Courtney Seiter describes the human psychology behind eight effective headline formulas. Understanding why the formulas work is far more important than blindly copying the formulas.

To boost response to online forms, Anthony at UX Movement suggests indicating which fields are optional rather than which are required:

Marking required fields enable [sic] users to do the bare minimum to complete your form. They’re going to put more importance on required fields and fill those out first while ignoring the optional ones. Why would they spend time on optional fields if they can fill out what’s required and move on? However, if you use voluntary over-disclosure to your advantage and mark optional fields only, users won’t feel the need to take shortcuts.

Worth a test.

A/​B testing is a powerful way to improve your online marketing.

But more important than any improvement you might get from testing is what you learn from your testing that you can apply in the future. That means the process behind your test is critical.

You should take these three basic steps before running any test:

1. Choose what element of your program you want to improve

For example, you might want to strengthen your e-mail newsletter or your donation page.

2. Identify how you measure success

You don’t run a test just to see what happens. You’re trying to improve something. What is that something?

So if you’re optimizing your newsletter, what’s the goal of the newsletter? To drive someone to your website, perhaps? Or what’s the goal of your donation form? To capture the most gifts or to capture the most revenue?

You will then measure your test results based on this goal.

3. Develop a hypothesis about how you will improve that measure

This step is critical. With a clear hypothesis—“more links in my newsletter will drive more traffic to the site,” for example, or “less clutter on the donation page will lead to more gifts”—you have a testable proposition. Your test will either confirm or reject your hypothesis, and you can apply that lesson in the future.

The debate between fully-open and fully-enclosed work spaces misses the point, David Craig argues. What really matters is flexibility:

The bigger flaw, though, in recent criticisms of open workplaces is the underlying idea that there’s only one choice: open or enclosed. Work is invariably a combination of individual work, collaboration, coördination, creativity, and other things, all of which can take a variety of forms, sometimes in just one person in one day. As research done by CannonDesign with 14 organizations over the past year has shown, the average employee does want fewer distractions, but they also want 35% more frequent interactions within their teams; they want more energy and buzz in the workplace than less, but they also want the flexibility to escape to a quiet place from time to time. What they definitely don’t want is one space that’s just open or just enclosed.

This is very much in line with what Jason Fried and David Heinemeier write in their book Remote.

Jason Fried explains why he prefers simple, text-based web designs to slick interfaces:

None of which is to say that a text-heavy design is the right solution for everyone. But I’ve always found it interesting that some of the most popular sites on the Web–Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, Wikipedia, to name a few–are often very heavy on the text and very light on the imagery. These sites won’t win any design awards, but they seem to communicate very clearly to their intended audience.

At the end of the day, you’re designing for your customers, not for other designers.