Tips and tools: Why you should fail a test on purpose, reframe your thinking, and stop speaking nonsense

Published: July 2023

Here are some great resources we have recently shared with one another

(We don’t profit from recommending things. We just love sharing things we think you’ll appreciate. You can see our other Tips and Tools articles here.)

The test we happily failed (and hope you will too)

A screenshot of the Userinyerface website.

User Inyerface is billed as a game, but really, it’s just designed to torture—and perhaps remind us why user experience matters so much.

We abandoned the challenge early, and hope for your sake that you do too.

The simple model that reframes (and deepens) your value to customers

A screenshot of the cartoon from Smashing Magazine’s website.

It’s easy to get hooked on adding stuff to a product or a website, but real value stems from understanding customer motivation and behavior.

If you are struggling to empathize with your users, take 3 minutes to read this comic strip from Smashing Magazine. It’s a simple reframe that will get you closer to your customers.

How (and why) Wix stopped speaking nonsense and passing the blame

A screenshot of the Wix article showing lots of error messages.

We have to applaud the user experience team at Wix. They rewrote 7,643 error messages over the course of a month!

Jenni Nadler’s post—When life gives you lemons, write better error messages—gives a fantastic insight into how they did it and what they learned.

(The visual breakdown of the bad and good error messages is particularly useful.)

A fun—dare we say whimsical—example of progressive disclosure

A screenshot of a whimmsical example of progressive disclosure.

If you’ve ever struggled to explain progressive disclosure to a client, you might enjoy Joe Davis’s whimsical example, I made tea.

For those of you who haven’t heard the term, progressive disclosure is the practice of layering content or features to avoid overwhelming a user. We might begin with a simple menu, but as the user makes choices, more options and details appear.

(I made tea expands to around sixty-six times its initial size.)

At Conversion Rate Experts, we’ve freely published our best thinking and resources since 2006. If you have a recommendation to share, let us know.

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Making Websites Win is an Amazon #1 bestseller in 15 categories. It’s a goldmine of the best conversion advice packed with easy‑to‑implement ideas. It has been recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders.

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