In the spirit of FOWD I made three predictions for the future of web design based on how we humble humans interact with each other.

If you enjoy the presentation why not buy my eBook Psychology for Designers, it’s only £2 / $3.50 / €3.50.

There are more posts on PsychologyForDesigners.com if you are interested in the area where psychology and design meet.

We have a number of interesting projects lined up for the coming months and we are looking for freelance Digital Project Managers to help with delivery.

If you’ve had 2 + years experience as a Digital Project Manager in an agency environment, are an excellent communicator and have a ‘can do’ attitude, then we’d love to hear from you.

You’d be responsible for delivery of multi disciplinary projects – user experience, visual design and front-end development – across a number of national and international clients.

The role would require you to:

• Produce project documentation, including Project Plans, Statements of Work, Project Initiation Documents, and quotations in conjunction with our UX consultants, designers and front-end developers.
• Schedule projects and book resources.
• Manage project progression, expectations and responsibilities both on the internal and client sides.
• Manage any third party suppliers or other agencies.
• Identify and overcome risks to the quality and profitability of projects and our client relationships.
• Liaise with internal project team to keep them informed of project progress; liaise directly with the client.
• Organise the timely completion, sign off and amends to deliverables.
• Set up and manage the shared project space.
• Hold weekly project meetings to discuss and document progress and resolve any problems.
• Manage change, and raise change requests, in order to control costs and revenue.
• Analyse timesheets to monitor project profitability.
• Report to the Operations Director on related sales by month.
• Manage time spent, and outsourced work during the project, in order to control costs and hence profitability.
• Provide the Finance Manager with invoicing schedules and contacts.

We’re looking for someone who has strong interpersonal skills and can develop relationships in a confident and friendly manner.

You’ll have excellent written English, Apple iWork and Microsoft Office Skills. Demonstrable experience of managing budgets and digital projects, with good understanding of interface design and build techniques. Prince2 or Agile certification is important, as is a good working knowledge of project planning tools and user experience principles and terminology.

The role is based in our Queen Square office in Bristol with an immediate start. The contract would initially be for 3 month.

If you’re interested in the position please send your CV, in the first instance, to Verity Whitmore or Tamlyn Driver.

No recruitment agents please.

Download the cxpartners task model cheat sheet.

My slides for the workshop are below:

In every UX  project I work on, I see just how important photos are in terms of conversion, trust, behaviour and user understanding.

What amazes me is the lack of attention that photos get during the design process from a usability and user experience perspective.

As UX professionals we are ideally placed to help select and evaluate photos in terms of usability and effectiveness.

So how can help to improve the effectiveness of photos on your next project?

Usability of web photos ebook

Within ‘Usability of web photos’(£2) , I give you everything you need to get started, as well as a new checklist to use to evaluate the usability and effectiveness of web photos.

In the 60 page ebook I cover:

Part 1: What are usable photos and why are they so important?

In this chapter I explain just how we can think about photos in terms of usability and user experience. I also talk about some of the psychological reasons behind the importance of photos.

Part 2: Photo usability stories from the coalface.

Every time I conduct user research I observe fundamental usability problems that are caused directly by the photos. In this chapter I share a few of my favourite photo sability success and disaster stories.

Part 3: How do you know if a photo is usable or not?

Many of you will have conducted expert reviews of digital products and services using heuristic evaluation tchniques. I’ve come up with my own checklist for you to use to evaluate the usability and effectiveness of photos.

Part 4: The digital design process and web photo usability

I think the design process is broken when it comes to photos. We pretty much ignore them and then leave selectign them until far too late in the process. In this section I interview a commercial photographer and a digital design director to uncover the issues they face when creating and designing with photos in commerical projects.

Part 5: User-Centred design techniques to improve photo usability

In the final chapter I share ten simple techniques that you can use that will help to improve the effectiveness and usability of photos on your own web projects.

The book is available now for only £2 from Five Simple Steps. My cut from each sale will be donated to Children in Need.

About cxpartners

cxpartners is a user centred design consultancy working with clients such as Channel 4, Cambridge University and Marriott to develop web and mobile experiences.

Our projects take us all over the world and we’ve a global reputation as leading thinkers in this field. Nevertheless, we’re a small, friendly and informal team. We think we provide a great place to work and grow, and a fantastic place in which to further your career.

Job Description

This is a new, full-time London-based position for a Senior UX Consultant who is comfortable and confident leading UX projects.

You will be our first full-time London employee. As well as working on existing projects, we will ask you to help grow our business in London, to help establish our office and, in time, to help build our team. For the first few months, we’ll ask you to spend time in our Bristol office (several days a week to start with) to build relationships with our existing consultants, with whom you’ll also work in London.

In particular, we’ll ask you to manage and deliver a wide range of user experience (UX) projects with existing clients, including:

• Conducting usability tests, research, expert reviews and surveys
• Running workshops and interviews with our clients
• Gathering business requirements
• Creating wireframes, user journeys, personas, information architecture, reports and other deliverables
• Working with our Design and Development teams to ensure quality of delivery and UX focus in later stages of our projects.
• Help to win new clients for us by responding to new business opportunities in London.
• Represent cxpartners on the global UX scene; attend and speak at conferences; write articles and blog, both for us and for others. Our writing appears regularly in Smashing Mag, .Net and the like.

In everything you do, you’ll need to present us beautifully and to reflect our values to our clients: making the complex, simple; bringing ideas to life through storytelling; listening carefully – because we love our clients; speaking plainly and directly; helping our clients to grow their businesses through serving their users.

We’ll need you to have (and to show evidence of) these skills:

• Detailed knowledge and at least three years’ practical experience of user experience methodology and practices, including user-centred design.
• A highly professional appearance, and the natural ability to command presence.
• Strong interpersonal skills; the natural ability to communicate effectively internally and externally, and to develop relationships in a confident and friendly manner.
• Excellent written English and verbal communication skills.
• The ability to work both independently and as part of a team.
• Strong attention to detail.

And this experience:

• The right to live and work in UK.
• A university degree, probably in one of the following subjects: Computing Science, HCI, Business, Psychology or Design.

In return, we’ll offer you a great package with a bonus scheme, 25 days holiday, and benefits including an iPhone 5, health care and pension plan.

If you’re interested,  please contact Verity Whitmore with a brief CV and your portfolio (link or pdf).

A product roadmap links individual projects to your wider business strategy. The steps to go through to reach the goals identified in your strategy. A way of planning the steps to get to where you want to be.

It helps show how each part of the business needs to be in step to meet important product updates & the overall strategy.

Feel free to update it and make it your own.

Here's our product roadmap template

Download Product Roadmap for PowerPoint
Download Product Roadmap for Keynote

If you have any tips to share on how better to communicate a roadmap why not add a comment below.

Future of Web Design London

My book Psychology for Designers is out and I’ve been asked to run a workshop and speak at the Future of Web Design in London in May.

The workshop will cover the following:

You know somethings are ‘good design’ and some things are ‘bad design’ for usability & user experience but have never been quite sure why this is so? Learn the psychological principles behind how our brain makes sense of a user interface and you’ll be able to:

• Design better
• Present and advocate your designs using psychology

In this workshop we’ll take the typical elements of web and application design and deconstruct them using our knowledge of Cognitive Psychology to understand why some designs work better than others. We’ll cover: Homepage and content pages, how people perceive & remember, forms & product pages, baskets & calls to action, how people decide. Through this we’ll look at how to find, apply and advocate using psychology theory.

I’m really excited and hopefully I’ll see you there.

Psychology for Designers

Our friends at Five Simple Steps have published a new book by Joe.

If you are a web, digital and UX designers, Psychology for Designers will show you how to apply psychology to make your designs more effective and how to use psychology to better advocate design decisions.

Great design is judged on how it makes you feel: emotion is key. This book won’t tell you every single psychology study you have to read. In fact, it contains very little in the way of theory. What it will show you is how to find, apply and advocate design using psychology. Making your designs and they way you talk about them better.

In this book Joe Leech will talk you through in five chapters how to apply psychology to design. He’ll cover the benefits of using psychology in design, the and the various types of psychology. He’ll also show you how to find and apply a psychology theory to solve a design problem as well as advocating design decisions using psychology. He’ll also give an overview of psychology courses and further study.

The pocket eBook is available now for £2 from those nice people at Five Simple Steps

I’m also very pleased to announce my new ebook ‘Usability of Web Photos‘ which will be out in the new year.

Usability of Web Photos eBook

“Congratulations purchase complete, you’ve qualified for our free delivery”.

What? What does this mean?

In a state of panic you search for their delivery policy which is buried deep in the site. It reads “Free delivery on every order. Items take approximately 4-6 days for delivery”.

Now you:
A) Still have no present for your dad and
B) are no longer in town to find a replacement.
Angry and frustrated this experience has left a bad taste in your mouth and you vow never to shop at this store again.

So where did this company go so wrong?

They offered free delivery. Surely that’s got to count for something? For many people free delivery is extremely important. In fact a recent survey by comScore showed that 55% of people abandoned checkout because shipping costs were too high and their number one improvement for online shopping would be free delivery.

Finding out what your customers need

What this company failed to see, was that it was not the cost of delivery that was most important to this customer but having control over when it was delivered. You, the customer would have been more than happy to pay to get it delivered in time for Christmas, but you weren’t given that option. Funnily enough in the same comScore survey mentioned earlier the second most requested improvement cited by consumers was the ability to have named or nominated dates for delivery.

Not understanding what your customers want and need can cost you dearly.

We hear numerous stories of woe connected to poor deliveries and returns, but equally when retailers offer great service in this area they shine as brands people love.

What has struck me about both the positive and the negative experiences we hear about, is that the difference between them is the information and choice that is given to the customer at different points throughout their shopping journey.

The story above outlines the heightened emotional state people are in when making time sensitive purchases. If as a retailer you can turn that anxiety into a successful experience you have an opportunity to differentiate yourselves from your competitors and boost brand loyalty.

Here are some things you should be thinking about in order to make sure you’re one of the companies that shine.

During purchase

Delivery information

Make sure people are able to locate delivery information easily from every page on your website – don’t make people hunt around for this information. When we worked on the Charles Tyrwhitt website we achieved this by placing delivery information next to the product information in a easy to spot location.

Delivery in context - Charles Tyrwhitt product page

Allow control over how and when people receive their delivery

For some people time is not an issue, so here free delivery will be beneficial. For others time is the most crucial thing, so they will be willing to pay to have control over when and where they receive their delivery. Equally for delivery of large ticket items allow people the option for timed delivery, so they don’t have to wait in all day. Again a service people will be prepared to pay for in return for convenience.

John Lewis delivery options

Allow people choice in their delivery options

Allow people to set their delivery address – amazingly some companies won’t allow you to add a different delivery address from your billing address on your first purchase. New Look clearly show delivery options at checkout, providing the option to pick up from store for free.

New Look delivery in basket

Provide clear and easy to find information about your returns policy and options

If people are aware of this up front they can make the decision about whether they want to proceed or not. Of course providing a great returns service will negate the need for this but if you are unable to fulfill on this you should let people know before they buy.

Post purchase

Keep people in the loop

Provide good feedback so people feel in control. Build up the excitement with notifications. A great example of this is the Dominos pizza tracker in the US as soon as you place your order you can see that your pizza has started to be made and is on it’s way to you.

Dominos pizza tracker - creating excitement

Photojojo’s communications are always lovely. The shipping confirmation shown here is sprinkled with personal touches that keep the customer informed and excited about their purchase.

Delightful - photojojo shipping confirmation

Stick to your promises

If there’s been a delay try and offer a solution let them know you’re sorry. Go above and beyond.

Allow people to cancel their order easily if they need to.

Allowing people to cancel their order before it’s been sent will save an unnecessary return and so save money to your business.

Returns

Often people buy online because of convenience and necessity; ‘they didn’t have my size in store’, ‘There isn’t a store in my town’. Don’t punish people for this, allow them to buy and try without extra cost to themselves. I recently had to buy 2 coats online as I wasn’t sure of my size so ordered both. Neither of them fit and the company (who will remain nameless) forced me to foot the returns bill of £25.00. Needless to say they’ve lost my custom for good.

Make it easy for people to return items

The simpler this process is, the more likely they will be to buy from you in the future.Send the customer everything they need to make a return. This information should be supplied along with their package and also made readily available online incase they need to access it somewhere else.

Allow lots of choice for how people return their goods.

For example free pick up, free post or collect+ are all services, which take the hassle away from the customer.

And finally go above and beyond.

I hold ASOS up as an exemplar of good practice for delivery and returns. However I still wonder why they make me write out the price I paid for each item on the delivery slip, surely they have this in their database? In other words there’s always room for improvement.