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It’s Tuesday morning and retailers across the world are breathing a collective sigh of relief. Although the holiday shopping season still has nearly 4 weeks to go, the high-stakes, ultra-stressful Black Friday and Cyber Monday are behind us. For retailers, the last few days were all about executing on the strategies that have been carefully planned for months. According to a piece in the Washington Post, a common goal this year was to win over a coveted new breed of omnichannel shoppers who “ping-pong from physical stores to laptops to smartphones, and a purchase can come via any of these avenues at any time.”

As most of you probably know, Amazon offers a premium membership called “Prime”, which allows you to get fast, free shipping on your purchases, as well as other benefits like streaming video and music. If you shop a lot on Amazon, it’s a pretty good deal at just $99/year, which is why many people (including myself) have signed up.
To drive these subscriptions, Amazon has a landing page set up where it offers users the opportunity to sign up for a free trial of Prime service. I decided to run a quick audit of this page and see if there might be some opportunity to improve it. For all the EyeQuant users out there, this is a good example of how you can use EyeQuant on your own sites.

Internet Retailer recently released its top 500 guide (note: paywall), which tracks the performance of the largest eCommerce sites in the world.

It's official - Google has rolled out a major redesign of their search results and search ads. The company line, as outlined by Jon Wiley - Google's lead designer for search - is that the new design improves "readability and creates an overall cleaner look", while the redesign of the ads is "making the multi-device experience more consistent."
Google's desktop ads now do match the design of their mobile versions and achieving multi-device consistency certainly is a great reason. We'd like to take a data-informed guess on what other good reasons Google might have had for this major revamp of their most important interface. 

At EyeQuant, we do a lot of eye-tracking as part of our mission to teach computers to see the web like humans do. The main purpose of our studies is to find the statistical patterns that power our attention models (which you can use to instantly test your websites!) Today, we're sharing 3 of the most surprising insights we found. 

When I'm chatting with clients, partners, and prospects, I find myself talking a lot about the idea of “visual clutter”. My colleague Bitsy has written extensively on the topic of “attention-driven design”, but I wanted to add my take on the issue.

Show me, don’t tell me: visually communicating your process eases tensions across departments, and will make your design meeting a hell of a lot easier.

Last week in Malmö, Sweden, innovators like Reddit co-founder Alex Ohanian, branding expert Cindy Gallop, and EyeQuant's very own Fabian Stelzer convened to speak about the future of design, technology, and communications at Media Evolution's The Conference. During his presentation, Fabian walks us through a defining question for many at The Conference - an issue which has integral to any discussion about branding, advertising, and marketing. That is, how do we reconcile data with creativity? 

There’s an age-old saying that goes, “The only thing that stands in the way of a business making more money is a design committee meeting.”

“If houses were built the way software is built, the first woodpecker would bring down civilization.” (Anon.)

A building and a website aren't so different, really. Someone had to design it, and many more people have to use it. In this post, we'll look at 4 ways to work with UX experts, rein in design ego, and build a website that's made for change.