Sublime

Many psychologists now believe short-term memory may be rather smaller—perhaps just four items. But the “seven plus or minus two” rule remains, because it works.

Line length presents a quandary: Do you give people the short line length and multiple columns that they prefer, or go against their own preference and intuition, knowing that they will read faster if you use a longer line length and a single column?

I use CrazyEgg to see exactly where people are clicking most and least on homepages and landing pages. It is particularly helpful for repositioning the most important links or buttons to help prompt visitors to take specific next actions. Don’t guess what’s working or not—measure it.

FACT OF LIFE #2: We don’t make optimal choices. We satisfice. When we’re designing pages, we tend to assume that users will scan the page, consider all of the available options, and choose the best one. In reality, though, most of the time we don’t choose the best option—we choose the first reasonable option, a strategy known as satisficing.1 As so

Surveys won’t tell you how to create the best layouts and content to maximize your conversion rate, however. Only the most serious usability problems will be revealed with a survey.

Ideally there should not be just one single test winner to push live on your website—there should be a winner to push live for every key visitor segment, and doing this will result in much higher conversion rates.