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The trendy must-have element (that really isn’t so trendy). (more here)

You might need to ensure your website works on 76 different browsers in the near future.

More from Paul Irish on the new ’space race’.

Not much more to add to this (but it IS admirable how well the UX of the graphic accomplishes exactly what it preaches):

credit

What is this? Aurora Borealis on your laptop?

Not quite. It’s a heatmap - a sophisticated tracking method to observer where a statistically significant sampling of users eyeballs are focused on web pages. These change as our internet habits change - and borne from them are ‘best practices’. Some other methods to test usability are:

1. Scroll Heatmaps - showing how far down the page visitors scroll (useful for finding and optimizing the fold of a page).
2. Attention Heatmaps - showing where on the page the visitor shows the most attention (same as eyeball)
3. Click Heatmaps - showing where the visitors click on the page, results in the most “traditional” web heatmap.
4. Mouse Move Heatmaps - used for conducting accurate eye tracking on a massive scale.
5. Conversion Analytics - such as Form Analytics and Link Analytics.

But why does all this fuss matter? Ok, let’s say you sell overpriced t-shirts online (vintage bedazzled Ed Hardy ones), converting on your traffic at 2% selling at $100 each. From a 1000 visitors, that’s 20 conversions grossing $2000.

Let’s say enhancements in interface design resulted in a 0.5% improvement in your form completion rate. A 0.5% improvement in your conversion, though just a teeny decimal, now means 25 conversions at $2500 from 1000 visitors. Extrapolate over your first 100,000 visitors and your wise attention to interface design, now laced your coffers with $50,000 more. Attention to detail. It counts.

The trick? A 0.5% increase on a 2% conversion rate is actually a 25% overall improvement.

Chris Spooner atop the mountain decrees “Thou shalt not commit these usability crimes”

(Another lesser known fact: Apparently you get bonus points in heaven for using awesome He-man based examples to explain your commandments.)