Two Words That Will Make You a Smarter Content Marketer. 10 psychology techniques to drive behaviour | user experience design, ux and usability blog - keepitusable. If you want to increase your engagement metrics, increase page views, increase the amount of enquiries and much more then follow these simple techniques. 1.
Know your audience If you don’t know who your audience is then you won’t know what makes them tick. You can’t persuade people if you don’t know much about them. Knowing your audience helps you to shape your message in a way that’s most likely to gain their acceptance. 2. Once you know who your audience is, you need to make sure you communicate with them in an effective manner. 3. People will actually read more your text, the less text you write. 4. People scan content for things that stand out to them. 5. People are drawn to imagery over text. 6.
If you want to get your message across and have it remembered, video has the advantage (over just reading text) of communicating social and emotional information, not just facts. 7. The Keep It Usable cats! Cats are one of the most searched terms on the internet right now. 8. 9. This is me. Advanced Common Sense - Usability Workshops.
Do-It-Yourself Usability Testing: The Workshop Learn how to dramatically improve your Web site, application, or mobile app by watching people use it After I finished writing Don't Make Me Think, I spent five years teaching a workshop about basic usability principles. A lot of people who took that workshop suggested that I also do a full day just about usability testing. I thought it was a great idea, but I couldn't figure out how to do it all in one day. Finally, after a lot of pondering, I realized how to structure a day that included everything I think people need to get started doing testing on their own, including some hands-on practice. In this day-long session, I'll teach you how to do your own low-cost/no-cost testing that's simple enough to make it a routine part of your design process.
The day will include... Who should attend? Anyone involved in publishing a Web site, application, or mobile app. Some of the topics covered... ...and much more. 2014 Schedule Sorry. Lean Usability Testing: Current Best Practices and Resources | A State Space Traveler.
Beyond Usability Testing. As web professionals, we’re accustomed to putting out fine websites based on best practices, analytics data, competitor review, secondary research, and our own expertise. Talented as we may be, though, it can be hard to stay aggressively committed to optimizing the user experience when more powerful and immediate success indicators like client satisfaction, aesthetic appeal, and ease of development and maintenance all compete for our attention.
To overcome these boundaries on the empathy that we can extend to our sites’ imagined visitors, there’s no substitute for research conducted with actual users. Dana Chisnell rightly noted in 2009 that usability testing allows us to “make good, solid, confident decisions about design.” By putting our best guesses about what works in front of our target audience, we get to see where we were right and where we were wrong. I don’t know anybody who’s seen their work tested without being surprised about how wrong some of their best guesses were. The History Of Usability: From Simplicity To Complexity. Why You Should Get Excited About Emotional Branding Globalization, low-cost technologies and saturated markets are making products and services interchangeable and barely distinguishable. As a result, today’s brands must go beyond face value and tap into consumers’ deepest subconscious emotions to win the marketplace.
In recent decades, the economic base has shifted from production to consumption, from needs to wants, from objective to subjective. We’re moving away from the functional and technical characteristics of the industrial era, into a time when consumers are making buying decisions based on how they feel about a company and its offer. Read more... A Guide To Validating Product Ideas With Quick And Simple Experiments You probably know by now that you should speak with customers and test your idea before building a product.
Mistakes include testing the wrong aspect of your business, asking the wrong questions and neglecting to define a criterion for success. Read more... Read more...
Ngenuity Journal | Spring 2012 | Seven Common User Experience Mistakes to Avoid in Financial Services. Fact vs. Fiction: What Usability is Not. A close friend asked me a few days ago – “You’ve covered decent ground on the science, dimensions, characteristics, design aspects, process and pervasiveness of usability considerations. How about doing a reverse bit? What usability is not about? Or the myths of usability?” I jumped at the chance. In choosing to write this, I am simply reinforcing the simple concept that it is also necessary to talk about the “NOT” part in a subject as complex as usability. This shall (I hope!) Usability is expensive It is known that Stanford University, Microsoft, IBM, and many others spend tons of resources (money and human) on usability research, which is quite expensive. I agree that it’s not a commodity – that there’s a price to pay.
Usability is free At the opposite end of the first misconception, a large number of people believe that usability can be free. Usability is minimalism The concept of minimalism is usually a nice and welcome change in today’s noisy world. Usability is user experience. Usability Guidelines for Heuristic Evaluation « UX Centered Blog. I have read quite a few blogs and articles on Heuristic Evaluation and learnt about the theory-based approach for performing it but failed to find detailed heuristics for evaluating a website. The Heuristics I have read so far are more on evaluating a system/web application than for a website. So this post walks through the process for conducting Heuristic Evaluation and lists various usability guidelines (heuristics) for evaluating a website.
Heuristic Evaluation is evaluating the website based on usability principles (heuristics) and identifying the major usability problems with the website as well as evaluating the things which need to be retained from the existing website. One very important point to note here (which is missed by most of us) is the output of the Heuristic Evaluation should also consist of features/things which should be retained from the existing website. Process for conducting the Heuristic Evaluation (example is presented along with the steps) For e.g References.
8 tips for a sane IA. For World Usability Day (10th November 2011) I provided 8 tips (tweets) on Information Architecture (IA) “truisms” I’d want everyone on a team to know before starting a typical website project. Twitter is a little restrictive, so I thought it would be worth fleshing them out. Figure 1: A snippet from the @we_are_nomensa Twitter feed on World Usability Day. 1. Create the structure bottom-up, label it top-down One of the hardest parts of a website project is to work out where everything goes. Even better, invite people from the website’s target audience in and get them to do it for you with card sorting. Figure 2: An example from card-sorting results that, after analysis, is combined across participants.
When it comes to labelling each area of the structure; that needs to be top-down. The aim is to have labels that have as little overlap as possible. 2. A perfect menu would be one where any item you think of could only be under one menu option. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Share this post.
Bridging User Research into Design. By Janet M. Six Published: October 17, 2011 Send your questions to Ask UXmatters and get answers from some of the top professionals in UX. In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our experts discuss how to bridge user research into design. Every month in Ask UXmatters, our panel of UX experts answers our readers’ questions about a broad range of user experience matters. To get answers to your own questions about UX strategy, design, user research, or any other topic of interest to UX professionals in an upcoming edition of Ask UXmatters, please send your question to us at: ask.uxmatters@uxmatters.com.
The following experts have contributed answers to this edition of Ask UXmatters: Carol Barnum—Director and Cofounder, Usability Center at Southern Polytechnic State University; author of Usability Testing Essentials: Ready, Set. . . Q: How do you bridge user research into design? “I hardly know where to begin with such a big question,” exclaims Whitney. Initial User Research—Discovery The Problem Space.
5 Usability Principles In Practice. Human Factors International published a great post outlining some important usability principles folks should practice when building an app, a website or a product. A friend of ours recently asked us for some tips and examples of a few of these principles. Instead of emailing them back to him, we decided to share the actual examples of each of these in a quick blog post.
Here they are: 1. Motivate The goal of your site or app is to meet specific user needs and marry them with your business goals. How the 7 Deadly Sins Are Used To Motivate 2. HFI uses out some good questions to define this one: Who are your users? Why Workflows Work Better Than Sitemaps 3. The ability to find something a user is looking for is 80% of usability. How to Create Simple and Effective Sub Navs 10 Ways to Turn Hyperlinks into Hyper-Clicks 4. Make your controls understandable. Great Example of How WSJ Snubbed It's Users How An Early "Neat" Idea Can Take a Turn for the Worse 5.
How to Speed Up Your Site with Backbone.js.
12 Website Usability Testing Myths. The internet is a wonderful, magical place that is filled with more amazing content than you could shake a stick at; it has an almost unimaginable wealth of resources on a huge array of different topics, and more or less anything you can think of exists on the internet. The problem though, is not that there is too much content, nor that there are too many sites, it’s just that the vast majority of sites and services suffer from a number of different usability issues that make using them anything from difficult and frustrating to downright unpleasant to use .
I’m sure you can think of a number of sites off the top of your head that fit into these categories. Unfortunately there are a number of different myths floating about saying that improving usability takes too long, costs too much or doesn’t really do anything useful to these sites and services. As someone who works on a website usability testing tool I hear these myths far too often, and I’d like to dispell them permanently. Online Testing Essentials: An infographic on what online marketing activities to test. A well-built sales funnel is never complete until every part of it has been tested and optimized.
For maximum success, marketers should dig deep and experiment with every customer interaction point. What follows is a brief guide that outlines what things are good to regularly test and optimize—including PPC, media buys, landing pages, and email campaigns. You don’t have to test everything all at once. Start with the marketing activity the produces the highest return and then work your way down. Click on the image below to view an enlarged version of this infographic: View an enlarged version of this Infographic » Click here to download a .pdf version of this infographic. Want to display this infographic on your site? Simply copy and paste the code below into the html of your website to display the infographic presented above: Tips and Tricks to Tweet:
Reduce Bounce Rates: Fight for the Second Click (Jakob Nielsen's. Mobile web. Usable Web. Usability Toolkit. Selling the idea of usability. Naloge. Selling Usability to Your Manager. You're enthusiastic about usability and want to make it happen within your organisation. But your manager doesn't share your enthusiasm. Perhaps your manager sees usability as a diversion from the business of product or software development, or thinks it's too fluffy to truly inform design, or sees it as a threat to his or her expertise. How do you go about changing your manager's mind? Most people will tell you to assemble a cost-benefit argument for usability. There are many resources on the Web to help you do this, and Randolph Bias and Deborah Mayhew have written an excellent book on the topic.
But often, this just isn't enough. Step 1: Assemble the Benefits of Usability The first step is to review the key benefits of focusing on usability. Higher Revenues Loyal Customers Improved Brand Value Process Improvement Step 2: “Type” Your manager The next step is to tailor these benefits to the needs and interests of your manager. How Does Your manager Prefer to Get Information? Be practical. 247 web usability guidelines. Web usability guidelines Home page usability: 20 guidelines to evaluate the usability of home pages. Task orientation: 44 guidelines to evaluate how well a web site supports the users tasks. Navigation and IA: 29 guidelines to evaluate navigation and information architecture. Forms and data entry: 23 guidelines to evaluate forms and data entry. Download an Excel workbook containing all 247 web usability guidelines You can also download translated versions of this checklist (in French, Spanish and Russian).
How to use these guidelines Work through each of the guidelines in each list and mark your site as either conforming or not conforming to the guideline. Remember that all guidelines are context specific. The guidelines are purposefully expressed as positive statements, so that when you feed the results back to the design team you can identify some strengths of the design before you launch into the problems. And remember that guidelines can get you only so far. About the author Dr. Creating usability test tasks that really motivate users. Usability test tasks are the beating heart of a usability test. These tasks determine the parts of a system that test participants will see and interact with.
Usability test tasks are so critical that some people argue they are even more important than the number of participants you use: it seems that how many tasks participants try, not the number of test participants, is the critical factor for finding problems in a usability test. But for test tasks to uncover usability problems, usability test participants need to be motivated: they need to believe that the tasks are realistic and they must want to carry them out. So how do we create test tasks that go beyond the mundane and engage participants? To help our discussion, I’m going to classify usability test tasks into 6 different categories. The 6 categories are: Scavenger hunt.The Reverse Scavenger hunt.Self-generated tasks.Part self-generated.
Let's look at each of these in a bit more depth. Scavenger hunt The Reverse Scavenger hunt Dr. UXMARKZ - Hand picked UX related resources. UX Myths - Myth #22: Usability testing is expensive. Usability News - CHI '08: Usability and Cultural Complexity. Finding out what makes customers click - 30 Jul 2008 - Computing. Mona Patel has over a decade of experience in the evaluation and design of web sites, and for the past six years has been helping usability consultancy Human Factors International (HFI) develop and implement new technologies for testing and improving a wide variety of organisations’ sites.
The discipline required to improve sites is somewhere between engineering and psychology, according to Patel, which is why HFI employs several practitioners who have degrees in cognitive psychology. One of the firm’s primary aims is to help customers get to the bottom of any issue they might be having with their web presence. For example, the consultancy could help a firm figure out why its site is attracting thousands of visitors to the checkout stage but only 10 per cent convert. HFI’s customers include a host of well-known retail companies, as well as banks, manufacturers, telecoms firms and government bodies.
“After research we turn the principles into the design,” said Patel. Thinking Through UIs. Interactions magazine | The Washing Machine That Ate My Sari - M. Usability <> Web Metrics ; Advancing analytics through the lesso. The Usability Challenge - Express Computer. 10 Principles of UX. Guidelines.