1. Subliminal Suggestion

Research shows that objects and images you see around you can prime you for certain behaviors. For example, a study on children showed that after being shown a Santa Claus cap, they were more likely to share candy with others. The cap embodied the concept of sharing and giving in their minds, and exposure to it primed them for regarding sharing more positively. The same study also exposed kids to a “Toys ‘R’ Us” logo, which had the opposite effect of the Santa Claus cap, making them less likely to share their candy.

When choosing images for your website, think carefully about the message you’re trying to send. Pick images that are meaningful and that embody that message or feeling. Don’t put graphics on your website for their own sake — if they’re not doing a job, they don’t have to be there. Clichéd and overused imagery and stock photos are also dangerous because it may not send the right message in the given context, so select images that get the effect you’re after.

2. Prevent Choice Paralysis

There is a phenomenon in marketing known as “choice paralysis.” Choice paralysis happens when the user is given too many options. Choice is great, but when your customers are presented with too many options, they may be confused about where to go. Nobody wants buyer’s remorse (where a person chooses an item and decides later it’s not right for them), so many people spend more time than they should on the selection process: they become paralyzed.

In fact, according to Barry Schwatz, when customers have too many options to consider, they end up avoiding a specific service or the task in general (Paradox of Choice) – and this is exactly what we as designers need to carefully consider in our designs.

To remedy choice paralysis, make it easier for people to find the right product or service for them. Tell them what each option is great for, and then suggest the one they should choose. You can even use visuals to highlight the most popular product and steer potential customers towards it. If the product is not right for them, they’ll pick another, but if they’re confused, a “default” choice helps prevent choice paralysis.

3. Show The Product

When you visit a physical store, perhaps a grocery, you can look at, examine and sometimes even taste the products on sale. You make your purchasing decision based on the information you gather there. Are the tomatoes ripe enough? Are those strawberries red enough? What about the look and smell of that freshly baked bread?

When you sell services or Web apps online, you should do exactly the same thing: show the product. It’s surprising how many websites that sell software don’t actually show screenshots of their applications. Sure, these are intangible goods, digital goods that you can’t touch or smell, but they’re still goods you can see.

People make judgments based on what products look like. Why? Because appearance is an indicator, rightly or wrongly, of a product’s usability. This is known as the aesthetic-usability effect.

If people see a complicated and cluttered interface or, in some cases, even just an unattractive interface, they may assume it is not very usable or is hard to learn. On the other hand, if people see an attractive and simple-looking interface, they may start figuring out how it works right then and will want to give it a try. Get people to imagine using your software, and you’ll get closer to closing the sale.

4. Let People Try It

Once you start using a product, you become involved in it. Once you start entering data into it, you begin to make it your own. Every second a user spends trying out features is a second of their time invested in learning and using your product.

When that user is then presented with the question of whether to purchase or subscribe to the product or service, they will more likely say “yes” because they are already involved and have invested time in it. Of course, if the product is bad, then it may turn people off, but then your priority should really be to improve the product until it reaches a level people are happy with.

In recent years, we’ve seen the emergence of the “freemium” business model. A freemium service allows people to use a portion of it free of charge, but requires a purchase to use all of its features. It gives people a taste of the full product but doesn’t limit them to a trial period. This lets them use the product for free without monetary commitment and then upgrade if they like it.

It’s a great model for many online Software-as-a-Service businesses because once somebody begins using your product, they get sucked in. They start to rely on it, and when they rely on it to do business or manage their life, they will very likely need the premium features down the line and will be happy to upgrade because they already know your service well.

Stories are very important in sales because they get potential customers to imagine what it would be like to use your product. Letting people actually try your product for free goes even further. They don’t have to imagine because they can begin using it right away at no cost. Letting people try out your product, whether through a demo, a trial period or a freemium model, is an excellent way to win customers. Now, this isn’t really a “design” element but is important to mention here because of its potential to drive conversions.

5. AIDA

AIDA is a well-known strategy in sales and stands for: Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. It is relatively simple and describes the sequence of events you should aim for to get a sale. So, first of all, you must capture the attention of your potential customer. Once you have it, you should win their interest by explaining how your product or service can help them.

Then, once they’re interested, generate a desire in them for your product. For example, a story about how this product has helped someone like your visitor can help them imagine what this product would do for them, and especially what benefits it would bring. Indeed, the benefit part is key here because benefits, not features, sell products.

Finally, you need to get people to act. This means purchasing the product or signing up for the service. If people want your product, all they may need is a button to check out. If they are interested but not yet sure, you could use a few methods to motivate them further; for example, creating a sense of urgency with a limited-time offer or limited supply.

Now, the AIDA approach applies more to copy — the actual marketing text on the website — than design, so what we need to do on the design side is reinforce that copy, make it stand out and ensure visitors read it. This means making sure the first thing a new visitor sees really grabs their attention. The flow of the page should then direct their focus to the items that achieve the other two goals: interest and desire. Finally, at the end of this flow, we need to convert. So, provide calls to action: “Order now,” “Sign up here.”

It’s important to understand that the design alone won’t sell: you need strong copy in place to do most of that work. The design is there to reinforce and support the copy, rather than the other way around.

This means you shouldn’t design a nice website first and then fill up the space with words. Instead, think about the message you want to send out, write the copy and then construct a design that delivers that. If a delivery truck breaks down, then the package does not arrive, but if there was no package in the first place, then the delivery wouldn’t matter at all.

6. Guide attention

To benefit from something like AIDA, you have to lead your visitors through your content. You can do this by aligning items in a manner that will flow, and using images that guide the eyes. For example, if you want to focus attention somewhere, use a big arrow. Our eyes will notice the arrow and will naturally want to see where it points to.

Structure your content in a way that will flow towards something. Having a bunch of scattered feature descriptions may confuse and make your visitors lost, unless of course if all of the points end in calls to action. If you want to ensure your visitors don’t miss anything, align everything in a linear structure so that the user scans along it. Make sure to end it with the ultimate call to action: that signup or download link.

7. Always Provide Next Actions

ABC: Always Be Closing. If you’re designing a website to sell something, whether a software application or Web service, you should always be thinking about how you’re closing the deal on each page. This doesn’t mean filling every page with big “Buy now” buttons; it means when the customer is ready to buy, they shouldn’t have to look around for the check-out link.

Always provide next-action links to keep the flow going and to ensure you don’t lose the attention of potential customers. Next-action links can direct the visitor to a page with more information about the product or to the actual page where they can make the purchase or sign up. These links could read something like: “Ready to order? Click here,” “Learn more,” “Take the tour” or “Shop now.”

Don’t leave a dead end on any page: always suggest to your visitors where they should go next.

8. The Gutenberg rule

The Gutenberg diagram (or the Gutenberg rule) is a concept that maps out something called reading gravity. Reading gravity describes a habit of reading in the western world: left to right, top to bottom. The Gutenberg diagram splits up a page into four quadrants: the “Primary Optical Area” in top left, the “Strong Fallow Area” in top right, the “Weak Fallow Area” in the bottom left and a “Terminal Area” in bottom right.

The Gutenberg diagram

It suggests that the bottom left area of the page will get least attention as our eyes scan the page from top left to bottom right and that our glance would end up in the lower right portion of the page. How can we utilize this concept? Buttons and calls to action could be placed in bottom right instead of bottom left, as this is the place where the visitor’s glance is likely to alight.

Note that the Gutenberg diagram is more likely to work on pages which have more a balanced distribution of content. If parts of your page have strong highlights through high contrast and bold typography, then those areas would likely attract more attention and so will direct the way a user scans the page.

According to a recent study conducted by Edison Research, 87 percent of the U.S. population is now aware of its existence. Surprising? Not really. Forget about Twitter’s overwhelming online presence, the site is constantly being thrown in our face throughout every media outlet imaginable. From CNN to ESPN, we’re constantly exposed to the endless stream of thoughts that Twitter encompasses.

While Twitter’s presence is undeniable, its future lacks certainty. Will Twitter continue to grow and thrive? In short, no. Why? Allow me to explain…

With nearly 90 percent of the U.S. population completely aware of Twitter, certainly a majority of them are actively using the service, right? Not really.

Twitter gets an estimated 180 million unique visitors internationally per day, but not all of them have accounts. Of the estimated 106 million accounts on Twitter, only 3 percent have more than 100 followers, while 24 percent of users have 0 followers. Only 40 percent of people who try Twitter remain active on the service after their first month.

While Twitter does receive quite a bit of attention, it has been proven to be of little use to the majority of people.

It’s All the Rage… For Now

Obviously, Twitter gets a lot of its traffic from outside sources promoting their accounts on the site, but how much exactly? 75 percent. That’s right, three-fourths of Twitter’s visitors come to the site as a result of promotions made by third parties.

That’s all fine and well for now, but hype eventually dies. What happens when these outside sources decide to abandon the social networking platform for the next big thing? That, my friends, will be the end of Twitter as we know it.

Too Connected

So why, exactly, do 60 percent of Twitter users quit within the first month of using the platform? Twitter simply doesn’t appeal to average internet users.

If you’re not a spammer, a narcissist, or a business owner, chances are Twitter isn’t of much use to you. Your everyday person signs up for Twitter to see what all the hype is about, figuring that they will be able to connect with friends and family, and read interesting news stories. Quickly, however, they are proven wrong. Twitter takes “connecting” to another level. New users are rapidly exposed to what Twitter is all about, and are overwhelmed with the constant influx of updates.

Most (normal) people don’t care what you’re eating for dinner, when you’re going to sleep, or how local firefighters rescued a cat from a nearby park. Soon, new Twitter users find that the platform is essentially a breeding ground for relentless marketing and ego inflation.

Funny enough, neither corporate entities nor people with a false sense of self-important care what you have to say. The way in which Twitter is used really defeats its purpose. If nearly every status update falls upon deaf ears, is it really connecting?

Other, Better Options

Despite the fact that Twitter is constantly shoved in your face, it’s not like there aren’t other options. There is an endless list of social networking mediums that exist, many of which are of much greater value to typical internet users. Sure, Twitter does an outstanding job of catering to users’ without much to say, but it is essentially useless to those who do have something to say. That’s where Facebook comes in.

Not only does Facebook cater to the average Joe by allowing them to speak their mind, they provide a familiar platform to do so. Learning from the mistakes that lead to the downfall of MySpace, Facebook provides a more familiar, easier to understand social networking experience.

Being wrapped up in the online tech world, you may not know it, but terms like hash, tweet, and retweet have no meaning to the vast majority of society. Terms such as like, fan, and share, however, are easily understood. Not to mention the fact that people actually like building, maintaining, and having a profile.

For these reasons, it’s clear why Facebook continues to dominate its competition. Currently second only to Google in terms of traffic, Facebook sees over 400 million people logging in every month, 50 percent of which visit the site every day.

Twitter Isn’t Profitable

Despite Twitter’s reach, the fact remains that they really don’t make any money. Why? Well, for one, they don’t really put much effort into actually becoming profitable. While this is a noble and refreshing concept considering the abundance of ad infested social networking platforms, it doesn’t do much for the company itself. Twitter relies on venture capital to fuel its operations.

How long will venture capital firms continue to shell out cash to an unprofitable service, though? In the end, all venture capital firms are concerned with is profiting from their investments.

This year, Twitter did release an advertising platform in hopes of turning profit. So far, it has yet to do so. Twitter limited the companies that they would allow to advertise to well known corporate entities, shunning small businesses who desire a self-serve advertising platform similar to Facebook’s. Hey, that’s their call, but how long will these advertisers last?

The truth of the matter is, their advertisements are reaching a demographic with a short attention span… people who, in all honesty, aren’t likely to even notice the advertisement as they quickly scan for updates. Why would these companies even pay for advertisements when there are thousands already following their account?

While sipping a cup of organically farmed, artisan-brewed tea, I tap on my gigabit-wireless-connected tablet, to pull up a 3D movie on the razor-thin HDTV hanging on the wall. A media server streams the film via a superspeedy USB connection to a wireless HD transmitter, which then beams it to the TV.

That actor–who was he? My augmented-reality contact lenses pick up the unique eye motion I make when I have a query, which I then enter on a virtual keyboard that appears in the space in front of me. Suddenly my field of vision is covered with a Web page showing a list of the actor’s movies, along with some embedded video clips.

These technologies will come to life in the distant future, right? Future, yes. Distant, no.

Speed and content (much of it video) will be paired consistently across mobile, laptop, desktop, and home-entertainment systems. New ways of using video–including adding 3D depth or artificial visual overlays–will require more speed, storage, and computational power.

In our preview of technologies that are well on their way to reality, we look at the connective tissue of USB 3.0, 802.11ac, and 802.11ad for moving media–especially video–faster; at HTML5 for displaying video and content of all kinds consistently across all our devices; at augmented reality to see how the digital world will stretch into our physical reality by overlaying what we see with graphics and text; and at 3D TV, which will add image depth and believability to the experience of watching TV.

USB3

USB may be one of the least-sexy technologies built into present-day computers and mobile devices, but speed it up tenfold, and it begins to sizzle. Cut most of the other cables to your computer, and the standard ignites. Bring in the potential of uncompressed video transfer, and you have a raging fire.

Any task that involves transferring data between your PC and a peripheral device–scanning, printing, or transferring files, among others–will be far faster with USB 3.0. In many cases, the transfer will be complete before you realize it has started.

The 3.0 revision of USB, dubbed SuperSpeed by the folks who control testing and licensing at the USB Implementors Forum (USB-IF), is on track to deliver more than 3.2 gigabits per second (gbps) of actual throughput. That transfer rate will make USB 3.0 five to ten times faster than other standard desktop peripheral standards, except some flavors of DisplayPort and the increasingly out-of-favor eSATA.

In addition, USB 3.0 can shoot full-speed data in both directions at the same time, an upgrade from 2.0′s “half duplex” (one direction at a time) rates. USB 3.0 jacks will accept 1.0 and 2.0 plug ends for backward compatibility, but 3.0 cables will work only with 3.0 jacks.

This technology could be a game-changer for device connectivity. A modern desktop computer today may include jacks to accommodate ethernet, USB 2.0, FireWire 400 or 800 (IEEE 1394a or 1394b) or both, DVI or DisplayPort or both, and–on some–eSATA. USB 3.0 could eliminate all of these except ethernet. In their place, a computer may have several USB 3.0 ports, delivering data to monitors, retrieving it from scanners, and exchanging it with hard drives. The improved speed comes at a good time, as much-faster flash memory drives are in the pipeline.

USB 3.0 is fast enough to allow uncompressed 1080p video (currently our highest-definition video format) at 60 frames per second, says Jeff Ravencraft, president and chair of the USB-IF. That would enable a camcorder to forgo video compression hardware and patent licensing fees for MPEG-4. The user could either stream video live from a simple camcorder (with no video processing required) or store it on an internal drive for later rapid transfer; neither of these methods is feasible today without heavy compression. Citing 3.0′s versatility, some analysts see the standard as a possible complement–or even alternative–to the consumer HDMI connection found on today’s Blu-ray players.

The new USB flavor could also turn computers into real charging stations. Whereas USB 2.0 can produce 100 milliamperes (mA) of trickle charge for each port, USB 3.0 ups that quantity to 150mA per device. USB 2.0 tops out at 500mA for a hub; the maximum for USB 3.0 is 900mA.

With mobile phones moving to support USB as the standard plug for charging and syncing (the movement is well underway in Europe and Asia), and with U.S. carriers having recently committed to doing the same, the increased amperage of USB 3.0 might let you do away with wall warts (AC adapters) of all kinds.

In light of the increased importance and use of USB in its 3.0 version, future desktop computers may very well have two internal hubs, with several ports easily accessible in the front to act as a charging station. Each hub could have up to six ports and support the full amperage. Meanwhile, laptop machines could multiply USB ports for better charging and access on the road. (Apple’s Mac Mini already includes five USB 2.0 ports on its back.)

The higher speed of 3.0 will accelerate data transfers, of course, moving more than 20GB of data per minute. This will make performing backups (and maintaining offsite backups) of increasingly large collections of images, movies, and downloaded media a much easier job.

Possible new applications for the technology include on-the-fly syncs and downloads (as described in the case study above). The USB-IF’s Ravencraft notes that customers could download movies at the gas pump at of a filling station. “With high-speed USB [2.0], you couldn’t have people waiting in line at 15 minutes a crack to download a movie,” Ravencraft says.

Manufacturers are poised to take advantage of USB 3.0, and analysts predict mass adoption of the standard on computers within a couple of years. The format will be popular in mobile devices and consumer electronics, as well. Ravencraft says that manufacturers currently sell more than 2 billion devices with built-in USB each year, so there’s plenty of potential for getting the new standard out fast.

Video Streaming Over Wi-Fi

Wired ethernet has consistently achieved higher data speeds than Wi-Fi, but wireless standards groups are constantly trying to figure out ways to help Wi-Fi catch up. By 2012, two new protocols–802.11ac and 802.11ad–should be handling over-the-air data transmission at 1 gbps or faster.

As a result, future users can have multiple high-definition video streams and gaming streams active across a house and within a room. Central media servers, Blu-ray players, and other set-top boxes can sit anywhere in the home, streaming content to end devices in any location. For example, an HD video display, plugged in with just a power cord, can stand across the room from a Blu-ray player, satellite receiver, or computer–no need for expensive, unsightly cables.

The 802.11ac and 802.11ad standards should be well suited for home use, though their applications will certainly extend far beyond the home. The names reflect the internal method of numbering that the engineering group IEEE uses: 802 for networking, 11 for wireless, and one or more letters in sequence for specific task groups (that’s how we got 802.11a, b, g, h, n, and others).

The 802.11ac standard will update 802.11n, the latest and greatest of a decade’s worth of wireless local area networking (WLAN) technology that began with 802.11b. With 802.11ac, wireless networking performance will leap from a theoretical top speed of 600 mbps to a nominal maximum of more than 1 gbps. In practice, the net data carried by 802.11ac will be likely be between 300 mbps and 400 mbps–more than enough capacity to carry multiple compressed video streams over a single channel simultaneously. Or users may assign individual streams running on unique frequencies to a number of separate channels. Like 802.11n, 802.11ac will use many antennas for receiving and sending data wirelessly.

The 802.11ac flavor still won’t have the capacity to carry lossless high-definition video (video that retains the full fidelity and quality of the raw source), however. Today, lossless video is common over wired connections after decompression or decoding of a data stream from a satellite, cable, or disc. The right hardware will be able to take the 802.11ac compressed data stream and send it directly to a decoder in an HDTV set; some HD sets already have this capability today. But when uncompressed video has to stream at a rate faster than 1 gbps, a speedier format must be used.

That’s where 802.11ad comes in. It abandons the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands of the spectrum (where today’s Wi-Fi works) to the newly available 60GHz spectrum. Because the 60GHz spectrum has an ocean of frequencies available in most countries–including in the United States–you’ll be able to use multiple distinct channels to carry more than 1 gbps of uncompressed video each.

Unfortunately, the millimeter-long waves that make up 60GHz signals penetrate walls and furniture poorly, and oxygen readily absorbs the waves’ energy. So 802.11ad is best suited for moving data across short distances between devices in the same room. Apart from supporting fast video transfers, 802.11ad will permit you to move files or sync data between devices at speeds approaching that of USB 3.0–and 1000 times faster than Bluetooth 2.

The 802.11ad spec is one of three competing ideas for using the 60GHz band of the spectrum. The Wireless HD trade group, a consortium of consumer electronics firms, is focusing on video use of the 60GHz band, while the Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig) is looking at networking and consumer uses. Membership in the various groups overlaps, making an interoperable and perhaps unified spec possible. Though 802.11ad doesn’t specifically address video, it will be a generic technology that can accommodate many kinds of data. At a minimum, each group will work to prevent interference with one another’s purposes.

The combination of 802.11ac and 802.11ad, coupled with USB 3.0, will allow you to position clusters of computer equipment and entertainment hardware around your home. USB 3.0 and gigabit ethernet might connect devices located in a cabinet or on a desk; 802.11ac will link clusters across a home; and 802.11ad will carry data to mobile devices, displays, and other gear within a room.

Allen Huotari, the technical leader at Cisco Consumer Products (which now includes Linksys products and ships millions of Wi-Fi and ethernet devices each year) says that the change in home networks won’t result from “any one single technology in the home, but rather a pairing of technologies or a trio of technologies–wired and/or wireless–for the backbone and the wireless on the edges.”

This means fewer wires and cables, better speeds, and higher-quality video playback than anything possible today. By 2012, both specifications should be readily available.

3D TV

When television makers introduced HDTVs, it was inevitable that they would figure out a way to render the technology obsolete not long after everyone bought a set. And they have. The next wave in home viewing is 3DTV–a 2D picture with some stereoscopic depth.

As 3D filmmaking and film projection technology have improved, Hollywood has begun building a (still small) library of depth-enhanced movies. The potential to synthesize 2D movies into 3D could feed demand, however–the way colorizing technology increased interest in black-and-white films in some circles in the 1980s. For movies based on computer animation–such as Toy Story 3D, a newly rendered version of the first two movies in the series–it’s already happening.

The promise of 3D is a more immersive, more true-to-life experience, and substantively different from almost anything you’ve watched before. In commercial theaters, 3D projection typically involves superimposing polarized or distinctly colored images on each frame and then having viewers wear so-called “passive” glasses that reveal different images to each eye. The brain synthesizes the two images into a generally convincing notion of depth.

In contrast, 3D at home will almost certainly rely on alternating left and right views for successive frames. HDTVs that operate at 120Hz (that is, 120 cycles of refresh per second) are broadly available, so the ability to alternate left and right eye images far faster than the human eye can follow already exists. Fundamental industry standards are in place to allow such recording, says Alfred Poor, an analyst with GigaOm and the author of the Web site HDTV Almanac.

Viewing 3DTV displays will require “active” glasses that use rapidly firing shutters to alternate the view into each eye. Active glasses are expensive today, but their price will drop as 3D rolls out. Meanwhile, designers are in the development phase of producing a 3D set that doesn’t require the glasses.

Sony and Panasonic have announced plans to produce 3D-capable displays, and Panasonic recently demonstrated a large-screen version that the company expects to ship in 2010. As happened when HDTVs rolled out, premium 3DTVs will appear first, followed by progressively more-affordable models.

Creating and distributing enough 3D content to feed consumers’ interest may be more of an challenge. Poor noted that filmmakers are currently making or adapting only a handful of features each year for 3D. But techniques to create “synthetic 3D” versions of existing films (using various tracking, focus, and pattern cues for splitting images) could fill the gap.

Existing terrestrial cable and IPTV networks should be able to distribute 3D content. The bandwidth that such networks use to deliver typical HD broadcasts will be adequate for delivering 3D video once the networks upgrade to newer video compression techniques. Satellite may face a more difficult road, since such systems already use the best levels of compression.

For physical media playback, Blu-ray can store the data needed, and 3D Blu-ray players are already on the drawing board. No fundamental changes in Blu-ray will be necessary, so the trade group that created the standard is focusing compatibility–such as ensuring that a 2D TV can play a 3D disc.

Standards issues might not end up being very troublesome, so long as the 3DTVs are flexible enough. An industry group is working on setting some general parameters, much as digital TV was broken up into 480, 720, and 1080 formats, along with progressive and interlaced versions. A 3DTV may need to support multiple formats, but all will involve alternating images and a pair of shutter-based glasses.

Poor expects that 3DTV will be but a minor upgrade to existing HDTV sets. The upgraded sets will need a modified display controller that alternates images 60 per second for each eye, as well as an infrared or wireless transmitter to send synchronization information to the 3D glasses.

“Augmented Reality” in Mobile Devices

In Neal Stephenson’s book Snow Crash, “gargoyles” are freelance intelligence gatherers who have wired themselves to see (through goggles that annotate all of their experiences) a permanent overlay of data on top of the physical world. In less immersive fashion, we may all become gargoyles as “augmented reality” becomes an everyday experience.

Augmented reality is a catchall term for overlaying what we see with computer-generated contextual data or visual substitutions. The point of the technology is to enhance our ability to interact with things around us by providing us with information immediately relevant to those things.

At work, you might walk around the office and see the name and department of each person you pass painted on them–along with a graphical indicator showing what tasks you owe them or they owe you. Though many case scenarios involve “heads-up” displays embedded in windshields or inside eyeglasses, the augmented reality we have today exists primarily on the “heads-down” screens of smartphones.

Several companies have released programs that overlay position- and context-based data onto a continuous video camera feed. The data comes from various radios and sensors built into modern smartphones, including GPS radios (for identifying position by satellite data), accelerometers (for measuring changes in speed and orientation), and magnetometers (for finding position relative to magnetic north).

In an application called Nearest Places, the names and locations of subway stops, parks, museums, restaurants, and other places of interest are shown on top of an iPhone’s video feed. As you walk or turn, the information changes to overlay your surroundings.

“Smartphones and the related apps are the trailblazers for augmented reality,” says Babak Parviz, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in nanotechnology. “In the short to medium term, my guess is that they will dominate the field.”

Other prototype applications display information dropped at particular coordinates as 3D models that the user can walk around, or as animations whose details update in 3D relative to the user’s position. But the technology for those apps isn’t ripe yet; handhelds require a more-precise positioning mechanism in order to handle that kind of data insertion. Fortunately, each smartphone generation seems to include more and better sensors.

In other realms, augmented reality may serve to provide not just additional information, but enhanced vision. One day, infrared cameras mounted on the front of a car will illuminate a far-away object represented as a bright-as-day image on an in-windshield display. Radar signals and wireless receivers will detect and display cars that are out of sight; and one piece of glass will host GPS and traffic reporting.

Leaping past displays, Parviz and his team are working on ways to put the display directly on the eyeball. They’re trying to develop a technology for embedding video circuitry into wearable contact lenses. While wearing such contact lenses, you would see a continuous, context-based data feed overlaid on your field of vision.

Before Parviz’s lenses become a reality, augmented reality is likely to become a routine navigation and interaction aid on mobile devices. In addition, game developers may use the technology to overlay complete digital game environments over the reality that gamers see around them.

HTML5

Hulk VI was great, but w  hat should you watch this evening? Before heading off to work in the morning, you click to some trailers on a movie Website, but you don’t have time to watch many. So you use your mobile phone to snap a picture of the 2D barcode on one of the videos; the phone’s browser then takes you to the same site. On the commuter train to the office, you watch the previews over a 4G cell phone connection. A few of the movies have associated games that you try out on your phone, too.

Remember when every Website had a badge that read “optimized for Netscape Navigator” or “requires Internet Explorer 4″? In the old days, people made Web pages that worked best with–or only with–certain browsers. To some extent, they still do.

The new flavor of the HTML–the standard program for writing Web pages–is called HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language version 5); and HTML5 aims to put that practice to bed for good.

Specifically, HTML5 may do away with the need for audio, video, and interactive plug-ins. It will allow designers to create Websites that work essentially the same on every browser–whether on a desktop, a laptop, or a mobile device–and it will give users a better, faster, richer Web experience.

Instead of leaving each browser maker to rely on a combination of its in-house technology and third-party plug-ins for multimedia, HTML5 requires that the browser have built-in methods for audio, video, and 2D graphics display. Patent and licensing issues cloud the question of which audio and video formats will achieve universal support, but companies have plenty of motivation to work out those details.

In turn, Website designers and Web app developers won’t have to deal with multiple incompatible formats and workarounds in their efforts to create the same user experience in every browser.

This is an especially valuable advance for mobile devices, as their browsers today typically have only limited multimedia support. The iPhone’s Safari browser, for example, doesn’t handle Adobe Flash–even though Flash is a prime method of delivering video content across platforms and browsers.

“It’ll take a couple of years to roll out, but if all the browser companies are supporting video display with no JavaScript [for compatibility handling], just the video tag and no plug-in, then there’s no downside to using a mobile device,” says Jeffrey Zeldman, a Web designer and leading Web standards guru. “Less and less expert users will have better and better experiences.”

Makers of operating systems and browsers appear to be falling into line behind HTML5. Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Opera, and WebKit (the development package that underlies many mobile and desktop programs), among others, are all moving toward HTML5 support.

For its part, Microsoft says that Internet Explorer 8 will support only parts of HTML5. But Microsoft may not want to risk having its Internet Explorer browser lose more market share by resisting HTML5 in the face of consensus among the other OS and browser makers.

HTML5 is now completing its last march toward a final draft and official support by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Many of the usability issues I discover nowadays can be very subtle indeed, difficult to describe even, let alone write guidelines for, but I’ve collected together a list of 10 of the most common usability issues I find so that you can see how your site measures up.

1. No Search Results Found

It can be difficult to “test” the search engine on your site, you enter “apples” and find apples… there.. done. But frequently when I actually try to work out what customers are searching for I end up with the dreaded “No Results Found” page. I would argue that there is no excuse for ever showing no results no matter how odd the search. Go to your web site and really use the search engine for once and see if it ever returns no
results.

Some suggestions

• Given that people are using the search engine, you can assume that people are looking for something
  so why not at least show the last 5 things searched for, or the 5 most popular products or pages?
• Does your internal search engine know what to do with synonyms? Will it find the same items for “ipod”
  and “i-pod”? If not you need to do some work.
• At a presentation a long time ago by the tech guys from BBC search, they showed how they’d implement
  what they call “Best Bets”. It was a great if simple idea in which they’d identified items they’d expect
  people to want if they typed a certain word into a certain section of the web site at a certain time.
  These “best bets” were returned along with the usual search results.
• Make sure you have at your disposal the list of search terms used on your site that returned no search
  results and do something about that.

2. Somewhere To Go Next

When designing web sites, it’s tempting to think of them as a tree structure, with categories being branches or departments and the individual pages being the leaves, but it’s not. The visitors to your web site rarely use it as you designed it, often landing on a page deep in the site missing the home page altogether. Often the page a visitor will not contain the information they need but because this page has been designed as a destination (or leaf) rather than as a step in a journey and have nowhere to go next. It’s then tempting to assume that your site navigation will encourage visitors to explore further, but some recent recent research found that many web users are “navigation blind”, passing as little heed to site navigation as they do banner ads. Having somewhere to go next also usefully avoids the reduction in sales in what Jared Spool amusingly calls “The Back Button of Death”.

Some suggestions

• Create landing pages that meet your customers needs rather than arguing with colleagues about who
  has most prominence on your home page.
• Don’t assume that your site navigation will be used. Think about the linkages between your content
  rather than the categories.
• Design and author the relationships or the “journey” rather than the structure of your site.
• As an exercise, look at your site without the main navigation. Is it still navigable?
• Add extra inline links where appropriate. No content is an island.

3. Facetted Search Results

Search results and product listing pages are often arbitrarily chunked into say 10 or 20 items? It may return 3 or 4 hundred matches or more, too many results to read really. One of the easiest ways you can improve your site is to add search filters or “facets” to your search engine so that when people search, the attributes of the items found can be used to easily further drill down on what they are looking for. The example below from the Delia Smith web site shows how a search for “chicken” can
be easily further filtered using the “Also found in” links at the right hand side.

4. Default Actions

On many sites you have a main task you are trying to achieve, whether it’s finding a present for someone or buying a train ticket. All these sites break down these tasks into separate screens but often fail to make it clear what THE ONE THING you should do on a particular page. Amazon do a great job of designing buttons that are the “Default Action”. There are other buttons on the page, but it is always obvious which is the button you should click next to achieve your task. The Amazon screen below has lots of things I could do (Change quantities, add gift wrapping etc.) but the “Place your order” button really stands out well. Now go to your web site
and see if it is visually clear what you want your visitors to do.

5. The 1, 2, 3 of Design Purpose

So many sites fail on this one. You’d be amazed but often, the owners of a web site haven’t actually even decided what the purpose of their web site is, they have a web site because everyone else has one or because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Given the way we all use the web, I reckon you probably have roughly 3 milliseconds to convince someone that your web site is where they should be. This is how I break down
that precious moment for a first time visitor…

1. Am I in the right place? Does your company name or strap line peripherally assure people that they
   are in the right place? Are the images used helpful?
2. Am I convinced by this site? Does what’s on screen or deeper in the site, reinforce the customers
   credibility of your company as they explore what you have to offer? Visitors are looking to be convinced so are you
   doing all you have to convince them?
3. What should I do now? What is the ONE THING you people to do? Is it to call you, or to buy something
   or to sign up or to remember you or what? Tell them to do that thing. Make it clear how to do that thing. Make
   the design focus on doing that one thing.

Go to your site and see if you can visually and conceptually recognize the 1, 2, 3 in your design.

6. Chocolate Box Syndrome

Human beings put things in categories, we can’t help it, but categories are also where lots of problems arise. For example, imagine that a web site, like life, was a box of chocolates and categorized thus…

• Soft centres
• Hard centres
• Ones that nobody likes

I wouldn’t want to choose which category to click, but in general I have a very clear idea of which type of chocolate I’d like. Whether or not you should categorize chocolates like this or not is something you’d need to test using card-sorting techniques with your customers but the usability of these categories can be significantly improved by showing some of the items in it.

So, the above example might be changed to look like this…

• Soft centres (23)
• Hard centres (4)
• Ones that nobody likes(4)

..which at least gives us some clue as to what the arbitrary categories contain in terms of
numbers. But it may be better served by showing it’s contents with a fuller description, like
this…

• Soft centres (dark chocolate orange creme, strawberry creme, coffee truffle more
• Hard centres (butterscotch toffee, hazelnut crunch, caramel more
• Ones that nobody likes ( turkish delight, crystallized ginger, praline more

Given that I prefer dark chocolate over milk, I am able to be encouraged into clicking, maybe going straight to the item I’d like (the “dark chocolate orange”) and not wonder if the caramel is one of those nice gooey ones. When a category, such as “Soft Centre” reveals some of its contents, it helps us to better understand the parameters of the category. And given, in most cases, we’d like to know what we are going to get before we get it, because a category (or link) reveals some of it’s contents we are more likely to be tempted into clicking it. Now visit your site and assess whether the categories you use “reveal their contents” or not.

7. The Anxiety Test (why, why, why?)

This is a really easy test to run. It helps if you drink way too much strong coffee first. All you have to do is use your site and imagine worrying nervously and endlessly about every element on every page. For example, in the registration process, you could imagine worrying…

• Why do they want my address? Will they send me junk mail though the post?
• Will you sell my address?
• I wonder if you’ll call round when I haven’t tidied up a bit?
• What if I’m moving house next week? Can I change it later?
• Is this my credit card address or where I’m living now? Will this checkout process break?
• I don’t know my post code yet, does this matter?
• Is “rd” OK or should I type “road”
• Do I really have to fill all these address fields?

Particularly for form items, where possible, it is reasonable to tell people what the implications of giving up some information are, why you need it and in what format you’d ideally like it. This puts people at ease with your site because it…

• calms anxieties and makes people more likely to buy
• reduces the errors people tend to make, creating a better experience
• sets expectations and helps to build trust

8. 404 Page Not Found

This is a simple test too. Add some random characters at the end of your URL and hit return and see what you get. What can you say? Sometimes people will link to you and get the URL completely wrong. It happens. Why not accept that it’s going to happen and design for it. Don’t think of your 404 page as simply an error page, think of it as a page from which people should be able to get to the page they really wanted.

9. Newsletter Honesty

This test is related to both The Anxiety Test and The Chocolate Box Syndrome. Many sites offer the option to sign up for an email newsletter without telling the visitor…

• What the newsletter contains
• How frequent the newsletters are
• What you are going to do with their email address
  Given that most people are precious about their email In Tray. Does your site?
• Show examples of previous newsletters so that people can assess whether or not it is the type of thing
  they’d like to receive. If not why not?
• Is it honest about how often you send out the newsletter? Is it once a day, week, season?
• Do you state clearly what you will do with their email address?

10. Page Titles

I still occasionally find sites where every page share the same title. Not the title as it appear inside the window, but in the window bar. It’s not as common a mistake as it used to be but it’s still happening. Page titles are hugely important to the usability of your customers browser bookmarks but also hugely important with regards to how Google works and how people find you. So, perform the test of …What does your site look like in Google search results? For many people this is the one chance you
have to convince them that your site is worth visiting. They don’t get to see your lovely new design, they don’t get to experience how usable your site is; all they see of your site is the blue, black and green of Google and the titles you have created.

Chances are you’ve seen the video showing how the iPhone can flip and expand Web pages. It can show you the entire Web page at a glance or zoom in to make the text you’re interested in readable. In one sense, since the iPhone uses Safari, Web designers shouldn’t have to do anything special to create a Web page that will work on the iPhone.

But do you really want your page to just work? Most designers want their pages to shine!

[polldaddy poll=1303861]

When you build a Web page you need to think about who’s going to view it and how they are going to view it. Some of the best sites take into account what type of device the page is being viewed on, including the resolution, color options, and available functions. They don’t just rely on the device to figure it out.

General Guidelines for Building a Site for iPhones

• Test on as many phones as you can
  The first thing you should do is view your site on a cell phone or 10 different cell phones. While there are some emulators out there, they really don’t give you the same feel as trying to navigate through a Web site on the tiny little screen.
• Make your pages degrade gracefully.
  You can write your pages for Flash-enabled, wide screen browsers, but make sure that the critical information is visible even in a tiny monitor that can’t handle any special features (like cookies, Ajax, Flash, JavaScript, etc.). Anything beyond XHTML Basic will be beyond some cell phones.
• Build a wireless specific page – and make it easy to find
  If you’re going to build a specific page for your cell phone and wireless customers – make it available. A great way is to put the link to the wireless page at the very top of your document, and then hide that link from non-handheld devices using the handheld media type. After all, most people come to your home page, even on cell phones – and if the link to your wireless page isn’t there, they’ll leave if the page is too hard to use.

Web Page Layout for iPhones

• Remember that the screen is tiny. Web pages that are multiple thin columns (like the New York Times site that the iPhones ads feature) are going to work better on cell phones than Web pages with one large column. The narrower the content is on your normal page, the less it will have to shrink to fit a cell phone window.
• Divide pages into smaller chunks. It can be difficult to read long segments of text on a cell phone, so putting them on multiple pages makes them easier to read.

Links and Navigation on iPhones

• The shorter the links are, the better. If you’ve ever tried to type in a URL on a cell phone, you’ll know that it’s a pain (except perhaps for teens who are used to SMSing 24/7). Even on the iPhone it’s tedious to type in long URLs. Keep them short.
• Don’t put your navigation at the very top of the screen. There is nothing more annoying than having to page through screens and screens of links to find the information you want. If you’ve looked at Web pages that were designed for cell phones, you’ll see that the first things that show up are the content and headline. Then, below that is navigation.
• Access keys are a gift from heaven on cell phones, especially when the links or form fields make it clear what keys can be hit to get that link. If you get into the habit of using access keys on your Web pages, your cell phone users will be ecstatic.

Tips for Images on iPhones

• The images must be small. Yes, the iPhone can zoom and unzoom in on images, but the smaller they are, in both dimensions and download time, the happier your wireless customers will be. Optimizing images is always a good idea, but for cell phone pages, it’s critical.
• Images must download quickly. Images take up a lot of space on Web pages when you’re viewing them from an iPhone. And while they are often very nice and make the pages look better when viewed on a full-screen Web browser, they often get in the way on a mobile device.
• Don’t put large images at the top of the page. Just as with navigation, it can be very tedious to wait for an image that takes up 3-4 screenfuls to load at the very top of the page. And this is extremely common on Web pages.

What to Avoid When Designing for iPhones

There are several things you should avoid when building a wireless friendly page. As I mentioned above, if you really want to have these on your page, you can, but make sure that the site works without them.

• Flash – most cell phones do not support Flash, so it’s not a good idea to include it on your wireless pages.
• Cookies – most cell phones have no cookie support.
• Frames – even if the browser supports them, think about the dimensions of the screen. Frames just don’t work on wireless devices – they’re very difficult or impossible to read.
• Tables – don’t use tables for layout on a wireless page. And try to avoid tables in general. They aren’t always supported and you can end up with strange results.
• Nested tables – if you must use a table, make sure not to nest it in another table. These are difficult for desktop browsers to support, and at best make the page load more slowly.
• Absolute measures – in other words, don’t define the dimensions of objects in absolute sizes (like pixels, millimeters, or inches). If you define something as 100px wide, on one mobile device that might be half the screen and on another it might be two times the width. Relative sizes (like ems and percentages) work best.
• Fonts – don’t assume that any of the fonts you’re used to having access to will be available on the cell phones.