Next Thursday, November 11th is World Usability Day 2010, there is a great free event at Michigan State University, not too far from Pure Visibility, and there’s still time to register! This is a great opportunity to learn more about designing mobile applications. Read More
Pure Visibility is working with a company that sells engineering codes and standards to engineers, librarians, and technical professionals to conduct a usability study for their website. We’re interested in learning about how people shop for and purchase standards.
If you are an engineer, librarian, or technical professional that has purchased standards at your current job, we’d like to sit down with you for an hour to talk to you and look at our client’s website together. Our findings will remain confidential and will only be used for this project. We can meet with you during the business day or after work, either at our downtown Ann Arbor office or at any other location in the Ann Arbor/Detroit area that is more convenient for you.
If you are interested, please give us a phone number where we can reach you during the day (and let us know if there are any restrictions on when you’re available to talk). We’d like to get in touch with you for a 15 minute call to ask you a few questions and make sure that you match the profile we’re looking for for this study. Participation in this study will be on a paid basis.
Changes are coming to the Pure Visibility website! In the not too distant future, we will unleash a new site architecture followed by content changes and a visual redesign.
As this effort got underway, we knew it was important to employ the same skills that we bring to our clients – to eat our own cat food, you could say. We did user research and captured that information as personas and then used those personas as the basis for our information architecture work. We then took our early website prototype out to real users to gather some data about how it worked for them. Read More
UXmatters is a great resource for (unsurprisingly) UX-related articles, such as information architecture, usability, and user research. An article from February 22nd, “Review of Information Architecture Evaluation Tools: Chalkmark and Treejack,” provides a great overview of two user research tools from Optimal Workshop.
The first, Chalkmark, allows unmoderated testing of static mockups. You can put up a mocked up page, ask people where they would click to find information about something specific, and then Chalkmark tells you where users clicked.
The other tool that this article discusses is Treejack, which lets you test an organizational scheme, abstracted away from the actual interface. In Treejack, you build a tree that reflects how information on your site is organized into categories and sub-categories (or how you want to organize this information in the future). Again, you ask people to tell you where they think they would find a specific piece of information, but with this tool, they can click around in the tree and think about it before giving you their final answer.
The article on UXmatters goes into further detail about the analysis capabilities that both of these tools provide, and they sound pretty exciting.
Do you have a page on your website that you know could be better? Do you need help showing how subtle changes can have a big effect in conversion rates?
I came across a great site recently: ABtests.com (via The Interaction Designer’s Coffee Break). It consists of the results of A/B tests. It shows two different designs, side by side, points out which one had a higher conversion rate, and presents a theory about why one design did better than the other.
Testing designs is an important part of getting your online sales engine running. It takes advantage of the unique strengths that online marketing offers – the ability to collect lots of data and test ideas. There are free tools out there for doing it, such as Google Website Optimizer, but trying out a new idea can be as simple as rolling out a new page, using it for a while, and comparing the results to the previous design.
When you control the defaults in your product or website, you have the power to shape human behavior.
We touched on the matter of how you can influence users’ decisions on a form back during the presidential campaign, when we looked at the John McCain contribution form. If you were to make a form where the default contribution is $200, you imply that it is the amount that normal people donate. People will probably contribute less, but they’re bound to contribute more money than if you had set the default value to $10.
The recent story on Mashable, “Facebook Founder on Privacy: Public Is the New ‘Social Norm,’” reminded me of the power and responsibility that comes with being able to design choices for people. Mark Zuckerberg stated that the default settings on Facebook would be to share your data on the open web rather than restricting it to your friends. They changed the default with the expectation that most people would simply accept the default of sharing their data, and thereby increasing the value of Facebook.
Whether you agree with it or not, this is a reminder that design choices have consequences.
I consider myself to be all about change (even before Barack Obama) and feel like if I don’t shake things up in my life every few months then things will get boring. So, you would think when I found out about the new AdWords interface that I would be one of the first on board, but I’m not. I can’t figure out exactly why I’ve resisted using the new interface, but I know part of the reason is because I’m so used to the old interface when I’m not working in the Desktop Editor. This week I finally buckled down and faced this change head on and decided to start using the new interface with a couple of my accounts, after all we are all going to be forced to use this new interface soon.
The new interface looks like the Desktop Editor in terms of navigation. There is a navigational tree along the left that allows you to quickly jump from ad group to ad group and campaign to campaign. In my opinion this is a big improvement over the old interface because the most time consuming thing was moving throughout a large account and waiting for pages to load. Anther big change in the new interface is the addition of graphs that look a lot like Google Analytics graphs. This should make it easier to identify trends in your AdWords accounts where with the old interface you had to either generate reports look at the change history or look at Analytics data to identify long term trends. I imagine these graphs could be very useful for monitoring accounts, but I haven’t found anything interesting yet. Another change that I like is that you can actually edit keywords, previously if you wanted to change a keyword’s matching or spelling you were forced to delete the term and add the changed term back to the account.
So you might think, wow there’s a bunch of new useful features, I should switch to the new interface right away, but not so fast. One of my biggest gripes is how much information is crammed into the new interface window. I have a fairly large monitor (1680×1050 resolution) and I noticed that I needed to have my Firefox window taking up most of the screen in order to see all the information within the new interface. So, I decided to set my screen resolution 1024×768 (which is what a lot of internet users have) and my hunch was correct that it is terrible to navigate throughout the new interface unless you like scrolling left and right as well as up and down. Another big issue I have is just moving around the new interface is choppy and overall pretty sloppy. The new interface is beta like most Google roll outs, but from what I hear they are switching to this new interface in the next few months, so I hope these issues are fixed before the launch. Maybe it’s because I’m using Firefox and on a Mac but even so I don’t think this is ready for prime-time. Overall it has some good new features, but I am not sold yet. Has anyone else used the new interface? I’m interested to know what other people think.
Pure Visibility was well represented last week at the Internet User Experience 2009 conference. In addition to helping out behind the scenes, our Co-Founder and Visionary, Linda Girard, was a keynote speaker (“Bringing the Left Brain and Right Brain Together Online: Branding + Optimization”) and participated in a panel on Branding, Search Engine Optimization, and Usability.
The fifth year of the conference was bigger than ever. Attendance was up 50% – an impressive feat in the current economic climate! Beside the outstanding attendance this year, there were speakers from HFI, Adaptive Path, Organic, Enlighten, EA Games, UserCentric, Quicken Loans, Menlo Innovations, and a little-known company named Google. The talks were excellent and once again this conference has proven to be an excellent opportunity to learn about usability and online marketing.
We’ve all been there: You go to a website, you like what you see, and when it comes time to get in touch with the company and tell them you’re interested or ask for help, all you see is an email address.
That website just left you hanging.
The web is awash with alarmingly bad copy, and equally reprehensible lists of the ingredients of ‘good copywriting’. I personally find the fact that there are entire blogs devoted to this topic a bit alarming – as a former writer, I consider the communication of insight to be writing’s primary objective, and believe that (outside of say, experimental dissections of poetic form) the time we spend devoted to the discussion of writing guidelines and elements of form should be minimal compared to that devoted to the practice of creating such writing. Today, though, I found an exception to that rule in Mandy Brown’s thoughtful post on web writing on her blog A List Apart.
I like the idea of abandoning the over-used emphasis on conversion actions as the ultimate goal of website visits, in favor of creating and then preserving a space for reading. Brown has excellent ideas on how to do so, such as increasing the font size of the more weighted first paragraph, and increasing the whitespace padding on each side of the text (the usefulness of this second pointer is easily verified through comparing the experience of reading the post on Brown’s blog to this one).
The only point I’d like to add to Brown’s discussion is a further emphasis on being transparent on who the writer in cases where you’d like readers do more than just skim. Brown describes reading as a solitary process, but I tend to believe that as alone as we may be, reading is a practice of empathy and identification with a writer who is anonymous only in that they are unseen. Our sense of the author is one of the primary classificatory principles we use to judge what we read, and our ability to intellectually connect with writers is what makes reading an undeniably pleasurable experience. This echoes the empirical findings on the importance of establishing the credibility of an online source.
Without a strong sense of author, we are more likely to hesitate when it comes to abandoning ourselves to the experience. Add this to the hesitancy that is by now bred into the experience of online writing for many of us, thanks to a long history of horrendous web writing. As Brown says, designing a web page that reads well is by no means easy.
I welcome thoughts on the more specific aspects that now remain open to discussion – such as, how do such ideas apply differently to blogs, versus personal sites, versus company websites, versus informative sites?
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