Web Interfaces book! What more can you ask for?
Anti-patterns - do you have any?
Bill started the discussion off by mentioning that all interfaces are made up of hundreds of "interesting moments"— minute interactions which make or break the user experience. Many times people don't pay attention to the interesting moments which results in anti-patterns which make the UI confusing and hard to use. Here are a few great examples of anti-patterns Bill shared:
- Intuit's TurboTax: Watch what happens as you enter your interest paid for the year on your federal tax returns. The tax amount you owe the government skyrockets and then goes down. This nearly gives the user a heart attack.
- Yahoo! Photos site: Watch what happens as you drag the picture into the folder. Dancing Hampsters (as Bill calls them "idiot boxes") pop up. This interrupts and confuses the user. Golden rule of any UI is to stay out of the way and let the user complete the task.
- Barnes and Noble: Interesting example of the endless scrolling of the book selector. The selector ends up being a conveyor belt instead of a carousel.
Netflix: What made the biggest difference
Bill mentioned a number of factors which contributed to Netflix's killer user experience. Some of them included:
- Getting rid of the synopsis text on the search results page and putting it into a tooltip description ended up helping folks find movies with less work.
- Making the box icons of the movies larger ended up improving the user experience and consumption.
- Adding transparency messages such as: "We picked movie X for you because you watched movie X" helped out a great deal. This built trust which prompted engagement.
- Hiring people to micro-tag each movie ended up creating very targeted tags for movies. The response from users was: "Wow! These Netfix guys really know me!" This increased the consumption a great deal.
Netflix: Tell us about a mistake you made
Netflix had a goal of increasing movie consumption by increasing the number of people who tell the site taste engine the movies they like to watch. More information about the user's taste leads to more movie recommendations based on user preference which leads to increased consumption. Simple enough?
Here is what ended up happening:
- Netflix asked the new users to rate the movies they like
- During the 2 week trial the new users spent most of the time inputting their rating movies instead of watching movies
- As a result the retention dropped significantly since users did not perceive the value
What was the solution? Netflix simply moved this movie rating control into an area of a website where most existing users go. The new users ended up spending up most of their time watching movies instead of rating them.
It's hard to summarize 25 years of experience in a 25 minute discussion. Bill did a phenomenal job highlighting the techniques and best practices behind the Netflix UI. We'd like to thank Bill once again for such a fun and insightful talk!
