Usabilla

Playful-Design-by-John-Ferrara Theory

Book Review: Playful Design by John Ferrara

on / by / No Comments

The new book Playful Design by John Ferrara is about to come out and our friend Matthew Niederberger was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at one of the first copies. Here is a very brief summary of what he thinks about it. For the full book review, please visit the actualinsights blog.

According to Matthew, Playful Design is a very insightful book on how and why games
can solve real problems. It covers everything from clear explanations of the fundamentals, over definitions, to individual elements. From game concept to prototype, the author discusses many different facets of game design.
Read the rest of this entry »

Screen shot 2012-05-15 at 10.17.37 AM Theory

Optimize Your Conversion With Insights From Behavioural Economics

on / by / 1 Comment

This is a guest post by our friend Neal Cole.

As Dan Ariely explains in his popular books people are often irrational in their decision making as they are heavily influenced by unconscious biases. Conversion professionals can utilise knowledge of these ‘rules of thumb’ to nudge website visitors towards a particular behaviour. However, because people may not be fully aware of these influences customer research cannot predict how they will respond to the use of such persuasive designs.

Online experiments (A/B and multivariate tests) are the only true way of evaluating how visitors will respond to a new web page or online journey. Organisations that use such experimental testing can potentially save millions of pounds by avoiding lost sales and benefit from an uplift in conversion.
Read the rest of this entry »

Screen shot 2012-05-10 at 4.39.04 PM Discoveries

12 Tricks To Make Your Customers Feel Safe

on / by / No Comments

The customer is king. And we want the king to feel comfortable, right? Especially on the Web, where people can leave our site with only a mouse click, it is essential to keep them happy. Happy customers will stay to find the information they came for, they are more willing to trust us, and they will be more likely to spend their money with us. There are many different things you can do to make your customers comfortable, one of them is by making them feeling safe.

Here are some tricks that I discovered to help you make your users feel safe and as a consequence comfortable enough to spend their money on your site.

Read the rest of this entry »

featured_img Theory

Useful, Saleable, Buildable: The Role Of UX In Defining Requirements

on / by / 1 Comment

This is a guest post by our friend Mike Hughes.

A mentor of mine is fond of giving the advice “Do what you love to do in the service of those who love what you do.” Whenever I hear UX professionals complain that they are continually having to promote the value of what they do, I wonder if they are serving the right people. If people in your organization are not seeing the value you add, maybe you haven’t positioned yourself where you can add the most value.

In this article I’ll explain how my role has evolved from that of a usability expert to that of a user experience (UX) architect. In making that transition, I have increased my impact on product strategy and I have established a higher perceived value in the organizations I work for. Essentially, I will discuss how my emphasis and contribution has shifted from just making the product usable, to defining a product that is useful, saleable, and buildable.

Read the rest of this entry »

Screen shot 2012-05-03 at 2.39.41 PM Discoveries

How The Look & Feel Of Your Website Affects Your Users

on / by / No Comments

Good design has to live up to many expectations. Design translates features into a visual interface, and ideally it manages to do so in a logical and usable way. As if that’s not enough, design also needs to be appealing. Good design is therefore useful and usable, and at the same time it’s aesthetic, draws attention, and it fits into a given context. I believe all of these aspects have been covered a lot lately, except for the look & feel that comes with the context of a website.

In the following, I’m going to discuss how the look & feel of a website affects the way we perceive it and what we feel just by looking at it. Visual aspects like layout, typography, images, or colors can make your website appealing, authentic, credible, entertaining, and much more.

Read the rest of this entry »

featured_image Theory

Guaranteed Success With Emotional Marketing In Only 5 Steps

on / by / 2 Comments

Any good marketing strategy is built on emotions. This is not a secret. What seems to be a secret at times is how we know which emotions to work with. It can be quite tricky to appeal to a target group and to actually reach the right people with a marketing campaign. Here are the good news: It doesn’t have to be that tricky. Most of you might not know about it, but there is a great way to turn your target group into real and tangible people to help you better understand what makes your customers tick: The so called Sinus Milieus.

In this article, I will briefly introduce the concept behind Sinus Milieus and then guide you through 5 steps towards effective emotional marketing. If you are in a position where you need to reach people, I really recommend you to read on.

Read the rest of this entry »

featured_image Design

Personalize Your Website And Gain Credibility

on / by / 1 Comment

Personality is one of the major factors to influence web credibility. We love the feeling to actually interact with a real person, rather than a machine. The design of a website and the personality that comes with it can trick us into this idea, even if we are very well aware that all we see is basically some code sent to us by a faraway server, interpreted by our web browser.

  • If you have any feature requests, you have an amazing idea [...], you need support, or just want to say “Hi”, please contact us.

Quotes like the one above can make a big difference when it comes to how trustworthy users perceive your website. The text shows that the people behind pulpfingers.com are not only truly interested in what their users have to say, also their tone of voice is very human and authentic.

Read the rest of this entry »

Next Entries »
Google Analytics Alternative