Emerging Patterns for Web Design
- New York: Tuesday, February 28
Kara McCain
Full-Day Training Course
New Web design ideas come up all the time, and it’s tempting to try them on your site. Many of them, however, could cost you business or alienate your loyal users. Others could bring you new customers, delight your existing site visitors, increase customer loyalty, and improve business performance. How can you sort out the good ideas from the bad? We analyze user interface trends and innovations from the perspective of their impact on the total user experience to help you choose among the best new designs.
This seminar will:
- Define and illustrate emerging trends and specific new design ideas that solve common usability problems for today's websites.
- Help you determine which features best serve your users and business objectives.
- Detail implementation and usability issues that can cause redesign disasters and user backlash.
What You’ll Learn
This session will give you usability and usefulness insights, based on our research, that can help you decide whether—and how—to upgrade your site's user experience with new trends and design ideas.
We focus on emerging design patterns and trends that show promise for a broad range of mainstream website types (e-commerce, B2B, corporate, marketing, government, and nonprofit), rather than wasting your time with niche ideas that work only in a few highly specialized contexts. The seminar also provides the insights needed to help you assess each of these ideas and determine which will work best for your site.
Course Outline
This seminar will be continually updated with emerging designs. Newer topics may replace older ones as time goes by, so this list is provisional:
- Logging in: lowering the barrier to entry for users
- Shared identities and social sign on
- Modal dialogs: when to use (and not abuse)
- Navigation improvements
- Related product & content views and where to use them
- Better search tools: when and how to use them
- Site restrict
- Tags
- Micro search: searching within reviews, keyword search
- Carousels
- Responsive layouts
- Websites that work across multiple devices
- Infinite scrolling
- Extending content load and getting to the end of a page
- The new web typography
- What’s changing with Web fonts
- Trends in visual style
- Social sharing: building different layers on top of the social graph
Format
This full-day tutorial includes lectures, exercises, and plenty of inspiring screenshots that we deconstruct to show why they work—and where they fail.
Handouts
Copies of the presentation slides
Who Should Attend
This seminar is intended for anyone working on or managing the user experience of a website or intranet who is interested in innovative design ideas. Attendees are expected to be familiar with the basics of Web design and usability with respect to conventional features that have seen widespread use over the last decade. Except for the need to build on this general knowledge base, this seminar does not have any prerequisites. This is not a programming course: we will discuss what the new design ideas mean for users, usability, and business goals, but not how to implement them from a technical perspective.
Instructor
Kara McCain is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. For more than 14 years,
she has been creating innovative brand and user experiences in the search, social media, luxury, hotel, travel,
jewelry, telecommunications, professional sports, e-commerce, government, and food-service industries. Her
expertise has allowed her to develop and implement highly successful Web and print design strategies for
Fortune 500 companies. Before joining Nielsen Norman Group, McCain was a senior visual and interaction designer
for Yahoo!'s Search and Social Media division, working on Yahoo! Answers, Local search, and defining the way
people integrate social media into search. Prior to Yahoo!, she also led the Web design effort for clients such
as Verizon, Pizza Hut, The Ritz-Carlton hotels, the Dallas Stars, Radio City Entertainment and the Zale Diamond
Corporation.
| 
