[Sigia-l] Real World UI Design Failure

[Louise Hewitt]

> 
> 
> So when I saw the research into the "silencing" effect, I couldn't help but
> wonder if we were seeing that here. As a result, I'm a lot less enthusiastic
> about using pinned headers now :-) My next project includes a pinned widget
> bar (YouTube style, and for an entirely different purpose), so we'll see how
> that goes.
Will you share again? It's great having examples of these issues (win or fail) when dealing with clients trying to implement similar things.

Out of interest, are there any good examples of pinned elements that work well in tests? I put one (facebook style side messaging) on a complex CMS last year, but never got the chance to test it beyond paper. I have a hunch that its the kind of thing that users only notice if they need it ('OMG?!?! was that right that last thing I did," kind of situation) but gets tuned out as to peripheral when not relevant. Absolutely no science/evidence for this view though.

I guess you could make it blink ;D 
> 
> Don't try to make one thing do both, or you fail at both.
>> 
>> 
> A fair point, but putting ads in with top navigation is fairly standard
> stuff on many sites, so I was hoping we'd get through that.
Yeah, but by making it a 'pinned' element, your creating a strong association between the two things - the 'header' to a programmer/designer is a unique container of content, but for a user its just two things up in the same part of the page. As soon as you make that bit behave differently to the rest of the page, you've joined them together and they ought to be related.

Thanks  - re the earlier threads, it's this kind of discussion and sharing that made the list such a great resource in the past.


> 
> As an aside, I find it interesting that while UI design is usually fair game
> for multivariate testing, media sales usually aren't. I'd love to A/B test
> the pinned header with something other than a banner on that page so see if
> it then got noticed, or had some other effect, but the business won't hear
> of it. That said, we did an A/B test of Google Adsense turned on and off
> (elsewhere on the site), and turned them off as a result, so it's not all
> bad.
> 
> Jonathan
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