True or False? People Click “Read More” Links

Imagine you’re creating a design that lists articles and their descriptions on a website—maybe it’s news on a homepage or a list of blog posts. Each listing has an image for the article, the article’s title, a short description, and a “Read More” link. You recall hearing that generic links like “Read More” can be annoying for screen readers if implemented poorly. Since you’re planning to link the headline and the image anyway, can’t you just skip adding a “Read More” link to the design?

Now imagine you’re at a design review meeting and one of your coworkers suggests adding “Read More” links so people know where to click. They share their rationale: “Some people don’t realize they can click on images or headlines.” Another coworker says the whole image, headline, and blurb lockup should be a single link with a hover state indicator, so it doesn’t matter. What should you do?

If you’re overthinking “Read More” links, we’re here to help. We asked 74 participants to pick an article to read from a list and tracked where they clicked to put this debate to rest.

Julie Young
True or False? Switches Are Hard to Use

When it comes to binary selection UI elements, our team had quite a few preconceptions about which one was best for usability: switches (also called toggles), radio buttons, or checkboxes.

Our assumptions were colored by age—both our own ages and what we thought older or younger users would prefer. A few of us accused switches of being newfangled interface elements that would confuse older users (perhaps because we are also older these days). Yet radio buttons seemed like outdated interface elements that are rarely used outside of online surveys. And checkboxes? Aren’t those best for UX dark patterns like sneaking a discreet email signup checkbox onto a form? It was time to test our preconceived notions to see if any of them represented actual user behavior.

Julie Young
True or False? Right-Aligned Buttons Are More Efficient

Let’s take a look at those ubiquitous buttons at the bottom of the form: cancel and submit. We thought it would be more efficient for right-handed people to click buttons that are on the right side of their screen because that’s the hand that controls the mouse or touches the screen. Given you’re designing with a left-to-right written language and more people are right-handed than left-handed, you should default to placing action-oriented buttons on the right side of the screen.

This belief was widespread on our team. One of us swore they saw it presented by a famous UX person at a conference a long time ago (they couldn’t find their presentation notes), and another thought that Material Design makes you right-align buttons because it’s more usable (reading through their current documentation, it does seem like they have a tendency to right align, but it doesn’t seem like a hard rule). It was time for a usability test.

Julie Young
A Guide to Adding UX to Your Organization

With this guide that I created at Sparkbox, learn how to introduce user-centered thinking to your organization in the most efficient way possible. Here’s what it covers:

  • Detailed explanations of UX roles

  • A worksheet that will help you determine where your organization could use UX support

  • A worksheet that will help you match specific UX skills with your projects

  • A worksheet to help you prioritize UX projects

  • Strategies for earning organizational buy-in

  • Tips for evaluating and selecting UX agencies

  • Materials for hiring UX professionals—including interview questions, sample job postings, and salary information

Julie Young
How a UX Team Can Support a Product Lead

As a product lead, you’re pulled in lots of directions—you might be responsible for delivery, prioritizing features, and figuring out what customers really want. In this session, find out how UX pros can lighten your load by unlocking their potential for research, generating concepts, and evaluating customer feedback.

Julie Young
Designing Mobile Navigation

Best Practices for Large, Content-Rich Websites

You have a large, content-rich website with subsites and hundreds or thousands of pages. The desktop view of the site has room for visible navigation and wayfinding aids, but the mobile site doesn’t. In fact, the mobile navigation was more of an afterthought than you’d care to admit.

Sound familiar? If so, you’re not alone. Many organizations with large, content-rich websites struggle with mobile navigation, and we wanted to identify research-backed best practices that would help overcome some of these common design challenges.

To do this, my team at Sparkbox conducted a usability evaluation of 30 university and college websites. We chose the higher education sector because it is notorious for having countless pages of content, lots of web properties, and a myriad of competing audiences and internal stakeholders to serve.

After we identified the most effective of these websites during our evaluation, we usability tested the sites with college-bound students to see what else we could learn. From this, we developed these guiding principles for mobile navigation for large websites.

  • Menus: Distinguish primary and secondary navigation with visual hierarchy.

  • Submenus: Enable users to open and close menu folders to preview second-level pages and third-level pages in more than one section at a time. Build a robust main menu rather than creating an additional section menu.

  • You Are Here Indicators: Indicate the page the user is on when they open the main menu. Include breadcrumbs for increased clarity.

  • Navigating Between Websites: Use a global header or consistent header conventions across all subdomains and microsites to link back to the main site’s homepage. If the main navigation links to other websites that don’t follow the header convention, make sure the link is clearly indicated as an external link.

  • Site Search: Optimize site search with alternate keywords that match the vernacular of your audience. Ensure that every page on your website has enough context to be the first page or the only page someone visits through search.

Julie Young
Yes, Design Systems Do Improve Efficiency and Consistency

Design systems are great for developer efficiency, visual consistency, and accessible experiences. But measurement can be challenging, and even here at Sparkbox we’re often relying on anecdotes from our own projects or from self-reported metrics that we’ve gathered from our annual design systems survey. We wanted more proof, so we decided to test our hypothesis, “design systems help developers produce better code faster.” Our test subjects? A handful of willing Sparkbox developers.

Julie Young
4 Ways to Improve the Usability of Higher Education Websites

My team at Sparkbox recently usability tested four higher education websites with college-bound high school students as part of our best practices for mobile navigation research. While watching these prospective college students perform a few basic tasks that included finding admission deadlines, the sticker price of room and board, and most critically, if the school had a major they were interested in, we noticed a few common issues.

Four ways many higher education websites could improve their user experience:

  • Use clear, familiar navigation labels

  • Invest in the organization and navigation of degree programs

  • Be transparent about costs and important dates

  • Optimize site search

Fixing these issues could improve a prospective student’s user experience of any college or university’s website, resulting in a less frustrating and more positive impression of the school.

Julie Young
So You Want to Add User Experience to Your Project

Sometimes organizations come to us because they don’t have an established user experience practice and they need the kinds of insights that user experience provides. Or sometimes they want to develop a more user-centered approach to their team’s work. Introducing User Experience (UX) to an IT organization or a team of developers can be an adjustment both for the team and the organization. In this article, we’ll share some low-friction opportunities to incorporate UX while maximizing its value for the business.

When a UX consultant joins the team, they are displacing or disrupting the normal flow of things, even when they are warmly welcomed. Why is this?

Julie Young
Putting the “User” in UX

To create digital products that truly serve the user, you have to verify assumptions about what those users want. In this presentation for Sparkbox’s 2020 UnConference, I will share some easy ways to incorporate first-person user research into your project.

After this presentation, I answered more questions about user research. Check out the Putting the “User” in UX Q&A session here.

Julie Young
Recruiting for User Research: A Toolkit

Let’s be honest. Sometimes the biggest barrier to conducting user research or usability testing is finding real users to talk to.

Finding users takes time, and drafting emails to talk to each user individually is tedious and hard to track. Worse, sometimes your product is niche, or your organization doesn’t make it easy to access customers.

But even talking with one or two users can make a big difference in how well your product connects with its audience. So we wanted to make tools that would streamline the process of brainstorming where to find users, actually contacting users, and tracking your wins.

With this kit that I created while at Sparkbox, I’ll give you actionable, easy-to-use ideas for where to find user research participants and how to advocate for the importance of UX research and usability testing. This kit includes:

  • a choose-your-own-adventure-style decision tree that guides you to participants for research or testing (download the full poster and hang it on your wall!)

  • best practice email templates to invite users to participate in your research opportunity

  • a spreadsheet to organize your research prospects and contacts

Julie Young
3 Sketching Techniques to Improve Collaboration in Meetings

When I do project Discovery or kickoff meetings with clients, I almost always start with goal-setting exercises and end with prioritization activities. In the middle, we work to deepen our shared understanding of the problem we want to solve together or the opportunity we want to pursue. One great way to do this is to sketch.

In this article, we’ll discuss three types of sketching activities that we’ve found valuable for creating a shared understanding of the project, and we’ll give instructions on how to use them in your own Discovery or kickoff session. These activities are inspired by my two favorite resources for Discoveries and kickoffs: Gamestorming and Dan Brown’s Practical Design Discovery.

These exercises get your client and team members actively participating and thinking creatively during the Discovery or kickoff meeting. Many of the ideas you have during sketching won’t make it into a wireframe or even the final product, but the activities enable everyone to share their ideas. And because of that, the team walks away with a shared vision of the path forward.

Julie Young
Quantitative Usability Testing to Test Your Design's ROI

Most in the digital community are already familiar with traditional usability testing—where five to 10 users are recruited to think aloud while they use a website to accomplish tasks. But, there are even more techniques in the UX professional’s arsenal to gather usability metrics and insights. One very valuable (and very affordable) technique is to use an unmoderated first click test to run a design comparison study.

In this article, I'll explain why you need to comparative test your designs, and how to get started. 

Julie Young
3 Reasons Why Moderated Usability Testing Should Be In Your UX Toolkit

The usability testing tool marketplace is booming—every day there’s some new service or app that allows you to plug in your tasks and run a test on a panel of participants anywhere in the world. You can get hundreds of responses for quantitative research or watch video recordings of a handful of participants taking your test and thinking aloud into the camera. With all of these options, why would you still usability test the “old” way by moderating your own test with five to 10 participants from your user base?

Here’s why:

  1. Moderated usability testing brings you closer to the user.

  2. You can dig deeper into issues and adjust the test as you go.

  3. It’s easier than ever to remote usability test.

Julie Young
The Minimum Viable Product Approach to Web Content

In my experience, the tendency of the UX person, designer, or information architect is to provide clients with a complete roadmap for the ideal website experience. Their vision is often grand—nobody hires them to think small. So, they suggest great content ideas. Ideas that excite a team at first blush, but can feel totally overwhelming to execute.

Often, content can be a major hurdle, whether the client is creating a new website or redesigning an existing one. Clients often wonder, Who is going to write all the copy? When will we shoot on-brand photos and create compelling graphics? How are we going to produce great video content? Will we manage to get this done by our launch date, within budget and with an internal team that always seems smaller than what we need?  

Enter the content MVP.

Julie Young
Customer Experience Journey Maps - A New Buzzword for an Old UX Practice?

I have a confession to make - when my workplace started to go bananas for customer journey mapping, I didn’t see much of a difference between what a journey map offers and what is provided through traditional UX research techniques. To me, customer experience journey maps were just a new buzzword for an old thing. 

In one respect, that statement is entirely true. A good customer experience journey map begins with a persona, and includes the user’s flow. The persona and customer journey map are founded in first-person customer research - the hallmark of good UX research, not on the business’s assumptions or generic marketing demographics. Usually this information is gathered from one-on-one interviews with customers, observing the customer using the product or service in the wild, surveys, message board and social media posts, and digging into customer feedback channels and analytics.

From there, the journey map deviates from the typical UX research deliverables. Instead, it is a representation of this persona’s interaction with the product or company from end to end - the customer’s initial need for a solution, their discovery of the product or service, deciding to purchase the product/service, and what it is like to be a customer or owner for the life of the purchase. Often UX user flows assume one thing - the customer is already a user. It ignores the period before adoption where a lot of decisions are made, and it often doesn’t address all the phases of a user’s relationship with the company. 

Another aspect of a customer journey that is lacking from traditional UX documentation is that the customer’s emotional journey is illustrated with equal weight alongside the customer’s interactions with the product. What is easy or delightful and frustrating or confusing during the process is called out boldly in a customer journey map. In addition, the product’s marketing efforts and customer touch points are overlaid with the same clarity. It’s a complete snapshot of the journey, whereas a user flow is just a piece.

The biggest difference, though, is that a customer journey map and persona are agnostic of the technical solution. It’s a customer need-finding tool that identifies opportunities for new products, services, or features. In 12 years of working in user experience, UX research generally begins once the product or service offering has already been identified - the client wants a new website, the company needs a tool to do the following, etc. User experience research sets out to create useful and satisfying designs within the framework of a solution, whereas customer experience research sets out to determine what will be a useful or satisfying solution - and therein lies the value.

Liminal Thinking for More Empathetic Customer Research 

I recently finished reading Liminal Thinking by Dave Gray and I can’t stop telling people about it. None of the descriptions of this book do it justice (and neither will mine), but it’s about how people form beliefs, what happens to human interactions as a result of beliefs, and how to change beliefs (or your understanding of people’s beliefs). Like I said, this book defies description. But, it’s a quick read, so I strongly suggest you do. 

As I was reading, I kept thinking about why customer research is often flawed. If you’re a researcher on a project - maybe making personas or journey maps about an audience’s experience - you’ve already done a lot of initial research, maybe talked to the client and heard their opinions, formed your own judgments, made some assumptions, and already thought of a few solutions. It’s only natural. But these are also the thoughts that will color your research, and perhaps skew it toward your preconceived notions. It is easy to interview people, write surveys, and run focus groups that are unwittingly structured to validate your own assumptions.

How do you avoid skewing your own research? Gray offers some liminal thinking practices as a solution, and I’ve identified three that I think are the most helpful. 

Assume That You Are Not Objective

Gray shares a great anecdote about a boss who shoots the messenger when he hears bad news. Because the boss reacts poorly, his employees stop telling him things. After a while, the boss feels out of the loop and wants to find a way to change it. What the boss doesn’t realize is that his reactions caused this cycle - he needs to change his behavior to get his employees’ behaviors to change.

Now, imagine that you are a UX researcher and you’ve worked on a product for years. You know why things work a certain way. While you’re researching, users keep bringing up issues, but because you’re so close to the product you dismiss what they’re saying because it “had to be that way” or it’s “not in the budget.” Meanwhile, an outsider might find these insights to be the most valuable part of the research - possibly the key to designing a better product.

If you’re part of the system, you need to approach things like an outsider and assume that you are not objective. 

Empty Your Cup 

Emptying your cup is one way to get an outsider perspective. This means that you have to consciously suspend your judgment. Let go of any knowledge you have on the subject and forget your theories, preconceived notions, and assumptions in order to let other people’s thoughts and beliefs in. This is hard, but it is possible! 

How do I do this? While I’m in a research mode, I do not let myself dwell on theories or solutions. When they inevitably come to mind, I control them by writing them down in my notebook so that I’ll have them for later. Then I block the thought out (knowing I have it noted) and continue researching. 

For example, I was working on a project where I was interviewing about a dozen people who were considering an optional medical procedure. At the start of my interviews, it seemed like health insurance coverage was an enormous blocker. I jotted a solution in my notebook that said “make it easier to check insurance - maybe an online tool?” By the time I had talked to everyone on my list, I had learned that determining insurance coverage was a simple phone call that many people easily made. Those who weren’t calling the insurance company weren’t ready to commit to saying yes or no to the procedure, so they procrastinated while they thought more about it. It was a different problem (and a different solution) than the one I had identified earlier. 

If I had clung to my early idea, I could’ve used my interviews to validate the idea. I bet if I asked everyone I talked to, they all would have liked an easy online insurance coverage checker. But my insurance-checker idea probably would not have changed minds or solved the bigger issue of fear and uncertainty around the procedure itself. 

Triangulate and Validate

The story I just told also brings up the practice of triangulating and validating. With this, Gray encourages people to not just assume that they know what’s going on. Talk to as many people as you can, and to as many different types of people as possible. For my project, I talked to the client, to the medical office staff, and to people who were considering the procedure, in the process of having the procedure, and those who had recovered from the procedure. I read message boards and Reddit strings, online health information, and more. I tried to examine the research through a lot of different lenses so I that I could gain deeper insights. 

As difficult as it is, for the best customer insights you have to let go of your own theories and stay flexible about the outcome. If you manage to do this - even just a little bit - you’ll understand your subject more, and you’ll be able to make an empathetic connection with your customers.

Market Research Tools: Using Google Forms for Surveys & Screeners

Whether I’m recruiting usability test participants or planning customer research, one of my go-to survey tools is Google Forms. I often find myself turning to online survey tools for things like participant screeners for usability testing or user interviews, and I also use it to perform market research and customer surveys. Plus, Google Forms is free, which matters a lot when your client has a small budget or doesn’t need the full capabilities of a paid survey tool. 

Though there are a lot of freemium and free survey tools out there, Google Forms offers a handful of valuable features, and I know that the service is reliable - it’s not a start-up that is going to be shuttered or sold to someone else a month from now. At the risk of sounding too much like an informercial, here’s a list of the many reasons why I like using Google Forms to conduct online surveys. 

Advantages to Using Google Forms for Surveys

  • First and foremost, you’re able to build robust surveys with conditional logic. Really, as much logic as you need. Though the editor portion of the form tool can get unwieldy, you’re able to make a friendlier survey experience for your audience with low effort and at no cost. 

  • You can collect a lot of survey responses. At the time of this writing, you can collect 400,000 responses if you import to a spreadsheet, and unlimited responses if you only use the tool’s built-in reporting.

  • Your data is portable. You can download the responses into a Google Spreadsheet or a CSV file so you can import and analyze the results in whatever stats tool you’re comfortable with. Also, you can easily save a copy of the raw survey data outside of the tool for posterity. 

  • Lastly, Google Forms can be be customized with an image. Adding an image automatically changes the color scheme to match. So, the survey can match your brand if you need it to, which makes the survey feel more credible (and removes some of that “cheap” Google Form aesthetic).

With Google Forms, cost is never a barrier to reaching out to your users or your customers - you will always have a free, highly capable tool to help you collect information and gain insights from your audience.