The New York Times continues to impress with their ability to integrate elegant and useful tools into their ever-evolving index page. Tonight, they displayed a Twitter ticker below the featured story showing Reader’s Reactions to President Obama’s speech on the Gulf oil spill.

I find this to be a wonderful example of a traditional media company breaking away from traditional UI practices to experiment with the user behavior of their audience. I can only guess that most users visiting the index while this was rolling felt as though they had more information, from an extended source of contributors in real time. It’s a pretty amazing way to incorporate the opinions of captain random alongside the musings of rock-star, online journalists.

The times they are a-changin’.

I often find inspiration in the sometimes minimalist, sometimes colorfully-bubbly and always cutting edge style found in UI designs from our Asian counterparts. In fact, some of my favorite work comes from the Eico Design firm out of Beijing which consistently impresses me with their inviting, intuitive and downright slick user interfaces.

Click here for even more beautiful examples from the Pacific rim via Woorkup.com. Domo origato, dudes.

I spend a lot of time thinking about CTAs (or call to actions) over the course of an average work week. My team puts together advertising units, widgets and mini-site mock ups almost daily for big name brands and it’s important to create CTAs that are clear, eye catching and effective in converting to clicks. Some of the things we pay attention to mirror the tips mentioned here but there are a few more things to keep in mind that can help ensure you’re designing an effective CTA:

1) Size matters – make sure the CTA is big but not obnoxious. I’ve seen designs that go so big that the CTA ends up resembling an ad unit rendering it invisible to less savvy users. Find a good balance between your buttons and the surrounding elements but always strive to make it stand out, without scaring the user way.

2) Shape it up – Making your CTA look like a nice, inviting, rounded corner button makes sense about 90% of the time, but if you’re designing within an existing site or ad unit be mindful of the existing style. Sometimes, a link may be your best bet rather than using something resembling a button or badge. Whatever you end up doing, remember to use high contrasting colors to draw the eye and mouse.

3) Stick it where it counts – Positioning the CTA is probably the most important thing to consider. Remember that a user’s eye will generally track from left to right, top to bottom so the top-right portion of whatever you’re designing will be your hot spot. It often seems natural to place the CTA at the right/bottom-right of your design, but we’ve found that even with something like a 728×90 ad unit the CTA on the far left will perform more effectively. This is an excellent example of good positioning. Learn it.

This is a site I helped Dr. Michelle Post with a little while back. It took some time to get live due to issues over at GoDaddy.com (DNS names not resolving properly across registrar to hosting accounts) but it’s finally up. Back in the summer, this was my pride and joy — utilizing CSS3 rounded corners, transparent backgrounds, drop shadows with bright colors and a new logo design thrown in.

Dr. Post is a wonderful professor I met at the Art Institute of Colorado and offers amazing Custom Training Programs, Public Speaking talents and Education Coaching. I just hope the site does her talents justice.

ReachYourPotential.info