by JoelMarsh on 6/2/14, 11:45 AM with 34 comments
by JonoBB on 6/2/14, 1:10 PM
> If your marketing department wants to know anything about why the user is cancelling, put it in the form. Two pages of boring questions is a great way to reduce conversion.
> Break the form into many pages so it takes longer. Include links to FAQ pages. And avoid using defaults; it maximizes the number of conscious choices for the user.
> Ask them to explain their reasons for cancelling, and require at least 100 letters of text. Explaining is hard when your reasons are emotional.
Really? Obviously I don't want to make it too easy for users to cancel, but to make it too hard just seems petty to me. Asking them to fill out the reasons for cancellation is a great idea (and worked really well for us), but forcing them to write at least 100 letters is just horrible.
Also, there are some users that you really do want to cancel. You know, the ones that suck up twice as much support as anyone else and complain incessantly.
Surely its more important to be focusing on why users are cancelling, not luring them through a maze of "two pages of boring questions"? Does anyone reputable actually do this?
There is a sweet spot somewhere in between, but this seems to be irritating and would just make me want to write complete junk responses.
by harrybr on 6/2/14, 6:48 PM
The solution is simple, you need to clearly cite and link to your sources.
As well as making the source authors happy, this will be very helpful for readers who want to do further research.
by Aardwolf on 6/2/14, 12:54 PM
I want more information on screen, more settings, more logic.
The UI trend however seems to be less information on screen, less settings, and more "The UI knows better what you want than you do" :(
by fat0wl on 6/2/14, 3:04 PM
This guide reads more like those old guides for how to use SEO to drive traffic to your dung-heap. I don't know how others feel but I want to create a good experience for my users, not convince the masses that they are my users so I can go to some freemium lowest-common-denominator model.
Is web dev the wrong place for me or are we just in a bubble phase for these people who try to use their "clever interfaces" to regress humans to some animal state? (If you look at the chapter headers in this guide I don't think I'm out of line... its literally about addiction, sex, etc.)
by boyander on 6/2/14, 4:34 PM
by brianjoseff on 6/2/14, 2:51 PM
by toddkaufmann on 6/2/14, 3:22 PM
I used to think UX meant a wider "systems" approach to the man-machine interface, incorporating findings from CHI, cognitive science, user studies, etc.
Now it seems like it is becoming a name for the design of marketing your product in the experience economy, not helping perform a task more efficiently (unless the "task" is selling to the user).
I'd like to see some discriminating term separating this from the UI-to-the-machine (UIttM ?) where streamlined presentation of the right info just-in-time is important, versus the "create more clicks for A/B testing" sales growth-hacking / I can make a web page with fonts.
I dunno, maybe this is a false dichotomy and reflects some kind of design thinking that UX is a term to apply to everything. Did a UX person design the pattern on my toilet paper?
by usablebytes on 6/2/14, 12:54 PM