Usabilla Blog

We made an interesting deal with Rosenfeld Media.  If you upgrade your account to a standard or large plan now, you’ll receive a free copy of Rosenfeld Media’s newest publication: “Remote Research” by Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte from Bolt | Peters. “Remote Research” is a must read for everyone who wants to learn more about the ins-and-outs of remote testing. Nate and Tony are excellent guides in the world of remote research and share their experiences in more than 200 usability tests in this funny and easy-to-read book.

Sign up for a Usabilla account now and receive a free copy of this book.
Already got an account? Log in and upgrade at your account page.

What others say about this book

“Nate and Tony have done it! They’ve described beautifully one of the user experience profession’s best-kept secrets—conducting remote usability tests. This book is a must-have for anyone thinking about remote testing, since it tackles everything you need from soup to nuts. I can’t wait to get a copy for my own bookshelf. Oh, it also will melt your face remotely.”
—Jared Spool CEO and Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering

“Remote user research helped us find a good mix of users whose intent was to conduct the same tasks that we were examining on the AAA TripTik Travel Planner. It was thrilling for our team of developers, researchers, and managers to watch and hear travelers interact with the application in their own environments.”
—Renuka Sastri Manager of Publishing Marketing, AAA

“The techniques in this book will make every designer’s and user researcher’s life much easier. Nate and Tony use the attitude and power of Web 2.0 technologies to create a new way of thinking about user experience research. They share their expertise clearly, concisely, and with a great sense of humor, giving practitioners step-by-step details to conduct remote research of virtually any complexity.”
—Mike Kuniavsky author, Observing the User Experience

Interested in our deal? Sign up for a Usabilla account now and receive a free copy of this book. Already got a Usabilla account? Log in to your account and upgrade directly.

We’re very happy to announce that we’ve just launched our first ‘official’ public release. We’ve renewed our homepage, launched paid plans, and offer PDF reports for all your test results. Log in to your account to try the new reports and other new features.
With the help of our beta testers we have been able to build a useful tool to collect feedback on webpages, mockups, sketches, and other images. In the past months Usabilla has proven its use in a large number of different cases. More then 2500 usability experts, web designers, online marketeers and other web professionals are using Usabilla to conduct remote usability tests and collect feedback.

Check out your new PDF reports

You can now export your test results as a PDF report. Create and customize your reports in our analysis tool. You can also use the new ‘Save as PNG’ feature to save parts of your visualizations and use these in your own reports or publish them online. Log in to your account and analyze one of your tests to see these new features.

Upgrade your account

During our beta period we have been offering beta accounts to test our service. We will continue to offer free accounts, which will be limited to 5 pages and 25 participants. You can upgrade your free account to one of the following plans: Small ($49), Standard ($199), and Large ($950).

• Small – 10 pages – $49 / year – 250 participants – Upgrade
• Standard – 50 pages – $199 / year – 250 participants – Upgrade
• Large – 250 pages – $950 / year – 500 participants – Upgrade

We use PayPal to securely proces your payments and we don’t use automatic recurring payments, you simply renew your plan after a year if you want to continue to use our service. Please contact us for more information about upgrading your account or our custom plans.

Create a test in 4 minutes

Take a look at our new screencast to learn more about creating and analyzing a test. In just 4 minutes we’ll explain how to create an Usabilla test and analyze your results. Sit back, relax, and watch the movie:

Usabilla – Hassle free usability testing from Paul Veugen on Vimeo.

Questions or feedback?

Please let us know if you got any questions about our service. Send us a mail (support@usabilla.com) or contact us on Gtalk (support@usabilla.com) for help or if you want to discuss a test.

Press?

Read our press release

Tomorrow morning at around 9:00 (GMT+1) we’re going to upgrade our servers. Unfortunately this will cause a few minutes downtime for all our customers. We’re launching a new Usabilla version, implement our paid plans and will add an extra server. If everything works out as planned we will only be down for a very short time span and our new release will be up and running at 9:00 AM (GMT+1). We will send out a newsletter to our customers after our release tomorrow, with more details on the update and paid plans.

You can now easily export all your test results as PDF. Select a page and your tasks, customize your reports and save them as PDF. You can also export your visualizations as PNG to save them locally, include your charts in your own reports, or publish them online. Take look at a sample report.

Analyze your tests and create custom PDF reports

Export your visualizations easily as PNG

We released an update of the analysis page today. This release contains some minor changes and makes it easier to analyze large numbers of notes. We’ve added a list of all your active notes at the bottom of the page and you can easily turn notes on and off. The icons for notes are now smaller and you can select the color of the icon (the same color as points).

We’ve also updated the export options. Our XML exports now contain all your data, including time per task (per participant) and average time per task. You can find the export options at the bottom of the test details.

A few moments ago we released a major update of Usabilla. We know for sure this new release will make usability testing with Usabilla even more easier for both you and your participants. We’ve improved the usability of our test interface and added some interesting new features to extend your testing possibilities.

A short overview of the most important new features in this release:

• Easier feedback with an improved test interface
• Customize your introduction and thank-you page
• Help participants with an introduction per task
• Combine one-click-tasks and standard tasks in one test
• Improved results and task timers

Easier feedback with an improved test interface

We’ve simplified the test interface for your participants. We’re sure the new interface makes it even easier to participate in a test and share feedback. We removed unnecessary clutter from the toolbar and combined points and notes. Users can simply add a point to answer your questions and attach a note to this point if they want to share some additional comments. Usabilla tests currently got an average conversion rate of more than 30 percent. With these new improvements we hope to improve the conversion of your tests even more.

Help participants by providing additional context per task

You can now add a short introduction for each task. This short intro can be used to provide some additional context for your participants.

Some examples:

• You want to book a trip to Amsterdam in October. You’re searching for a hotel in the price range of 80 to 100 dollar. Where would you click to search a hotel?
• We would love to know what you think of our new homepage. Please let us know what your think of this page. Click on the screen to add a note.

Customize your introduction and thank-you page

Your tests need a clear introduction. You can now improve a test by customizing the introduction. You can use basic HTML for markup and some simple tags to automatically include page thumbnails, the number of tasks, etc. The Thank-You page can also be customized. This page is shown after a participant finished a test. You can use the page to thank your participants for their input or to point them to pages or forms.

Combine one-click-tasks and standard tasks in one test

A few weeks ago we launched ‘One-Click-Tests’. A one click tests is very simple test, where users can only use one point to answer a question. You can use this method for example to test first impressions or to measure the time it takes to accomplish a certain task. You can now combine one-click-tasks and standard tasks in one test. You can define for each task if it’s a standard or a one-click-task.

Improved results and task timers

We gave the results page a small facelift. The layout of the page changed a bit and we added some new features to analyze your test results. You can use our selector to select a specific area of your page and check the stats for that area (how many users clicked in a specific area?). We now also track time per task. This helps you to compare different tasks and pages.

Upgrade your plan

We’re going to launch paid plans in the near future. We’ll offer different plans, varying in price between $49 and $950 per year.

You can continue to use Usabilla for free, but your reports will be limited to 25 participants per test.

Share interesting cases

Please let us know if you need any help with a test case or want to share your findings. We would love to learn from your questions and usability challenges.

Contact us by mail (info@usabilla.com), via Twitter (@usabilla) or leave message at our customer support page at GetSatisfaction (http://getsatisfaction.com/usabilla).

In about 2 weeks we’ll introduce a new update of our test interface, which will make it even easier for participants to rate a web page or concept. Currently we have an average conversion rate of about 30% on all our tests, we hope to improve this with the new interface. The new release will make it easier to add notes and will offer options for additional instructions to help your participants with some extra instructions or context.

We’re also going to introduce a mobile version for Android and iPhone about two weeks later. In about 4 weeks you’ll be able to test your mobile apps and websites on the iPhone and Android phones. Users can use the same simple test interface we offer for standard tests in their mobile browser to answer questions and annotate your mobile interfaces.

Sign up for our free beta and you’ll be the first to try our mobile version.

We’ve pushed out just a major update of our online testsuite. Check your account to test our new interface and features. A short overview of the most important new features in our current release:

• Test in your own language
• One-Click-Tests
• Generate screenshots on-the-fly
• Nifty new visualizations
• Major improvements in the interface and flow
• Export your data as plain text, CSV, and XML

Test in your own language

We now support Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, Estonian, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish tests. We’ve translated our test interface in multiple languages. You can add questions or tasks in your own language.

Do you want to use our frontend in your own language? Help us to translate about 130 words and receive a free full account. Contact us for more details.

One-Click-Tests

Do you make a great first impression? With a One-Click-Test you can ask your users anything you like, but give them only one click to answer. For example: “Where would you search for information about our plans?”. A users’ first click is saved instantly after clicking anywhere on the screen.

One-Click-Tests for first impressions

Generate screenshots on-the-fly

You no longer need to manually create a screenshot of your webpage to create a test. When you add a new page to your test you can now specify the URL of the page and we’ll generate a screenshot on-the-fly. This makes creating a test even more easier. Our screenshot generator unfortunately does not support Flash and could sometimes choke on a webpage, but should work fine to generate fullpage screenshots in a blink in all other cases.

Upload an image or let us generate a screenshot

Nifty new visualizations

We’ve updated the visualizations of your test results. The new visualizations should help you to process your feedback more easily. You can now plot the results of multiple tasks on one page and change the colors of your charts.

Plot multiple questions in one chart

Create your own heatmaps

Export your data as plain text, CSV, and XML

Save your data as plain text, CSV or XML and import it in Excel, Numbers, SPSS, or any other software you like. Feel free to send us a request for other filetypes / formats.

Are you interested in connecting your webapp to Usabilla? Contact us for more information about the API we’re currently developing.

No account yet?

Sign up for a free account at http://usabilla.com/register

We have been working on some usability improvements in our frontend. These changes have been released last week and should enhance the user experience for your participants. Users get a clear introduction before they start the test. The toolbar has been simplified, the dimming on the mockups has been removed and users no longer need to register before they can rate a page. These improvements should push up the conversion rates for your tests.

When everything works out as planned we will move to an awesome office in Amsterdam in the first week of July. We will share a great office in the city center of Amsterdam with Eduhub (Dutch marketplace for education), Nieuwslijst (Dutch news aggregator) and some other cool startups. At Singel 146 we got plenty of space to grow our companies big. There’s still some space left. Interested? Contact us.
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