Usabilla has been selected as a finalist for the Bully Awards, an award honoring the leading European technology, media, and telecommunications companies. We’ve been selected as finalist in the category of ‘White Bulls’ and are thrilled to get the opportunity to present Usabilla at the White Bull Summit event in Barcelona.

A total of sixty European companies were named as finalists for the 2010 Bully Award. The deserving finalists were selected from a pool of entries that included hundreds of nominated European TMT companies. The finalists fall into three categories:

• Yearlings: firms that seek or have received angel/seed rounds or equivalent
• Young Bulls: firms that seek or have received Series A financing
• Longhorns: post Series A firms

“The Bully Award finalists were selected first and foremost for values of excellence and innovation in the TMT sector,” stated Farley Duvall, Founder and Chairman of White Bull Summits. “Each firm has been recognized as a leader in its field, with a bright business proposition and meaningful market strategies, driven by a rich understanding of customer needs and technological solutions.”

Thirty winners (ten winners per category) will be announced live at the inaugural, invitation-only White Bull Summit 2010, Pathways to Exit event in Barcelona, September 20 – 22.

If you look at the test detail view (http://usabilla.com/tests/view/name+of+your+test) and scroll all the way down, you will notice the export options have changed. We basically used two approaches in this update. The first approach is to offer a simple straight forward export that is usable in every experience level. The second approach is to give more experienced user full access to their data in a very flexible way.

Simple exports with CSV (Comma-Seperated Values)

CSV is a simple text format for database table data and is readable by most common spreadsheet applications like Microsoft Excel, Open Office Calc and Google Docs. Simply click on the data you want to get out of Usabilla and a spreadsheet with the data is generated.

All the CSV export options follow the same format and settings. They all start with the fields “page”, “task”, “participant”, followed by the requested data. We use a unicode (UTF-8) character set, fields are separated by a comma (,) and strings are enclosed in double quotation marks (“…”).

Advanced exports with structured XML

The XML export includes all the data of a test in a structured format. We have two options, one for the content and one for the results. By combining these two exports your are able to generate any report you want.

All data is contained in a root element called usabilla. To make debugging a bit easier, we included a version attribute (current version) and a success attribute to tell you if the request was successfully executed.

Content export

The first child element indicates the type of response, in this case content and then shows you the unique id of the test you requested the content for and the language of the content. Here is an example of what it looks like: <content for="7719893004c6e" language="en">. The data follows the structure of a test, so a test has pages, and page has tasks. Here is a simplified example response:

Exporting results

In this case the first child element looks something like this <results for="7719893004c6e" language="en"> to indicate you are receiving the results of a test. The results a split up in to two sections average, which includes task completion times (calculated with geometric mean), followed by a section participants with the data per participant. Here is a simplified example of what a response might look like:

Accessing your data from other applications

Getting your data in other applications, like Google Docs for example is made pretty easy. Go to your account page and click on “Generate a new token”, you can now use any of the addresses below to get your data:

• XML content:
  http://usabilla.com/tests/export/UNIQUE_ID/content/xml/?token=API_TOKEN
• XML results:
  http://usabilla.com/tests/export/UNIQUE_ID/results/xml/?token=API_TOKEN
• CSV results points:
  http://usabilla.com/tests/export/UNIQUE_ID/results/csv/points/?token=API_TOKEN
• CSV results notes:
  http://usabilla.com/tests/export/UNIQUE_ID/results/csv/notes/?token=API_TOKEN
• CSV results context:
  http://usabilla.com/tests/export/UNIQUE_ID/results/csv/context/?token=API_TOKEN

The easiest way to find out the UNIQUE_ID of a test, is to click on “Invite participants” on the test detail page. It is the last past of the address shown under “Your test is available at the following URL:”, and looks like: http://usabilla.com/rate/UNIQUE_ID

To disable API access to your data, just click “Clear API token” on account page and access is revoked.

Enjoy!

Hope you enjoy these new featured and find them useful in your projects. As always we appreciate any and all feedback so feel free to leave comment below or tweet us any suggestion or questions at @usabilla.

One of our most important focus points is the usability of our own test interface. Participating in a Usabilla test must be simple, fun, and way more exciting than a standard survey. In the past year we’ve released about 15 iterations on our test interface. Each iteration was based on feedback from participants, users, and experts using Usabilla. We’ve just released a small update and we think this update solves the most important usability issues of our test interface.

Problem: Participants don’t have a clue that they can add notes.

Usabilla is primary a quantitative tool. Notes add a qualitative aspect to the tests and are of in many cases of great help to interpret test results.  If you run a test case with for example 250 participants and all those 250 participants add 20 points with notes, your ‘lean & mean’ test is probably no longer ‘lean & mean’. This is the reason why we focus on points as primary response and notes as secondary. Unfortunately in our previous releases we didn’t manage to find a good balance between these two interactions.

The icons below were used in our previous release. Users can click anywhere on the screen to add a point. The ‘plus’ icon could be used to attach a note. Once a user added a comment, the plus changed to a note. Usabilla is currently available in 20 different languages. Maintaining these translations in a fast developing startup is not quite easy. That was one of the reasons why we focused on using icons instead of text in the first place. Unfortunately these icons were not as self explaining as we naïvely assumed (indeed, we should have tested this). And even the introduction movie we added didn’t really help (who watches these movies? ).

Solution: Improved icons and a new introduction movie

Back to the drawing board. We redesigned the icons for points and got rid of Mickey Mouse. Instead of the mysterious ‘+’ (‘plus what?’) and his little more obvious counterpart ‘x’ (’closing a note‘) we used a little bit more obvious analogies. A trashcan and a post-it. Was it really that hard? .

And, as a bonus: our test interface now really works flawlessly on the iPad. The delete and note icons were too small too use with a thick index finger and should be clickable now.

The introduction movie for a test showed the previous icons. We made a new movie, unfortunately only available in English, showing a sample task and the basic interactions. The movie automatically starts after the introduction has been loaded (no sound, so we think in this case that’s ok).

Testdrive

Try it yourself in this demo case.

What do you think?

We think we made a big step forward in usability with this tiny redesign. Our first own tests were promising. But we’re not done yet. We would love to hear your opinion about these changes. Feel free to share your findings and suggestions for improvement. We’re just getting started.

It has been a while since we sent out an update about Usabilla. In the past months 4500 users ran hundreds of interesting tests with an incredible number of participants, we fixed many small bugs and tweaks, released new features, made big steps in scalability, and expanded our team with a very skilled developer (Say hi to Sido). In this update we want to share some interesting updates

Store additional participant data

Usabilla is often used in combination with surveys to collect additional feedback or data from participants. You could already add a survey to your test by using the ‘redirect url’ to point users to a survey. We now also store all the variables you add to the URL of your Usabilla test (eg. /rate/329391911?name=Paul&age=25) and pass them through at the end of your test. This means that you can store additional information for each participant and we add these variables to the redirect URL at the end of your test. You can use this feature for example to identify your participants, to combine survey data with Usabilla results, and in the near future to create segments.

Post the id of participants to external surveys

Some survey tools (like PollDaddy) retreive the variables you attach to the URL and store them together with the survey data. We now add the id of your participant to the redirect URL. So if you redirect users to a PollDaddy survey, you can also find the id of your participant (pid) in the PollDaddy reports. In Usabilla you can find individual results of participants in the XML, TXT, and CSV exports (’subjectid’).

We’re hiring

We’re looking for a skilled PHP developer to join our team. Are you / do you know an experienced and versatile developer with a soft spot for user experience? Do you dream about MVC, PHP, HTML(5), scalability, user experience, and great web apps? Contact us.

Want to share a case?

Do have an interesting case you want to share with the usability / user experience community? We’re looking for interesting cases to publish on our blog and other community blogs. Please let us know if you got an interesting case you want to share.

Questions? Need help? Feedback?

Please let us know if you got any questions or need help to set up a test. We’re looking forward to help you to set up your tests.

Usabilla has been nominated for the Dutch Startup Awards in the category ‘Best Web App’. The Dutch Startup Awards are organized by The Next Web and the Dutch magazine Emerce. We’re very proud to be on the shortlist for the finale. We hope to deserve this award because we kickstarted our company in the past year. In less than a year we launched an easy-to-use usability app which provides value for more than 4000 users from all over the world and are eager to continue our growth in the next years.

Update: We won the Dutch Startup Award for Best Web Application! Thanks a million for your votes.

Vote for us

We need your help to win the Dutch Startup Award for ‘Best Web App’. You can vote for Usabilla at the website of the Dutch Startup Awards. Votes are registered with a Facebook, Twitter, or Hyves account. Would you like to help us? Please vote for Usabilla at http://dsa.thenextweb.com (Category ‘Beste Web App’) with your Facebook, Twitter, or Hyves account (or all three of them ).

Update: You can no longer vote for the Dutch Startup Awards. Thanks a lot for your help!

We’ve just upgraded our servers and we released some interesting improvements. We’ve made some changes under the hood, enhanced the user experience of the test interface and implemented some handy features in the analysis. We will outline the most important changes in this post.

Improved points

UX improvements for participants

Based on the feedback of our users in the past months (thanks a million!) we’ve made quite some changes the test interface to improve the user experience. Participants can delete a point and attach a note with small buttons attached to each datapoint. The feedback process has been smoothen with new loading screens before and after tasks and some changes in the way tasks are being loaded and saved. You can now use longer tasks and we’ve switched the order of the task & task introduction in the introduction screens for each task.

New points

Task introduction

Loaders between tasks

Small ux enhancements in analysis

We’re working on some exciting and big changes to the analysis section, but we’ve added some quick fixes to make it easier to analyze your tests. You can toggle the task panel and zoom options, to focus on the visuals. Especially on smaller screens this should make it easier to view your results and export them as PNG files. You can browse multiple pages in your test with the new ‘Next’ and ‘Previous’ buttons. Expect some exciting changes in the way we report your results in a few months.

Dock your tasks to focus on the visuals

Previous and Next buttons to browse a test

Auto-scaling our servers

The past weeks we’ve been working on some important technical changes in our system, which enable us to scale our system automatically using Amazon EC2. We’ve sometimes had some difficulties to process large peaks in visitors lately and together with our hosting partner Virtual Concepts we’ve built a solution which will automatically scale our system based on server load. Today’s release includes some changes in the way we handle sessions and we’re going to enable the load balancer later this week.

Thanks for your feedback!

Most of these changes are based on the great feedback we’ve received from our customers. A special thanks to Nick Finck,  Scott Klein, Guillermo Ermel, Lucas Barrientos, and Eduardo Mercovich for their valuable input to improve Usabilla. Feel free to let us know what you think of this release and please keep sharing your ideas.

Log in to your account to take a look at all the changes.

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