“Just because someone has signed up to your service doesn’t mean they have agreed to receive email from you,” Paul Boag writes.
This is an important distinction. As part of the sign-up process, you may have indicated that you will email them, or you may have even provided an option for them to opt out. However, if the user didn’t spot this, then you will still alienate them, despite being entirely within your rights. The email is still unsolicited in their eyes.”
The “superdistribution” of content online–users can access your content not just on your website but via RSS readers, social media, and orbital content readers–has changed the one-to-many distribution model, David Sleight writes:
[D]igital content continues to find novel new ways to wander away from its various points of origin. Tools that give users ever more control over formatting, timeshifting, and sharing will continue to proliferate. This steady growth runs directly counter to the simple, one-to-many broadcast model enjoyed by many publishers in the past—one where it was relatively easy for them to control the venue and keep tabs on the conversations happening around their content.
Bell Labs engineer John Karlin helped pioneer the use of behavioral testing in industrial design. His New York Times obituary offers this nugget:
Mr. Karlin also introduced the white dot inside each finger hole that was a fixture of rotary phones in later years. After the phone was redesigned at midcentury, with the letters and numbers moved outside the finger holes, users, to AT&T’s bewilderment, could no longer dial as quickly.
With blank space at the center of the holes, Mr. Karlin found, callers no longer had a target at which to aim their fingers. The dot restored the speed.
Karlin, the Times reports, “stud[ied] the psychological capabilities and limitations of ordinary people” to identify telephone designs that maximized usability.
Cara Harshman explains a test the Romney campaign ran:
The team started optimizing for donations with a test on the main call-to-action in the right upper corner of the homepage. They wanted to see whether button color – blue, green, yellow or red – and word choice – “Contribute,” “Support”, or “Donate” – impacted the likelihood of a visitor to click.
Overall they found that color did not have a definitive impact, but the word “Contribute” did show a statistically significant improvement of 10%.