Posted on May 16th, 2012 by John
We’re down to 1 spot for our special offer for first-time usability customers. Grab the last spot and you’ll save $2000 on an already great deal. Here’s what you get for only $1500:
- 3 rounds of usability tests with a total of 15 representative users
- 2 rounds of our help identifying problems on your site and how to fix them
- videos of all test sessions
- reports summarizing the problems and solutions
More details here …
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Posted on March 22nd, 2012 by John
Today we’re excited to announce a special offer for first-time usability customers. You get:
- 3 rounds of usability tests with a total of 15 representative users
- 2 rounds of our help identifying problems on your site and how to fix them
- videos of all test sessions
- reports summarizing the problems and solutions
If you act fast you can save $2,000.
Learn more here.
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Posted on December 27th, 2011 by John
Last week at Marketade we:
- Kicked off work for natural gas news publisher Intelligence Press. Based in Sterling, Virgina, IP has been a leading source of news and pricing on the North American natural gas industry for over 30 years. We’ll be helping them improve their overall web presence, including SEO, conversion optimization, usability, and more.
- Launched new Philadelphia apartment finder website for Urban Igloo, which has just expanded to the City of Brotherly Love. Also implemented live chat/help desk functionality and numerous other additions to Urban Igloo’s DC site.
- Ran online tree tests for Falls Church home remodeler Winn Design to validate information architecture. We’d previously used in-person and online open card sorts to create a new information architecture — using Optimal Workshop’s OptimalSort for the online part. Here we used one of Optimal Workshop’s other tools: Treejack. Tree testing is a fairly new usability technique and we found it to be very powerful at testing the site’s proposed organization and navigation terminology. We could identify areas of confusion and quickly create a new test with a tweaked label or part of the structure — and see if that fixes the problem. As with online card sorting the only challenge we faced was quickly and cheaply recruiting representative testers. Below is an example of how people navigated for one of our tasks.
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Posted on September 30th, 2011 by John
Usability expert Jakob Nielsen’s latest article covers his recent findings on mobile usability. He and his team tested 105 users performing 390 different tasks and found the following success rates:
- Full site: 58%
- Mobile site: 64%
- Mobile app: 76%
Here are some of his key takeaways and guidelines:
- “The first, and maybe most important, guideline for improving the mobile user experience: design a separate mobile site. Don’t expect users to access the same site from both desktop and mobile browsers.”
- “A second key guideline is to have clear, explicit links from the full site to the mobile site and from the mobile site to the full site.”
- “While a mobile site is good, a mobile app is even better. [...] Of course, it’s more expensive to build an app than a mobile site, because you have to code different versions for each platform. Thus, we can really recommend building mobile applications only if you’re either rich or offer a service that’s particularly suited to mobile use.”
- “Users have become more aware of horizontal swiping than they were in our previous research” but Nielsen recommends including a visible cue when people can swipe and keeping the meaning of the swipe gesture consistent.
- “To have a successful mobile site or app, the obvious guideline is to design for the small screen. Sadly, some don’t, and we still see users struggle to hit tiny areas that are much smaller than their fingers. The fat-finger syndrome will be with us for years to come.”
- “When you have a smaller screen, you must limit the number of features to those that matter the most for the mobile use case.”
Read the full article here.
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Posted on May 24th, 2011 by John
In my latest tip article for our newsletter, I give an overview of remote usability testing. Here’s the summary:
Remote usability testing is an easy and cheap way to identify parts of your website or application that are tripping up, confusing, or frustrating visitors. With $200 and a few hours, you can spot problems that are costing your business tens of thousands of dollars. Follow our real-world example below learn the steps to an effective test.
Read the full article here and share your usability tips or questions below.
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Posted on November 21st, 2009 by John
A few years ago, my friend Paul sent me this great list from B.J. Fogg and the Web Credibility team at Stanford. Unlike a lot of top 10 tips lists, this one is backed by rigorous research. High recommended — I revisit them every few months.
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