I don’t know if this is the type of UX success story you’re looking for, but there was a highly publicized case study of “The $300 Million Button” at Amazon.com (it’s also included in Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks).

Basically, there was an unknown conversion bottleneck in the Amazon shopping process:

1. User picks out the stuff they want to buy and adds them to their shopping cart
2. User clicks “checkout” to presumably pay for the purchases
3. A form pops up, as it does on many e-commerce sites, that asks the user to Log In or Register.

This simple form caused $300M worth of shopping cart abandonment as many users resented having to register to make a purchase (Amazon originally predicted they would be happy about saving time on future visits with Amazon’s patented “one-click-checkout”), and others couldn’t remember if this was their first visit to Amazon and became frustrated with each failed login/password attempt. The point: no one wanted to click “Register”.

This, despite the fact that the registration form didn’t ask for any additional information that wouldn’t already be needed to checkout with. Additionally, even users who had registered in the past stumbled on the form when they forgot their email address or password.

The fix they came up with was to replace the “Register” button with “Continue” and a message that read:

“You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site.  Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future  purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”

This little change resulted in a 45% increase in completed purchases, and for the first year, the site saw an additional $300M in revenue.

This is one of those classic marketing parables that reminds you to test everything and test often. Don’t just go with “common sense” or your gut feeling. You might not think that having the shopping cart on the right or left would make a big difference, but it can and does. And it can even have different results on different sites.

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I do believe that AirBNB’s “Neighborhoods” signals a significant change in the UX of the site and the service as a whole.

On the surface, you could say that AirBNB is competing with hotels, motels, and hostels in the “places to stay when I am traveling” business. This may be true, and it is certainly how AirBNB started out from a UI/UX perspective.

Hotels and the like are designed to serve the needs of a particular type of person: someone who is traveling for a specific reason, in most cases for a short period of time. Perhaps they are in town for an event of some sort, or maybe they have come to the new place on a business trip. In these instances, the person did not actively choose the place they were going, just ended up there due to proximity or because outside forces sent them there. For the most part, these people don’t know much about the city they’re staying in, and don’t care to. They probably want a clean, warm hotel room that is as close to the thing they have to do as possible, with easy access to the airport. If they’re feeling adventurous, they’ll ask the concierge to point them to a good local spot for dinner. Hotels, and therefore hotel booking websites, serve this population well. If you pay attention to the design and layout of these sites, you’ll see it reflected in their hierarchy and in what bits of information they choose to highlight.

I would guess, with no real evidence, that AirBNB has discovered that many people who are using their service are not this kind of traveler. I believe their new interface is designed to more closely align the tone of their service with the tone of their customers.

The “Neighborhoods” feature measures the places one might stay more qualitatively and less quantitatively. AirBNB chooses to highlight large photographs and descriptive tags about each neighborhood, as opposed to miles from the airport. This sort of approach is much better suited to casual travelers, vacationers, and a new breed of hipster nomad. These people ARE actively choosing the places that they want to go, so their decision is not as simple as the aforementioned business travelers. Additionally, they may be traveling for long spans of time. Very few people would be able to stay in a hotel for a month without losing their minds, but that is not the case with an AirBNB listing. If you’re scouting out a place to live for the summer, you certainly want more information than a simple hotel booking site provides. The pictures of community members, quotes from locals, and rich storytelling on each neighborhood page is a plea to travel in a meaningful way, not simply stay in hotels and hit the tourist traps.

Overall, I’m glad to see AirBNB taking this approach, and I think it will serve them well.

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“Simply increasing the content height” is exactly why the display is larger. The iPhone 5 is better for reading and writing than any previous iPhone.

Here are some examples:

• When writing, I can see a whole paragraph instead of sentences
• When searching w/ the keyboard visible, I can see 5.5 results instead of 3.5
• I can see 6 emails in my inbox instead of 4
• I can see 6 tweets at a time instead of 4
• I can read a whole additional paragraph in an email without having to scroll

If there’s one thing that I hope designers and developers take away from the increased display size, it’s that content is everything and the UI should do an even better job of getting out of the way.

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None. Repeat: NONE.

There is not a single major healthcare software company that genuinely cares about its end user experience, despite the fact that poor implementations have, amongst other things, been associated with increased patient death. The particular publication I’m thinking of is actually more reminiscent of a frustrated rant than a calm scientific explication[1].

Reasons why no one cares:

1. No one at the company really understands how to abstract healthcare workflows. The engineers are absorbed in the coding of functionality, the product managers have no idea how their stuff is being used to treat patients, the docs are too busy trying to use this crappy software to treat patients that they tend not to be available to give adequate feedback, and designers who are good are quickly snapped up by Silicon Valley companies who understand how ridiculously valuable they are.
2. There’s a huge barrier to moving away from a piece of healthcare software once it’s been bought and installed, because they’re all pricey and everyone has to learn a new set of workflows. Patient care almost invariably suffers during this adjustment phase, and the last thing anyone fighting in the trenches wants is to screw up a patient’s life.
3. Many morons in healthcare administration still have not figured out that “extreme customization available to fit your practice’s needs” is advertising BS for “we were too lazy to figure out this really important part of our software, but we don’t want to admit it, so we’re going to spin it like it’s a good thing and lay all the blame at your feet when the random crap you pick inevitably fails in some major way”.
4. The backend implementation for many large EMRs would have to change fairly drastically (read: be completely redone from scratch) to modernize it into something that coder-designers of recent generations would even want to touch. To give you some idea, EPIC, the largest EMR vendor, uses Cache[2]. This framework is based on MUMPS, which came out in the 1960s before humankind even knew what good programming methodologies were. Example for you programming types: there is no variable scoping in Cache. Let that sink in for a minute. Yes. All variables are globals. It is an unholy nightmare.

[1] http://www.pediatricsdigest.mobi…
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Int…

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