UI/UX Articles And Interesting Tidbits Of The Week
March//27//2020
Here are some interesting finds on UI/UX of the week!
1.
Video Accessibility. As world events impacted processes and work flows, video has become something that organizations are more reliant on, more so than ever. This article hailing from the WebDesignerDepot, sheds light on some considerations to have when embarking on a Video centered solution. This includes items such as Captions, Transcripts, Subtitles, Formatting Text on Screen, Keyboard Input considerations and of course, Accessible Video Players (this to name but a few). Well worth a read. Highlight of the article includes:
“Captions are basically a script that appears inside your video. So, much like a script for a movie or a play, captions are synchronized annotations that spell out what is heard. In addition to the speech itself, captions may include things like: Titles and chapter names displayed but not spoken aloud; Song names or lyrics playing in the background;Notes about ambient noises. There are two kinds of captions you can use. Open captions automatically display whenever anyone plays your video. Closed captions need to be turned on by the person watching the video.While some video player software may offer to auto-generate captions for you, it’s best to do it on your own.”
2.
Monitoring is Critical to Successful AI. Interesting article from Tech Crunch on AI and Machine Learning progress. As AI impacts our world on multiple levels (understanding individuals/users at a scale, identifying opportunities, predicting and personalizing features, optimizing permutations, new interfaces, to name but a few), this article places its emphasis on the need for monitoring results, at the risk of producing outcomes that are potentially biased. Highlight of the article includes:
“Recognizing this, artificial intelligence and machine learning are being rapidly adopted by critical industries such as finance, retail, healthcare, transportation and manufacturing to help them compete in an always-on and on-demand global culture. However, even as AI and ML provide endless benefits — such as increasing productivity while decreasing costs, reducing waste, improving efficiency and fostering innovation in outdated business models — there is tremendous potential for errors that result in unintended, biased results and, worse, abuse by bad actors.”
3.
Mobile Checkout Best Practices. While the article states best trends for 2019, the richness of content, testing and results exposition that is featured, makes it worthwhile highlighting it. The article showcases a series of tests done on mobile checkouts, including “add to cart” notifications, upsells, button positioning, button labels, trusted seals, savings highlights, save for later options, among other relevant topics. It’s incredibly detailed, insightful and well worth a read. Highlight of the article includes:
“We’ve tested a save your cart feature on many ecommerce stores and the results have almost always been positive. Most sites already have this ability built-in, if a user is logged in. So the easiest way to test this is to include a button or link in the cart page that says “Save Your Cart for Later” followed by “by creating a free account”. In one of our tests, we saw a whopping 250% increase in account creations by adding this link. Why so big? Because most ecommerce sites have dismal account creation rate other than people who already buy. (When is the last time you decided to create an account when buying clothing online for example?). So adding this incentive (save your cart) and clear CTA on a very high traffic page (cart) increases account creations dramatically.”
