About Luke Lancaster

Luke Lancaster

Luke kick-started his career in the digital space after graduating from Southern Methodist University at the beginning of the dot-com bubble. The bubble popped, Luke survived and he continued to bring order and justice to online consumer experiences. In 2000, Luke played robo-Cupid as senior product manager during the development of Match.com – the first website to truly legitimize online dating. In fact, you might even have “a friend” who swears by the site. Luke then became senior information architect at IMC2, where he built large pharmaceutical and consumer packaged goods brands online. Now, as an information architect at Click Here, Luke creates website blueprints for the same reason traditional architects create building blueprints – because people want to click aimlessly around a website exactly as much as they want a bathtub in the foyer. In short, Luke’s blueprints ensure that websites provide an intuitive, functional experience. His work is integral to the success of many of Click Here’s clients, including Chick-fil-A, Fruit of the Loom and Amstel Light. Additionally, Luke conducts a large portion of our new business efforts, including competitive analyses and interactive prototypes. Between Luke’s technical expertise and his hobbies – he swam with great white sharks, scaled the Great Wall of China, trekked on elephants through jungles in Thailand and Cambodia, and finished the Ironman triathlon – the man might be a machine. We’re looking into it.

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Posts by Luke Lancaster

July 5th, 2011
Posted by Luke Lancaster

Often when we approach a new solution, clients request to emulate the features or designs of many popular or successful websites. Perhaps we, too, look to the competitive space for website inspiration where a popular site has been highly successful or well tested. In e-commerce, giants like Amazon are constantly refining and testing their marketplace to provide the best usable and successful online experience. Clients may often say “if it works for Amazon, it will work for us.” But a closer look at the issue reveals this myth can be a dangerous solution for your brand.

Many times clients ask to look to these popular sites when approaching their solutions. These are often perceived as the shining stars to mimic for instant success. And why not, these sites have proven results. With limited time and slim budgets, it is often easier to copy these designs or features in hopes of instant and satisfying results.

Copying a design at some level is always part of a design process. The imitation is the greatest form of flattery after all, right? Well, before we fall prey to the blind pitfalls of copycat designs, we must first understand the difference between inspirations and bold-faced copying.

For example, while Amazon has an amazing set of well-tested features and functionality, they do not always perform as successfully on other e-commerce websites as easily. For example, in the first month after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out, Amazon got 1,805 reviews, whereas Target received only three reviews, despite both selling 2 million copies each. The same functionality garnished remarkably different results.

The book on Amazon currently has 3,634 reviews.

Copies can fail because the element copied is not that great to begin with. Other times, the design element copied may work well in the original site’s context, but may not be well suited for your site’s purposes. It must be well understood why you are implementing an element before blindly copying these elements and expecting similar success. What we may fail to realize in copying an admired feature or design is that these elements can be in various stages of evolution for the original brand’s site. They can be designed originally for a very specific solution that met the original brand’s needs. Without knowing the history of the evolution, a copy of this element may likely backfire.

The latest design to emulate is often Facebook. Their interface is constantly changing and evolving with their continual stream of feature enhancements. But at a closer look, Facebook itself is a copycat, bringing into its design elements from Twitter and Foursquare that are largely successful elsewhere. While this may work for large giants like Facebook, consider closely why copying could be a terrible solution for your brand’s online success.

With copying a design, you spend more time catching up and less time innovating design solutions. Innovation means pushing the boundaries that create a positive improvement for your users. By listening to the needs of your users, you can proactively create solutions that meet their needs instead of adding design features or functionality that are not appropriate. By understanding what your users actually need, you will begin to break down the barrier between your customers and your brand, which leads to building a trusted and positive relationship. However, copying elements blindly from other sources likely will create additional frustration for your users as these design features may not be what they need from your brand.

Just because others are doing it doesn’t mean your brand should embrace the same set of features or functionality solutions. Spend more time listening to your customers to understand their needs before you decide what best-practices elements are appropriate for their needs. Using common best-practices elements isn’t forbidden or un-creative necessarily; it just needs to have a well-thought-out need to provide a positive user experience.

Ultimately, doing simple user testing will help prove the results of your designs to ensure the elements you ultimately implement (copied or not) are successful to your target users. These results can be quickly mocked up in a wire frame or paper prototype for testing purposes and can provide you with valuable feedback. Additionally, for faster results you could even test the copied functionality on an existing website to determine how well this meets the needs of your users. Combined, this feedback can provide you with a valuable arsenal to refine your designs into successful results for your brand.

May 5th, 2011
Posted by Luke Lancaster

User interface design is constantly evolving in the digital space. As users adapt to their various online environments, so must designers and developers consider the changing landscape. “The fold” is a concept derived from newspapers, which refers to the invisible line on a web page where the user must start scrolling to see the rest of the page’s content. So in traditional media, newspapers were often delivered or displayed folded up and the area “above the fold” is the first thing the reader would see. Therefore, the most eye-catching headlines and images get the readers’ attention and draw them further into the publication.

In the digital space, depending on your monitor size, browser window or the mobile device you’re using, the fold invariably will be different. The early years of Internet design were critical to designing with the fold in mind because users were not accustomed to scrolling inherently. Often, designs were limited to the area above this fold because of user limitations for scrolling the page. Now, with trivial screen resolution statistics and varied browser window sizes, scrolling behavior has become second nature to users – no longer something to be avoided.


Various folds by Internet user browser size
Source: FoldTester.com

While users have acclimated to scrolling online, several recent studies have shown that users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the fold. So it will still be well-advised to keep the most critical messages at the top of your designs. With the emergence of so many varied screen resolutions, there is no longer a well-defined height where the fold must be met. It’s not necessary to throw out the calculations of your target audience’s fold statistics, but it doesn’t mean that you should design the entire home page or pages within this confined space. Use the insight of your fold statistics to guide your critical content within this space, but allow for continued valuable and engaging content to entice users beyond their fold.


Source: WhiteHouse.gov, Hulu.com

Source: Starbucks.com, Southwest.com

Scrolling Beats Paging

Because of users’ limited attention span, long pages can be problematic for users. Users prefer site pages that get to the point and let them accomplish their objectives quickly. So while it is recommended to design beyond the fold, consider limiting unnecessary content and keep it to manageable pages so your user is not overwhelmed.

But if you do have a long article, it is best to present it on one long page. Usability studies have shown that scrolling beats pagination, because users are inherently lazy. They prefer to simply keep going down the page to read their article, not clicking to advance the page. But be mindful that your content must be prioritized and the key enticing content must be presented above the fold.

The Information Foraging theory says that people decide whether to continue along a path (in this case, scrolling) based on the information scent. In other words, users will only scroll the page if it’s relevant and valuable to them. The key is to make sure that the scent remains. A common way to break that scent is to stop giving them the options they are looking for.

The New Fold

With so many variables for your mythical fold, it can be a frustrating exercise in futility attempting to design for a pixel-perfect solution across so many screens and devices. While users can scroll your page beyond the fold, it is important to design and plan your users’ goal or your business goals above the fold. Users will inevitably scroll the page if the layout encourages scanning and if the initially viewable information makes them believe the page is worth their time to continue discovering. It is up to you as a designer to pay off your users’ gamble by providing them valuable content to engage them further with your brand.

So fear not the fold, for they will scroll. The goal is not to force everything above the fold, but to ensure your most important content that will grab the user’s attention is within the topmost pixels. And remember: allow your content to flow down the page as it’s much easier for users to scroll down the page than to click across multiple pages. Embrace the fold and break beyond the boundaries with engaging and relevant content for your audience.

March 8th, 2011
Posted by Luke Lancaster

In the jungle of your brand’s digital experience, there is a vast opportunity to grow your brand and mature it to a strong silverback. But getting to the lead and maintaining status require an impactful and healthy user experience. While user testing research is critical to help drive the design of your brand’s presence, often time or budget constraints limit performance of the necessary steps.

Since research is often perceived as very expensive or very time-consuming, it is often left out of the project life cycle to meet deadlines and budgets. Without any research, there is no data to back up the design. This often forces designs to be driven by committees and subjective opinions instead of real user experience data. With research, we seek to create an artillery of valuable data to defend our designs with something more concrete and measurable based on target user experiences. It provides us insights into the consumer mindset to reveal what designs will be most successful.

Guerrilla Research

Fortunately, there are lower-cost options if it comes down to low-cost testing or no testing at all. Guerrilla research testing can be a fast and affordable alternative that can still provide valuable insights to apply to your strategic and tactical decisions. In some organizations, starting off with guerrilla testing can be a great way to introduce the value of research and provide widespread understanding and acceptance of these methods. A few posts ago, Jeff Jones wrote about the advantages of digital prototype testing, which can prove a powerful tool for rapid low-cost, high-return testing.

Oftentimes, you will get pushback from a client or stakeholder when research is initially brought up. Typically, underlying their rejection is more concern over the budgets or timelines. When presented with an alternative guerrilla-style usability testing method that integrates into the existing timeline with minimal impact, stakeholders become more receptive to usability testing. After all, it’s in their brand’s best interest to limit the traps and issues that will affect the success of the digital solution.

Keep in mind that guerrilla research is not a replacement for the big research, but it is better than no research at all. And often big research will not typically provide you the valuable data necessary to support the design implications. You owe it to your brand to incorporate at least some level of user testing into your project to demonstrate the value of testing to your stakeholders.

How Is Guerrilla Research Different?

Guerrilla research does not provide the same level of precise exactness in approach of traditional, formalized user testing. Guerrilla testing can provide you with enough results to determine if there are alternate solutions or opportunities to improve upon an issue in your design. Likewise, in guerrilla testing, the users you are recruiting may not fit the ideal persona for your brand, but are likely a generalized version of that persona that can generate valuable feedback.

Overall, it’s the difference of time, resources and effort that can play the biggest role in the success of guerrilla testing. This is what is most compelling in selecting what types of research you can accommodate on a project timeline. Formalized usability tests performed off-site in a lab, users’ homes or on location can take a significant amount of time and effort to arrange. Testing users in person can also be a challenge and take significant amounts of resource time and compensation fees.

Guerrilla testing doesn’t have to be limited to an in-house testing facility, but can also be performed online with remote users at their own computers. These services can provide basic recruiting based on a limited set of criteria and shave off significant amounts of time and money to get some quick feedback nationwide from users outside your in-house community. While there are also significant trade-offs with these remote testing systems, as they often are not conducted in real time by a moderator, they rely on the user taking self-guided webcam recordings of their experience. Absent from the findings may be the situational and environmental clues; however, the results can still reveal large issues within a design.

You Don’t Always Need King Kong

While costs of research make clients concerned about performing large-scale research, guerrilla testing can take the edge off those concerns so we can at least begin to introduce user testing to the mix. It can prove its value to the design, timeline and budget as well with impactful results.

Guerrilla testing is not a matter of doing something quick and dirty; rather, it’s just a lower cost approach to getting anecdotal feedback that can guide our designs with the knowledge against real-world concerns. The user’s feedback, not stakeholder opinions and speculation, can guide your brand’s design solutions.

So in the midst of your project life cycle, begin to include small amounts of time and budget toward developing small-scale guerrilla testing. It will serve to enhance your brand’s success in the digital jungle. Enlightened by valuable testing insights, soon enough your stakeholders will be going bananas for guerrilla testing.