Great User Experiences

I've written about bad user experiences, now here's the good..

Path who needs another mobile diary timeline of your life? I know I know.. But, Path is so beautiful that it beckons me to open it every day! Unlike Facebook, where you can have virtually unlimited friends, you're limited to 100 of your closest friends. Mine? My favorite startup, development folks that I love and trust. Plus, a couple of my "early adopter" marketing friends.

Why do I love it? It's easy to navigate, use and let's face it.. it's beautiful!

Jobvite having seen and used most every ATS and Recruiting platform (or at least a demo of it), this is the best I've seen. And by best, I mean by at least 1000k times better.

I hate Taleo. It's not a secret. If you've looked through larger company job listings and applied anywhere in the past 10 years, chances are you have used Taleo. The scary thing? It hasn't really changed or improved in a decade. 

Jobvite makes it easy for applicants to apply via their LinkedIn profiles, and upload your resume without parsing it and hacking it 12 ways from Sunday. 

If you haven't heard, there is a hiring war going on in a lot of cities (especially within IT). Getting a software engineer excited about your company is one thing. Actually making them fill out a profile on your corporate Taleo site? You're basically telling the candidates that you don't respect their time and showing that your company is stuck in the "black hole of the recruiting process".

Who uses Jobvite? Software Engineers-basically any company that you would *want* to actually work for. For my other friends and non-software engineering types? If you want to work for an innovative company, they should have a Jobvite portal for you to upload your information into.

What are you favorite user experiences, lately? What makes them awesome? Tell me! I'm always looking for great user experiences to add to my list.

My Top 7 Examples of Bad User Experience

I recently had a client looking for a very senior User Experience Designer to add to their team. In my quest for this person, I started asking myself ...

"what really makes a great user experience designer?"

Along the way, I remembered my own first experiences in college.

I feel old typing this. But, "when I went to college".. it was 1994

• We were using dBase on an Apple II
• We used CorelDraw 4 & 5 on our friend's computer he had in his dorm room. Having a computer and that newest expensive software? Was a HUGE deal-it was super $$$.

Back then, was the birth of the web. Not everyone had cell phones, either. SHOCKING!!

Today, we visit websites and apps via our tablets, mobile phones and anywhere we have a connection. I am going to come right out with it..

EVERY company

needs User Experience people

2012 eCommerce & B2C facts

Percentage of online shoppers that base their opinions on a website 

by the design of the site alone: 

42%

Percentage of online shoppers that did not return to a site 

based on the site aesthetics: 

52%

My 7 top examples of Bad User Experience and User Interface Design

• Mobile "optimized" site - that looks like a table of contents
• Flash - I have an iPhone, iPad and a MacBook
• Pop Up Ads - I click to close them. Period.
• Flashing Banner Links - again, it looks like an ad and I will not click
• Site Consistency - your user needs to feel comfortable
• Auto Play Video - huge problem on major media/magazine sites
• Keep it simple - the best design is often the most clean

I'm considering switching banks. A good percentage of my frustration is their UI and UX on their website.

What sites frustrate you? What else would you add to my list?




*I registered for Stanford University HCI classes to dive deeper into Human Computer Interaction. They start sometime in February!

Once it starts, I'll be writing on the blog to let all of you know how the class is going!

Here's a nice 2012 B2C Color Infographic from the folks at: The Infographics