Archive: Design

We are delighted to announce that Future of Web Design will be returning to London for the 4th year running. Taking place from May 17th – 19th 2010 in the heart of London it will be packed full of great talks, workshops and networking opportunities.

Grab the early bird discounts

There are a number of early-bird offers available including £195 off a two day conference pass, they are limited in number so grab them whilst they’re hot.

Amazing speakers

Here’s just a few of the great speakers we have lined up for this year. Full details of their sessions are available on the new site http://futureofwebdesign.com.

• Dan Cederholm – How to Get Started with CSS3
• Simon Collison – What will Web Design Look Like in Two Years?
• Molly Holzschlag – Progressive CSS3 Design
• Dan Rubin – Usability testing, interface design, prototyping and rapid iteration
• Relly Annett-Baker – Words and Pictures: Copy and the design process
• Paul Boag – How to Run a Successful Web Design Business
• Sarah Parmenter – iPhone interface design
• Joshua Davis – HYPE framework
• Elliot Jay Stocks – Successful Through Self-Promotion
• Brendan Dawes – How To Be More Creative

New venues, new format and longer sessions

• New conference venue – This year we move to The Brewery in the hear of the City
• New workshop venue – The beautiful Wallace Space will play host to the workshops
• New 3 day format – 2 days of talks and 1 day of in-depth workshops
• 2 tracks – Each day will feature two tracks giving you over 30 sessions to pick from
• Refreshments – Complimentary coffee, tea, juices and lunch for every attendee
• In depth sessions – Longer 40 minute sessions allowing speakers to go into detail on their specialty

Go and check out our new web site http://futureofwebdesign.com. Let us know what you think.

Donating money to a charity should be as quick and easy online as it is to stuff a few coins in a collection pot on the high street. It should also be apparent what the money will be used for.

With these two things in mind, it is surprising how often charities miss the mark when it comes to their online donation screens. Fiddly pull-downs, peculiar microcopy, trillions of steps, and minimal transparency.

Here are some of our step-by-step notes and drafts from a concept exercise on behalf of a well-known charity. The goal was to create a screen that encourages more site visitors to give, and give larger amounts.

We don’t know if these ideas will ultimately be used, but they illustrate ways of evolving the user experience in a way that should increase the amount of money collected.

The starting point

(Disclaimer: we combined two screens in to one to have a truly poor starting point for the exercise.)

The centre of the donations page has the words “Charge me” followed by one drop-down menu with well over fifty options starting at $2.00 increasing by one dollar up to $30 and then in larger increments up to the $1000 mark. The second menu has only one option: zero cents.

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I spend a lot of time working on large-scale site designs, redesigns, and app designs, so it’s kind of fun when the pressure is on to develop a single lead generation page.

For the purposes of this post, let’s define a lead generation as a single page that is:

• Usually discoverable when a user clicks on an ad
• A page that precedes a much larger site, or a gateway that refers the user into a larger site
• Dedicated to rapidly getting users’ email/personal information for follow-up messaging and/or a trial account
• Almost always makes an offer (discount, trial period, etc.)
• Not always connected in an obvious way to the larger app’s site (a user might struggle to find it again)

In some ways, a lead generation page, is a micro version of the app’s home page or sales flow.

Companies make substantial investments in Google AdWords (and others) to drive traffic to lead gen pages, so these single page designs have hefty expectations to deliver compelling user experience, design creativity, and form functionality

Lead gen page design is not only short, sweet, and mostly self-contained. It’s also a perplexing balancing act between designing for conversion “the dough” and employing some conventions (e.g. not hyperlinking logos back to the app’s main home page, stock photography, microcopy, offers, etc.) that feel more trickster-like “the spam.”

I’ve divided this post into two parts, 3 tips to follow when designing a lead generation page, and a 3-part redesign of an actual lead generation page that’s currently out in the wild. (more…)