The Usabilla Blog

In order for you brand or product to be successful, you need to appeal to your target group. There are countless appeals you can use: fun, friendship, relaxation, luxury, beauty, or sex, to name only a few. As long as it’s reasonably linked to your brand, anything can be used to draw attention to your website. With clever use of appeals, you can draw your customers in and take charge of their will. I admit this sounds a little scary, but really it is rather helpful for everyone designing for the Web.

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In web design, getting the usability right used to be major goal. Now that most designers seem to master this goal, usability has become like a commodity: As basic requirement for a functional website, we find its presence throughout the Web. This shift of attention has created space in the field of web design and visual design has regained its central position. However, visual design in its new definition embraces more than just looking pretty. Don Norman split it into three levels; visceral design, behavioral design, and reflective design. Together the three can reveal the full power of visual design and guide you to a successful website.

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Does our life become easier with every new invention on the market? I don’t think so. New technology presents us with great possibilities and limitations at the same time. Let’s have a look at this quote:

• The same technology that simplifies life by providing more functions in each device also complicates life by making the device harder to learn, harder to use. This is the paradox of technology.

— Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (1988)

What Norman said about technology in 1988 is still valid today. Our economy, educational system and our social interactions have changed dramatically with available technologies. In order to stay competitive, products become more and more ingenious, their features adding up. The idea is to make our lives easier. But does it work?

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Cultural characteristics, such as norms or values, influence product design. Most people can give an example of cultural influences when it comes to tangible products. For instance, toilet seats are designed differently in the US and Thailand. Online, these cultural differences might be less explicit, but this does not mean they don’t exist. Just as with other products, the way we interact with a website is in large part defined through our culture.

In order to ensure that web sites are globally accessible and equally appealing to different cultures around the world, user experience designers need to be aware of how culture affects the way we think, communicate, and consume information. I’ll explain how culture affects us in terms of visual design, navigation design, and information design.

Cultural UX differences - Worldwide Internet Usage

If you like to read about UX, you probably have at least one book that was written or published by Lou Rosenfeld. Aside from being a publisher, Lou is stil going strong as an independent information architecture consultant. We thought it would be interesting to hear his thoughts on the development of UX as a field, and see what he is up to in general.

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It’s time to get some user feedback on these big retail sites we all use during the holiday season. Every year more people buy goods online. More than $18.7 billion has been spent online during November, representing a 15 percent increase over the same period in 2010. With the holiday shopping season upon us, we decided to test eight big online retailers in the lead up to Black Friday. Online retailers need to provide a pleasurable online customer experience by embracing the importance of usability and a good User Experience (UX). This gives us an opportunity to look at the similarities and differences of a large number of retail sites that all offer the same kind of service.

User feedback on the page of Victoria's Secret

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NU.nl, the biggest news network in the Netherlands, redesigned it’s website this year. The main objective of the redesign was to improve the overall user experience and retaining the clear presentation of content, which the website is known for. One specific goal was to direct more visitors from the homepage to the content that the news network offers on different topics. Annemarie Boon, usability specialist at Sanoma Media, used Usabilla in the process to achieve this goal. Thank you Annemarie, for being so kind to share your findings with us.

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Do you want to know how you can improve the UX of your Facebook page? Customizing your Facebook page is a challenge because a big part of the design is already there. The limited insights that Facebook offers into your page statistics provide little evidence on which to base your design decisions. That’s why we conducted a remote usability test of the Facebook pages of eight of the world’s most popular brands. Based on the results, we offer eight tips that can help improve the conversion of your Facebook page and get you more ‘Likes’.

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UX University is a platform that aims to bridge the gap between the academic and the real world. We are proud to be part of this initiative and even more proud that the last edition was in our office in Amsterdam. Our good friend Hidde wrote a blogpost on the UX University website that we kindly republish here.

Maurits at the third UX University event

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It’s Tuesday and I’m back with more definitions for our Usability ABC. This week, I’d like to start with the following terms regarding usability testing: Usability lab, user, task, user case, and think-aloud protocol. As always I appreciate feedback and input to extend our list of usability related terms.

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