Remote Usability Testing Blog

User Onboarding - UX Design Strategies For Better Customer Retention

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?

5 Common UX Mistakes and How to Fix Them

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.

Integrating User Testing With Agile Product Development

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.

Finding Your Tone; SHOW, DON’T TELL

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:

• Your company’s websites and mobile apps
• Customer service calls
• Social media
• Earnings reports
• Press releases

User Experience of Mastodon vs Twitter

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.

User Testing that is scalable and responsive?

Moderated and unmoderated user testing have pros and cons. By leveraging unmoderated user testing with branching logic, you can have the best of both.

The 7 factors that influence user experience

2017 is a year dedicated to the customer.

Businesses are moving away from organizational-centric strategies and thinking more and more about the needs of their customers.

But what exactly do customers want?

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

Usability testing checklist: 10 essential tips

Today’s guest post comes from Cassandra Naji, Marketing Content Editor at Justinmind.

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.

How to conduct usability testing successfully

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.

1. What should happen BEFORE your usability studies?

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:

• What is your conversion rate?
• How high is the bounce rate of your website?

What UX Design means for your business

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.

What is UX Design in a nutshell?

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.

AGILE UX SURVEY

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.

How User Testing can benefit from the Hollywood approach to movie making

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.

How to Conduct Usability and User Tests on Mobile Devices

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.

Webcam based recording of participants in Mobile or Website Usability Tests

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.

OmniChannel Interaction: Implications for User Experience Cohesion

"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.

Mobile App Usability Testing with Remote Users

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.

Unmoderated vs Moderated Usability & User Experience Testing

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...

Yes, make me think! (but only once...)

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? ...

Apple Products Are Not Intuitive?

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...

The End of Market Research?

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?...

Voice of the Customer

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,...

User Experience Design; How it Works

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...

User Experience Focused Campaigns & Development

"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.

A/B Testing & User Testing

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...