UX Gon Give It To Ya - Carney
The Daily Carnage

UX Gon Give It To Ya

Big lessons from bad UX mistakes.

Really Bad UX Mistakes That Even Great Teams Make

Remember how horrifying Microsoft Word toolbars used to be? Here’s a little nightmarish blast from the past. Straight up heinous.

Even the best, at times, really suck. And it’s these mistakes that can also present themselves as opportunities to understand more about what users need. But, if you ignore your mistakes for too long, you’ll alienate your users and audience.

The blog post we’re featuring today breaks down some terrible UX mistakes so that you can learn them and understand why they’re bad news for your product or brand. If you see a mistake that looks familiar, don’t worry, this post will help you fix ’em too.

Mistake 1: You built a Norman door. A what? In UX talk, that means “any button, menu, or digital object that doesn’t give you any hint on how to use it.” Google did it here in Google translate. When you introduce a new symbol like this, help a new user understand the function by (1) building prototypes and collecting user feedback and (2) providing clear and simple user on-boarding.

Mistake 2: You under-utilized user data in personalization. We’re not talking about [insert name here] tactics. The value of personalization is in using what is unique about a person and their usage to help them reach their goals and increase engagement—optimizing every interaction your user has with your brand. Look for ways to use the data you have about your customers to offer personalized advice and recommendations.

Mistake 3: You loved too much of your product. When you’re too attached to your product’s features or design elements, it’s difficult to get rid of them. But this can be detrimental to UX because adding more stuff can overwhelm and confuse your user. This shows itself as content overload and visual overload. Instead, focus on the core value of your product and prioritize visual simplicity.

More takeaways and baaad UX examples inside.

Why Your Marketing Strategy Needs User-Generated Content

Content marketing got you down? Feeling tired from the stress of creating content? Well, fear no more because user-generated content is here to blast those problems away!

Sorry for the cheesy infomercial intro (not thaaat sorry). Mark was just wondering what it’d be like to be an infomercial scriptwriter. Turns out, not much fun.

But for real, user-generated content (UGC) is a great way to create great content without adding to your workload. If you’re not familiar with the concept, UGC is simply just using your audience to create content for you—any type of content, not just blog content! Coke and Starbucks do this all the time. In the marketing world, much of Moz’s blog is UGC.

Once you get your UGC campaign up and running, it’ll reduce your workload by giving you free, unique content. That type of content will improve your website’s SEO because your users are going to use more/different keywords in their content than you use. Google likes that variety. But wait, there’s more! UGC also helps build social proof.

Today’s Read also offers a few ideas on how you can create a UGC strategy:

  • Start by reviewing your audience. What platforms are the most likely to use that you can leverage? For example, if your audience are avid Instagram users, then a photo-sharing campaign is a simple option.
  • Set requirements for the content you want your users to provide. Moz has some good suggestions here.
  • Create a landing page on your website to collect and promote UGC. This is going to be specific to each campaign, but it’s vital to do this.
  • Engage with your audience. Connect with anyone who submits content. Promote discussions around UGC on social media. If you’re using UGC for blog content, definitely make sure you have comments enabled on your blog posts.
  • Don’t forget to showcase top-performing content. Highlight the stuff that gets the most likes, shares, clicks, etc.

More to learn on this one…

Modern Day Cowboys

Pack your bags, we’re headed to Germany for today’s Watch.

Das Handwerk, the German Federation of Craftsman, took the classic Western saga and turned it into an entertaining 2-minute modern film.

There are all the typical things you’d expect to see in a movie of this style—an older woman screaming in the streets, a priest performing an exorcism, dramatic banjo music (never thought we’d type that one), and of course our hero and his trusty steed.

In the tale, the hero rushes into the old woman’s house to tackle a villain the basement. As it turns out, the villain is actually a modern-day boiler. But our favorite part? The ad ends with the phrase, “Und? Was hast du heute gemacht?” which translates as “And? What did you do today? We can tell you, we haven’t done anything nearly as dramatic today.

 

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”

Charles Mingus

Ads from the Past

Carnage

Get the best dang marketing newsletter in your inbox on the daily. Subscribe »

Related Posts