User Interface testing has become an individual core testing process for both the Internal (employee accessing) and External (public) web applications. Here we are going to discuss the 'External' aspect, that is, the testing of applications accessed by users who do not work with the company that owns them. Typically used for commercial purposes, these applications include … [Read more...]
Decontextualized Tests And Heuristic Reviews
Sometimes the best way to test a product doesn’t involve the product at all. Decontextualized tests, or tests that do not involve the product, are generally geared to testing users’ attitudes on the product, or in generating ideas. But just because they may be more conceptual does not mean they are any less valuable as a source of data. In this piece, we will focus on card … [Read more...]
8 Usability Testing Tools When On A Budget
Setting up a successful company with sufficient funding is difficult enough. However, for many startup founders, tight budget constraints are a grim reality. Financial concerns plague most new CEOs - which partly explains why 50% of small businesses fail within the first two years. There are numerous usability testing tools available. However, for the average entrepreneur, … [Read more...]
5 Guidelines For Setting Up A Usability Study – Startup Style
No matter the size of a company, usability testing can be viewed as a luxury that all too often gets scrapped off the agenda as deadlines start to loom. In my experience of working in the young and vibrant e-commerce startup Mallzee, this issue crops up more than it should. When every penny counts, it’s hard to convince managing roles to invest time and money in user … [Read more...]
10 Guidelines To Improve The Effectiveness Of A/B Testing
A/B testing is one of the best ways of improving the conversion rate of a website (when done correctly) but often times the number of successful A/B tests is low. It’s not that you’re expecting a winner every time but you should really be creating a winner at least 25% of the time. So how do you improve the effectiveness of every A/B test you run? By running tests that … [Read more...]
UsabilityTools Review – More Research For Less Money
UsabilityTools.com seems to answer the needs of UX researchers, designers and marketers all combined. It’s a comprehensive testing platform with 9 tools you’d normally use separately via multiple different services and paying twice the price for it. Although it seems like a real competition killer, because of offering more for less money, still the market is overruled by … [Read more...]
UserVOD: User Experience Improvement For Mobile Applications
UserVOD is a useful tool service that enables iOS mobile application developers obtain insights into how users are using their apps. It achieves this by recording user sessions and capturing their actions and gestures. In addition to this, it provides aggregated visual analytics (such as heatmaps) via its dashboard. In this way, the developer would be able to know for … [Read more...]
6 Ways To Recruit Participants For Remote Usability Testing
One of the main pillars of the user-oriented design involves testing your own assumptions and design solutions. Usability testing is very important in the design process. It allows you to verify ideas, helps to reduce the costs already at the initial stage of design and allows you to explore the user expectations. These have significant meaning when it comes to the user … [Read more...]
Usability Testing Of UK Cinema Websites – Part 2
In Part 1 of this article, we have seen the usability problems encountered by users when they try to book cinema tickets for kids on a Saturday morning. The websites that were tested were all UK cinema websites: CineWorld, Empire Cinemas and Odeon Cinemas. This article shows two other tasks that were performed by users during the same usability testing session, namely the … [Read more...]
Usability Testing Of UK Cinema Websites – Part 1
During a recent spot of unavoidable eavesdropping in a slow-moving queue, I overheard two ladies expressing great frustration at their less-than-positive experiences on cinema websites. This reminded me of usability testing on UK Cinema websites that we had carried out in late 2011. Back at the office, I dug up the video clips of user testing that we had recorded back … [Read more...]