Great design and user experience for smiles

I’m taking a bit of a break from writing my contextual series to address a few crucial problems that I’ve been seeing on a daily basis. That is the lack of a good user experience. On any given day, I visit close to 50 different sites and use over a dozen apps.  Of those I would say that 75% of them I would not visit or use if they had decent competitors.  The biggest problems with sites and apps these days is that they like to bombard the users with information.  I get that you want to make money from your ads, but displaying them elegantly will yield better results.  Design is also crucial, these days the simple look works and it looks great.

I’ve built my site around the same principles that I talk about. Yes my blog has ads, but I in no way try to distract my readers from the content. I push users to signing up to my newsletter in a box that appears in the top right. That box is set only to be seen once a week.  As for the look and feel, I kept things simple with no fancy logos, gradients, etc. While I may not get a huge amount of traffic, I am sure this design and approach could be used with great success from more popular bloggers.

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Contextual Series: User Engagement

In the second part of the contextual series, I will be continuing from where I left off last time with User Onboarding. I’ll be covering how to make your application relevant after the user has gotten past their initial experience.  The goal is to engage with the user in a way that will retain them and have them spend money.

The first few minutes of the user trying your product is crucial. In that short period of time they will decide whether they will uninstall it and move on or keep trying it out. But the next 30 minutes are also just as important. Like a drug, you want the user hooked to your product, you want them to feel as though they are dependant of it.  The most common way products get you addicted is through social engineering by getting you to engage with people you know. While it is something I would recommend each product would do, the product should be able to stand on it’s own even if the user has no friends.

Let’s assume that your product is capable of tracking a lot of data, including basic user profiles to narrow down their demographics and activity history. The data can be used to improve your analytics, determine business logic, and can be used to feed into your contextual engines.

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Contextual Series: User Onboarding

Over the past few years I’ve been working with new technologies and working new techniques for approaching user experience problems. Companies have routinely approached the problem of providing segmented user experiences by selling different products or services. Those who don’t have the resources to do so pick one segment and focus on them while alienating all other users who are trying out their product. I am not a fan of either solutions and there are others who aren’t either.

The proper solution for ensuring that users are happy is by providing a product or a service that feels as though has been built for them. When a user comes to your newspaper site and you know that they like cars, you shouldn’t start giving them news about fashion.  They will see this and leave immediately, likely to never come back. First impressions are everything. But even with that great first impression, if you can’t keep the user interested and engaged, you’ve also lost them.

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Forget marketing if you cannot provide unparalleled support

2013 has been a year where my brand loyalty has gone out the window. A lot of the products and services I used to love have lost me as a customer and a supporter.  Why?  Because I’ve experience poor support.  There were also certain scenarios where I chose to buy a competitive product or service to the one I was considering because their sales and support team made me feel welcome.

This is certainly not a new theory by any means. Companies are hiring agents to man their Twitter and Facebook channels for users complaining.   Having been on both sides of the coin, it isn’t an easy.  As a user, you are frustrated that you aren’t getting what you expected, whether or not expectations are reasonable.  With sometimes unreasonable users, providing may sometimes feel like a lost cause. Let me tell you that it is not, I will share my GoDaddy experiences later.

There are companies that I have been very loyal to over the past 10 years. I’ve praised their product, chanted their name and also showed my support with my wallet.  I’ve also supported brands in general, regardless of the product they released.  When something doesn’t work as expected or breaks, support is the first line of contact. Some bend over backwards trying to make you feel comfortable, even if you are wrong. Then there are others who feel like they just read you an answer from a manual without care of you moving on.  This year, my worst experiences have all been with services, namely Lunarpages, GoDaddy and Spotify.

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Is Lunarpages storing passwords in plaintext?

First of all, I want to state that these are serious claims. That what I am stating is based on my observations.  While I cannot confirm what I am saying is true, it is hard to claim the situation is much different than what I am stating.

Lunarpages, as I wrote in my previous post, has been my hosting provider for nearly 10 years. I’ve grown up from being that wacky teenager with limited technological understanding to now architecting and building infrastructure and development tools. I don’t claim to be an expert in any way and there is a lot I can learn.

Over the past year, I noticed some very shady things going on with my account. In part, my account was compromised at least twice where files were overridden. To this day, I still do not know how it has happened. But lately having to deal with support, I noticed a rather major flaw.  Lunarpages and it’s staff have access to your passwords in plain text.

To come up with the conclusion that Lunarpages in has access to your passwords in plain text comes from two separate emails I’ve received from them in the past week.  Frankly, I have lost all faith in them as a company.

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Why Lunarpages is no longer my hosting provider

I’ve been with Lunarpages now for nearly 10 years.  Of those 10 years, the last year has been terrible. There have been several instances along the way that were bad. I was more patient then.  I have paid for their services on a yearly basis. I would essentially be paying for 10 months per year. The downside was that I was locked in and had no where to go.

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Must changing your default email be this difficult?

As you may (or may not) have read yesterday, I have been migrating my email services onto a more reliable platform.  In the process of doing so, I have been looking to change my primary personal email address from @cy-designer.com to one at @pelland.me. I don’t know if any of you have tried to change your primary email address, it is not at all easy.

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I’ve finally migrated my email away from shared hosting!

I’ve spent the better part of the day today working to migrate all my email accounts from my current shared hosting provider onto a more reliable Outlook.com. My shared hosting provider, which I do not wish to mention at this moment, but will in future posts, has been terrible. I’ve had emails disappear on me and in many cases my emails bounced. Of course when I contacted support with those issues, they blamed the sender for improperly typing the email address. Out of the dozen or so support tickets on the issue, not once did they bother looking into the issue.

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Pelland.me now with Open Graph “Read” support!

As of today, pelland.me has been upgraded with the ability to keep track of all the articles you read. I’m looking to add some more actions in the near future and make the actions better associated with the interactions you are performing in this blog. To start, you only need to Login with Facebook.

If anyone feels I should post a tutorial or perhaps a plugin for this, let me know in the comments.
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