The Usabilla Blog

We are happy to announce that we launched a new, highly improved version of both our surveys and the analysis of test results in Usabilla. Most of all, everything is much quicker and responsive. Some of the improvements:

• Our visual surveys are completely rewritten from scratch and much faster as a result. By using leaner code and preloading test content in a clever way, participating is even more pleasant than it was before.

• The analysis also got a complete makeover. We now use the newest web standards and no longer rely on Flash, which makes the interface way more snappy and flexible for future improvements. You can also analyze the results of individual participants, we added filter options for participants and visualize results with click paths.

• The XML of test results contains more data and is structured for integration with other apps and our future API.

We believe this greatly enhances the Usabilla experience for both our users as your users (test participants). If you have any questions, don’t hestitate to contact us.

Summer finally hit Amsterdam. In the vacation high season we decided to devote our very first quarterly user experience report to the travel sector. We lined up a total of 18 travel sites in three different categories (hotels, airlines, and comparison sites) and invited 800 participants to give feedback and perform simple tasks.

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Incorporating usability techniques and processes of User-Centered Design (UCD) in companies that are not used to working with them can become a daunting task. Over and over again we hear arguments that justify the rejection and invalidate the possibility of change, even if this is minimal. This article describes the most common arguments we hear, and proposes concrete actions to refute the negatives.

by Doug Savage (www.savagechickens.com)

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Hi %YOURNAME:%,

In some situations, a test calls for a more personal welcome message than a variation of ‘Dear participant’. I’m glad to announce that as of today, our developers made this possible. We are humans after all, not machines. The sound of our name is the sweetest and most important sound in any language. If you don’t believe Dale Carnegie, believe the research that shows personalization increases response rates.

Personalize your introduction

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Designing your tests just got a bit easier: you can re-arrange pages in the Test detail tab now. Just click the Move up ↑ or Move down ↓ buttons at the top right corner of every page-section of your test. Here, take a look:

Shuffle your testpages around in the test details tab

We hope you enjoy this improvement, and as always we appreciate any and all feedback. Feel free to leave a comment below or tweet us any suggestions or questions at @usabilla.

Last Thursday we were affected by a large scale outage in Amazon’s server center. Since we were hosting most of our servers in one zone of Amazon’s server center, we weren’t really prepared for a system failure like this one. We store our data on Amazon data drives (‘EBS’) and create regular on-site and off-site backups. Unfortunately we weren’t able to access our most recent data (‘EBS’) or any recent backups (‘snapshots’) during the outage. Amazon basically locked down a large number of the EBS drives in the corrupt zone of their datacenter in Virginia. Unfortunately our data was only available in that specific zone at that time.

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Our hosting provider, Amazon Web Services, suffers currently severe technical issues in one of their data centers (see this list of startups with connectivity issues). Due to these issues we’re unfortunately not able to access your most recent test data at the moment. Amazon’s engineers are working hard to solve this problem. In the meanwhile we’re preparing to kickstart our servers again when we regain access to our data again.

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The standard Usabilla widget is a useful tool to invite your visitors to participate in one of your tests. Thanks to the kind tip of one of our users you can now also use a new widget to set up a quick A/B/n test in Usabilla! Use this widget to invite your users to participate in a random test out of two or more of your Usabilla tests. You just specify which tests to use and every time the widget pops up, we randomly select one of these tests. With this simple widget you can set up a A/B/n Usabilla test for any webpage, image, or sketch in just a few minutes.

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Quite a few Usabilla users have asked us in recent weeks, how to select notes in a certain field range within a completed test page. In response we have created a new Google doc spreadsheet template to help facilitate this need, for a more thorough analysis of note comments within a test. Using the XML export option in conjunction with your unique API token, you are able to access the data you have collected with Usabilla in other tools. For more information how to XML export your data, please view our previous blog post on the topic.

Screenshot of the Google doc spreadsheet

We are happy to announce MeasureWorks & Usabilla will be co-hosting the second edition of ‘Startup & Measure’ on March 15th at Usabilla HQ.

Neil Patel, co-founder of Kissmetrics and CrazyEgg, will be our featured guest, and he has prepared a short presentation about measuring and startups. Before and after Neil’s presentation there will be plenty of time to grab a drink and exchange some KPI’s.

Hope you can join us for the festivities.