Designers are prone to falling into the trap of cluttering their interfaces. Limitations of space often push them to the wall, and they find themselves trying to fit everything they can into a tiny usable space. The unique problem that the modern designer faces, be it on the web or in the design of a product, is finding a way to fit all the necessary features while maintaining the highest levels of usability and user experience of the product.
Regardless of whether you sell a product, offer a service or run a blog, any visitor comes to your site with simple goals like consuming or gathering more information. The user experience is the foundation of everything from that point on, and the main pillar of your conversion strategy.
Everyone knows that user research is important for building a highly usable product. It’s the exact details of the research process that are less obvious...
A user test is a little bit like cake: you know what a great one looks like, but you’re not quite sure how to go from individual ingredients to culinary masterpiece. We’ve all been there...
As product and UX professionals we all know the importance of getting your designs in front of your target persona. Being able to see over their shoulder as they thumb, tap, swipe, and navigate their way around, is essential in being able to quickly identify issues and make quick iterations to improve the product.
Both assistants are huge sellers in the race for your voice queries, but which one really provides the best user experience?
Usability testing data is a sure-fire way to eliminate guess-work and focus on making the UX design process more effective. These types of user tests can help you figure out if your audience can adequately use your website or mobile app.
In theory every company these days is customer-centric web and has a mobile responsive design process, and yet a surprising amount of companies haven't updated their online stores or platforms accordingly.
Turning visitors and prospects into paying customers is about more than good advertising and slick SEO. Users are savvy enough to tell the difference between good and bad UX, and it can often be the differentiating factor between a single visit and a repeat customer.
Turning visitors and prospects into paying customers is about more than good advertising and slick SEO. Users are savvy enough to tell the difference between good and bad UX, and it can often be the differentiating factor between a single visit and a repeat customer.
Are you delivering the best user experience for your website and mobile app visitors? You may think your website or app offers seamless navigation, intuitive form usage, and an effective way for users to interact with the information being provided.
As any seasoned professional knows - whether a carpenter or a digital creative - your daily work is part procedural and part art. In this article I focus on the ‘art part’ of user testing; I offer seven tips for creating user test prototypes that will give you the feedback you need while keeping you on time and budget.
While many people are busy deciding which gym to join, diet to try or bad habit to break… the new year is the best time to embrace some new habits that actually have a great ROI: namely, beginning or expanding your team or company’s UX research efforts.
Everybody working in the IT industry has seen a number of case study videos, where users talk about glitches in software, unavailable options in apps, and their ideal features and interfaces.
The conflict between qualitative and quantitative user experience research methodologies has its origin in a time when computers were only a dream, and with the emergence of the social sciences over a century ago. It lies in a struggle that is much older than the field of Usability, User Testing, and Design Research.
In the world of User Experience Research, there’s often some confusion surrounding the difference between User Studies (and user research in general) and User Acceptance Testing (UAT).
Quantifying how good a user experience is, or how well a site meets the needs of its users, can be a difficult task, and goes beyond what user acceptance testing can do. We can look objectively at metrics like time on task, or success/failure rates to determine user behavior, but they don’t tell the whole story. To get a more complete picture, we need to rely on usability metrics that are standardized and commonly used throughout many industries, as a means to benchmark our designs when running unmoderated and moderated user research studies.
Having led and analyzed hundreds of user tests, I’ve made a lot of mistakes. So here I share several Do’s and Don’ts, in the hope that you can more confidently create the prototype that’s perfect for getting exactly the user feedback you need, right on time and on budget.
Building a brand new site, or updating an existing one, is a massive investment in both time and money for most organizations. And folks in the UX field know often one of the most difficult tasks in the process is finding the time and stakeholder buy-in for comprehensive, meaningful and actionable user research. What should not be difficult, is actually conducting that research.
Mobile UX London is preparing for its 2017 annual conference in November. Technological predictions to biggest fears; here are some highlights about a few of the thought leaders speaking at the event.
Remote user testing studies can give you an unparalleled look into the thought processes, behaviors and reactions of real users. Remote user tests can be created quickly, and help teams work through roadblocks and uncover hidden problems early in the development process.
Before building anything, you should always understand the requirements, design a solution, and test it. User Testing allows you to determine if people are going to understand or like your product. The earlier you get the feedback, the sooner you can know what people are struggling with and what is worth fixing. Your goal is to verify ideas and correct mistakes before spending time and money developing a solution.
Did you know that 40-60% of users who sign up for a free trial of a software or SaaS application will use it once and never come back?
At Userlytics, we test lots of different user interfaces: from public homepages and e-commerce sites to private, members-only portals. And those tests span a host of different platforms and screen sizes.
While all of these sites serve different purposes and often different audiences: they all have one thing in common. They’ve all made some mistakes that negatively affect the user experience. And they’re not that hard to spot, if you take the time to look for them.
For years if not decades top management executives from large corporations have talked about how the user experience (UX) of their customers is a top priority.
However, a quick & easy user test of even some of the most important and well known companies shows that this has, until recently, been more lip service than concrete actions.
All brands have a voice. It’s what companies use to communicate with their customers, prospects, and the rest of the world. Your brand’s voice is conveyed by many different people, through many channels:
Everybody’s heard of Twitter. The micro-blogging site, founded way back in 2006, is used by more than 300 million people each month. Even Presidents tweet. With the enormous reach and popularity Twitter currently enjoys, you would think it’s not in danger of being upended. Certainly not by some scrappy, open-source upstart. But that’s exactly what’s happening.
Moderated and unmoderated user testing have pros and cons. By leveraging unmoderated user testing with branching logic, you can have the best of both.
Businesses are moving away from organizational-centric strategies and thinking more and more about the needs of their customers.
Customers want their experience with brands and digital assets to be pleasant, simple, and seamless. In other words, they want the usability and the user experience to be easy, intuitive and if possible, emotionally rewarding
With the rise in popularity of user testing tools like Userlytics, there’s no reason why everyone can’t run effective usability tests and produce user-friendly products. User testing is the best way to get insights and feedback from target users, validate features and measure product acceptance. Usability testing tools and prototyping tools such as Justinmind break the user testing process wide open, meaning that testing can be done remotely and independent of the guidance of User Researchers.
While user testing is now simpler and more effective than ever, it still pays to be savvy when testing. This usability testing checklist will help you plan, carry out and then analyze user tests on both web and mobile apps.
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Let's be serious: How often did you already think about improving the usability and the user experience of your website? In the end, maybe nothing really changed and your investment was a waste of time and money. That is why you should consider a few crucial things when you plan to conduct usability testing.
Simply said: It does not make sense to improve something if you are not able to measure success. That is why you should document what is happening right now on your website or shop:
Discover the impact of good UX Design
You are about to read this article. But would you read it if you needed a magnifier? Probably not. Which illustrates how important UX Design and the design of an appropriate user experience is.
We are going to focus on websites for this article, in particular those involving e-commerce, although of course UX design also plays a role in mobile apps, as well as offline products and services.
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The concept underlying Agile Software Development is of rapid and limited design and development iterations with a continual feedback loop and involvement on the part of the users. The testing implications of Agile SW development are fairly obvious: frequent iterative user testing of each design and development improvement.
Unmoderated remote user testing, whereby user experience and usability professionals can set up tests and have participants respond to them at scale, from their home, anywhere in the world, is clearly a major part of the toolset for Agile UX.
One of the most active groups of professionals focused on Agile UX, almost 15,000 members worldwide, is the Agile UX Group in Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/3803162). We decided to run a survey with them and see how they use un-moderated remote user testing, how they perceived the value proposition, and what features would have them use this methodology more extensively, as well as obtain buy-in from colleagues and business owners.
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What does moviemaking have to do with user experience and usability testing? It turns out that the answer is, quite a lot.
A great user experience design achieves an emotional response. When a user experiences a "wow, that was so easy and intuitive and cool" moment, that is when you know that you have built a great product.
The same is true for a movie or TV series. The ones that work are impacting our emotions, not our reasoning.
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For many years Agencies, Product Managers, Marketers, Usability professionals and Web Development firms have been able to quickly and inexpensively user test their prototypes and production sites by recording target Personas interacting remotely from their home or office.
This has allowed an insightful method of iteratively tweaking the design and functionality of websites and digital applications to enhance usability and user experience.
The explosive adoption and usage of Mobile devices in recent years has created a need for an easy way to perform usability testing of Apps on native mobile devices, in particular the user experience of unreleased Apps prior to launching them on Google Play or the Apple Store.
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A key consideration when planning remote usability tests with participants in their homes or offices is whether to record only the screen and device interactions, or in addition the participant himself/herself, through their webcam or a similar video recording device.
For many years we have had the possibility of capturing the screen experience of remote usability participants, including their verbal "think aloud" commentary.
The next generation of products that became available to usability and user experience professionals included recording the participant, in a "Picture-in-Picture" (PiP) video recording of the Usability test, usually via the Participants' own Webcam.
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"Seduce me by allowing me to learn something new;
Empower me by ensuring a coherent application thereof."
Every CMO, Product-Brand Manager and Advertising Executive knows we are in the midst of a massive disruption in marketing & advertising; the fragmentation of the traditional one way mass communication model of radio, TV, and print into an exploding ecosystem of interactive and cross polinating channels is changing the game in unforeseen ways.
In the US, online is about to displace TV as the largest media spend category, and within the category of online there continues to be a "Cambrian" explosion of channels and customer touch points, for both direct marketing and brand building.
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Mobile is hot. So is user experience, usability and customer experience.
Whereas many websites designers, developers and product managers believe thay have a good control of the usability and user experience of their landing pages when accessed from a desktop, in relation to mobile, and especially mobile apps, they know they don’t know.
So there is a huge interest in testing websites accessed from a smartphone or tablet (mobile browsing), and even more so in relation to the customer experience of interacting with mobile apps on iPads, Android devices, iPhones, Windows phone 8, etc, to optimize the mobile app usability & user experience.
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One of the issues that comes up time and again when planning user testing (whether usability testing, user experience testing, online in-depth interviews (IDIs) for qualitative research, etc), is whether to conduct the tests on a moderated or unmoderated basis.
Just like in politics, there are some who are firmly aligned with one type of testing or the other, and then there are the majority who see benefits for each methodology depending upon the context and the goals, and who may even wish to use both methodologies for the same project...
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Despite years of investment in time and money by usability professionals in improving the user experience of their companies and clients, there are very few companies that delight and retain customers as effectively as Apple through compelling user interface interaction and experience design.
Why? Is Apple simply a deity that we can admire and aspire to, perhaps try to copy but never reach its Olympian heights?
Or is there something else preventing us from going beyond “good enough” user interface experience design? ...
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It may seem counter intuitive, but they are not. What they are is “coherent” and the rules and proceses used to interact with them are consistent throughout; so even if you have to “learn” a new methodology of interaction, once you learn it, you are never surprised because it is applied commonly throught the user interfaces.
In the same way that a reader or movie goer is willing to temporarily “suspend their disbelief” and enjoy a story, as long as the internal rules of the story, whether they are based on magic, science fiction, or speculation, are consistent and coherent and obey this “internal logic”, a good interface design does not need to be “intuitive”. It can be completely different than every method of...
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Remember when IBM dominated the computing market in such a way that the Justice department filed an antitrust suit? The suit lasted for 13 years, from 1969-1982. That was the time when IT departments not only managed the IT assets of a company, but also provided the data crunching IT services.
Everything changed when Apple and Wintel liberated departments from that dependency. All of a sudden they were able to perform financial modeling, accounting, HR administration, and marketing analysis by themselves, using decentralized IT resources in the form of the PC.
Was that a bad thing? Clearly not for the users of IT, who radically increased both the range of what they could do and the speed of obtaining results.
What about the IT department, did it disappear?...
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User feedback is probably one of the most critical, effective and efficient methods for optimizing market research, marketing, and advertising.
Most companies are pretty good at acknowledging, and acting upon the need, to proactively solicit customer feedback.
This traditional type of proactive market research, solicited feedback, is all about asking people to form an opinion or conduct a task, and listen and observe to their answers and actions and reactions as they engage with provided stimuli. In other words, soliciting insights from users and customers.
However, despite the positive feelings we usually associate with the term "proactive", this is not the only valid way to receive feedback.
Unsolicited, “reactive” feedback,...
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Yesterday we made a post on designing for the users and some basic usability and user experience notions to remind our readers about the importance of user-oriented design and development.
Today, with that thought, we would like to add a note on our blog about a visionary, world leader and one of the most important and influential characters in the design and technology worlds.
Steve Jobs (1955-2011) once said “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works”.
At only 56 years old, this great man who did not settle with the Status Quo leaves behind a legacy and the knowledge of a brilliant mind geared by creative thinking, new perspectives on users, and the beauty of combining usefulness and aesthetics...
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"If your users have many questions, it's a failure of your primary site design. It
becomes not so much customer support, as much as customer complaints".
- Jakob Nielsen
Over the past years, we have seen a growing popularity of designs and Marketing and Advertising campaigns created and designed for end users and customers.
Once you start practicing user-oriented designs or campaigns, and you see the tremendous increase in customer take up and loyalty, and decrease in customer support costs, chances are that you will not want to stop.
Iterative Product Development
Experts say that designing and developing a product is both a creative and a communication process.
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It is often said that “less is more”, but when it comes to Online Marketing & Advertising Research, “the more the better”.
That said, doing both quantitative and qualitative should be only done with a clear understanding of the strengths and benefits of each.
For example, when doing qualitative exploratory research, the number of respondents beyond a number between 5-10 per study, is not the main factor; far more important is to enable a setting with a minimum of bias (within a participant’s home), and minimum barriers to participation (to ensure you are receiving feedback from your target demographic, rather than limiting yourself to stay-at-homes, students or the unemployed).
If you allow a minimum invasive testing...
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