Best low-budget viral ads [Twitter]
30 years ago, to get millions of views you needed a Super Bowl budget. Today all you need is a phone and an idea.
This Twitter thread collects some of the best and most memorable low-budget ads, including Dollar Shave Club, Burglars just want Tacos, or Flea Market Montgomery.
What do the videos have in common?
- Humor. Product is secondary. People share what makes them laugh.
- Amateurishness. No fancy production here.
- None of the ads would survive a marketing department meeting.
To quote Howard Gossage, “Nobody watches ads. People watch what entertains them. Sometimes it’s an ad”.
Average UX Improvements Are Shrinking Over Time [Nielsen Norman Group]
On average, UX changes have a smaller impact on quantitative metrics. This trend means that UX has substantially advanced since 2006.
On average, UX improvements have substantially decreased since 2006–2008: from 247% to 75% (a 69% decrease).
At first glance, it might look like a decreasing trend in the average improvement resulted from a UX-focused redesign means that UX professionals have gotten worse over the years. Actually, the opposite is true. Over the past 14 years, the UX-design community has grown substantially — and so has the collective knowledge and experience.
This decrease in average improvement scores shows that, as an industry, we’ve done an excellent job over the past 10+ years.
At the beginning of the usability movement, just about every product had substantial room for improvement. Now, there are much fewer long-hanging fruit, you need to dig deeper, do more research, and really not what you’re doing to achieve meaningful results.
The SaaS Website Content You Need to Close Sales [Mike Sonders]
Mike Sonders analyzed the online searches of thousands of SaaS buyers to uncover exactly what information they want when considering a SaaS purchase.
These are the top five highlights:
- The most sought-after (and often 1st) piece of info sought by SaaS buyers is pricing – by a large margin.
Have a pricing page! - ‘[brand] alternatives‘ is the 2nd most-frequent search pattern.
Have a page on your website targeting ‘[your_brand] alternatives] that positions your offering against your competitors.
Example: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/comparison - SaaS buyers literally search for ‘why [brand]‘.
Buyers want someone to spell out for them why they should spend money on the solution. Make it easy for them! - Security is a big concern for SaaS buyers. They want to know how you’re going to protect them from loss and litigation.
They’re even checking out your privacy policy and GDPR terms! (Keep those things up-to-date.) - Your ‘About Us‘ page matters.
Buyers want to know that the effort they put forth–convincing management, setting up and integrating your solution, convincing employees to use it–is going to be worth it in the long run.
In your company’s About Us page, make sure you convey anything that can reassure buyers that the company is robust and set up to thrive.
The full article has tens of examples for each of these points, with screenshots and explanations.
Reducing the Site-Speed Impact of Third-Party Tags [Andy Davies]
From Analytics to Advertising, Reviews to Recommendations, and more, it’s common for sites to rely on Third-Party tags to provide some of their key features.
But there’s also a tension between the value tags bring and the privacy, security and speed costs they impose.
Even small incremental improvements soon add up to make a larger difference.
When thinking about the impact third-party tags are having on site-speed, keep these five principles in mind:
- Catalogue the tags that are being served to your visitors
- Consolidate to remove expired and unused tags, reduce duplication and ensure tags are only included on the pages they are used on
- Reduce the cost of tags by adopting lightweight alternatives, slimming down testing frameworks and Tag Managers. Self-host libraries instead of fetching them from public CDNs.
- Choreograph when tags are loaded so that the most important content gets shown to your visitors sooner
- Cut delays caused by connecting to tag domains
The article has all the specifics: numbers, timings, recommendations, tools, etc.
The golden books of UX Design [UX Planet]
There’s never enough learning.
The article contains an extensive reading list to deepen your knowledge in the disciplines of User Research, Usability, Information Architecture, User-Interface Design, Interaction Design, Content Strategy, or Experience Strategy. The list includes books on design thinking, processes, methods, principles, and best practices.
Some of my favorites:
- The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman
- 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People, Susan Weinschenk
- A Practical Guide to Information Architecture, Donna Spencer
- Don’t Make Me Think AND Rocket Surgery Made Easy, Steve Krug
Many more in the article.
———
Radek Sienkiewicz
PS. What’s your favorite non-fiction book? (Doesn’t have to be business-related). Let me know!
