90% Of Everything: Links

Creately is an Online Diagramming webapp (for flowcharts, wireframes, etc). They've recently done a pay-what-you want experiment. Here are some of the findings:

• Customers who paid $1 were mostly new users who’d heard about the PWYW plan and signed up on the first day. This group of customers was also the most likely to cancel their accounts over a period of time. Many of them did not use the application intensively and would have been fine with a Free plan.

• Customers who paid the Mean Price of $4-5, have made good use of their Creately accounts, including creating multiples diagrams and publishing them. These customers come from a diverse range of industries including small businesses owners, marketers, teachers and students. These users have shown less propensity to cancel their accounts as they were extracting good value from their accts.

• Customers who paid more than the Mean Price provided the most valuable insights. These customers incorporated Creately into their work and business processes and derived significant value from Creately’s collaboration capabilities. Customers in this group included tech-savvy small businesses, software teams, design companies, Webmasters and business consultancies. This group made the most use of Creately to collaborate with co-workers and clients, valuing our visual collaboration platform to communicate and solve real business problems across cross-functional teams, instead of simply using Creately as a diagramming tool.

Here's an interesting post from Google regarding their recent addition of landmark data to Google Maps India:

... we ran a user research study that focused specifically on how people give and get directions. We called businesses and asked how to get to their store; we recruited people to keep track of directions they gave or received and later interviewed them about their experiences; we asked people to draw us diagrams of routes to places unfamiliar to us; we even followed people around as they tried to find their way. We found that using landmarks in directions helps for two simple reasons: they are easier to see than street signs and they are easier to remember than street names.

Before

After

Nice.

Bell Curve Pagination

What we wanted to create was a pagination system where the distribution of links changes in relation to both the number of records in the set, and the current position in the set. Users need small jumps close to their current position and then wider jumps towards the end.

The mathmatical model we use is a slightly modified Bell Curve. The user can access the nearby pages as well jump to midpoints or the start and the end without the needs for pre-defined links. Note: the numbers I’m showing here are just examples.

If there are 100 records in the set and the user is at the mid-point they will see links to 49, 48 and 51, 52 but as the range extends outwards, the granularity of the links changes.

Using this system the user can navigate in a more natural way such as ‘it was near the end’ or ’somewhere around 40′ and can find a record far faster than the traditional method.

The added bonus is that this is SEO gold. Google only navigates a few pages deep and by exposing your entire record set (rather than just the first 10) search engines can index the entire range with just a few jumps.

Extensions & Open Source

You can see Bell Curve pagination in action on any long list page on Smarkets.

Here's a neat little study from Mozilla's analytics team.

Each month nearly 40 million people click on this button within Firefox:

And end up here:

What are these 40 million people wanting to get out of this interaction? Why do so many leave this page without clicking anything? Analytics alone can't tell us this. Which is why Mozilla have a "user outreach" app (which looks a bit like kampyle to me):

More than 4,000 people gave feedback over the past two months, which revealed this:

So, it's pretty obvious that the people who come to this page seeking support are leaving disappointed. Something needs to be done. Here's an intial mock-up (note new "Need Help?" area on the right-hand side.

In all, a nice, clean and actionable piece of research. Read the full article at blog.mozilla.com.

Ask HN: Who are the top UI designers on the web today?It would be interesting and useful to know who the top 5, 10 or even 20 designers are and what they've done that's so impressive, innovative, useful or loved.