UIE

> I would be curious to know if there is some credible A/B testing showing that for a relatively unknown new product blocking Mailinators and it’s kin somehow results as a better conversion?

Well, there's always this: https://articles.uie.com/three_hund_million_button/ -- trigger warning: that page has annoying delayed-by-few-seconds modal popup that begs you to subscribe and, incidentally, hand out your email address; the irony must have been lost on their marketing folks.

Unless your business is REQUIRED[×] to have user details on file, putting any kind of friction on the user's action path is equal to voluntarily giving up sales. No, I don't want yet another account on your shitty website, no matter what it sells to me. If I end up coming back often enough, then I may, voluntarily, create an account. But if your site requires to create one up front, I'm incentivised to take my business somewhere else.

The worst offenders try to do email domain TLD matching against country of residence. I've seen it only twice, but it's such a user-hostile pattern that it has seared itself to my memory (while mercifully having relieved me of the memory of where I ran into it).

×: cough gambling, financial services, insurance, etc.

I respect the fact that you asked. :)

There are lots. Not to be self-serving, but I post all the best links I find on www.thehipperelement.com, if you feel like scanning through them.

But a few, off the top of my head are:

- www.alistapart.com
- http://www.uie.com/articles/ (run by Jared Spool, I think)
- www.smashingmagazine.com is a bit hit and miss, but what they lack in quantity they make up for in quantity.
- www.unbounce.com
- www.goodui.com is a good, quick, visual reference for best practices. You could make a career just from enforcing some of those, haha.

And these two books would lay a good foundation in general:

- "Web Form Design" by LukeW (his blog is also interesting)
- "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug

If you only spent a few hours on those you'd be ahead of the game. And if there is anything you feel is missing from the world, let me know on Twitter and maybe I can write something about it. @HipperElement

Hopefully that helps.

Seen a few comments focus on the "redesign" and comparisons to Digg, and wanted to add a few comments:

1. People may forget, but Reddit was a (the?) major winner in the Digg exodus.

2. I don't think Digg every got the subreddit style discussion boards down. I think the reddit "homepage experience" vs. the typical subreddit experience to be very different. Should be interesting to see which way they slide for the redesign.

3. The influx of new capital and the focus on the redesign sort of telegraphs that they want to grow reddit, which is a very large but idiosyncratic community.

If they do it right, the change will be very transparent and very incremental, ala the ebay background color change [1].

Should be an interesting thing to watch!

[1] https://articles.uie.com/death_of_relaunch/

Jared Spool's article "Market Maturity" [1] published in 1997 is a very good way to understand what kind of experience is required for success. He argues that success depends on market maturity which roughly follows four stages: 1. Basic deliverability war, 2. Feature parity war, 3. Productivity / "ease of use" then finally 4. Price war.

Stage 3 is generally where UX becomes a priority. For a consumer web product or startup this generally makes sense as a marker for market maturity as delivering technology and shipping features has become easy and cheap. Crafting UX is difficult but probably won't be for long. For example Twitter Bootstrap seems to be lowering the cost of boilerplate UI which in turn lowers the cost of UX in general.

[1] http://www.uie.com/articles/market_maturity/

I like Luke Wroblewski's advice a lot (http://www.lukew.com/ plus his two books on form design and web usability)

I have to worry about form design mostly, so two links I liked were

http://www.uie.com/articles/web_forms/ and
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2006/07/label-placement-in-forms.php

I also stole some ideas from here:
http://developer.fellowshipone.com/patterns/

Those are the ones I've read and somewhat followed.

I also bookmarked this framework to try out:
http://gantry-framework.org/

There are also several eyetracking services (some provided by Ycombinator companies I believe) - I'd love to have eyetracking studies on the company website, but the current management doesn't mind that it looks like crap since it will be outsourced anyways.

>The people who never look into the settings probably didn't install the ad blocker themselves in the first place.

Not true. Even most people who install an AdBlocker will not change their settings. If you change your settings, you're part of a very small minority. Businesses often use this to increase tips.

Imagine two settings:

1) Enter your own amount (default of $0.00)

2) Four options: 15%, 20%, 25%, Other

If you use #1 you'll receive fewer tips. Many people will leave it to $0.00. If you use #2, most people will tip and of those tips most will be 15-20%.

[0] https://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/09/14/do-users-change-their-settings/

[1] https://www.fastcodesign.com/3022182/how-square-registers-ui-guilts-you-into-leaving-tips