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 … [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...]
Low Cost User Experience Testing
User experience testing and usability testing are absolutely essential for the creation or editing of a successful website. While it is important for all types of websites, testing is particularly important for e-commerce and other complex websites where users will need to do navigating through several pages in order to achieve their objectives. … [Read more...]
An Introduction To A/B Testing
A/B Testing isn't a new term. In fact, many canny marketers and designers are using it at this very moment to obtain valuable insight regarding visitor behavior and to improve website conversion rate. Unfortunately, A/B Testing still remains in the dark for most online marketers and web designers. The technique is still underrated as opposed to comparably valued methods … [Read more...]
Paper Prototyping As A Usability Testing Technique
Paper Prototyping is a technique that consists of creating hand drawings of user interfaces in order to enable them to be rapidly designed, simulated and tested. As simple as this technique may look like, it has been effectively used since the 1980s and is likely to continue to be used with a guaranteed degree of success for many more years to come. The objective of this … [Read more...]