UX Cases - The Usabilla Blog

User Experience Report: The 2012 Republican Party Candidates’ Home Pages

on April 16, 2012 / by Jurian Baas / No Comments

With the Republican Party presidential primaries of 2012 fully underway, we decided to test the home pages of the Republican Party candidates: Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich. We focussed on the travel sector, banks and online retailers in previous cases, and we were excited to look into politics. The pages need to have a different appeal, which leads to different design decisions. Most of the time, it needs to communicate a sense of urgency and action to get more people to help with the campaign. We believe the feedback of our users led to interesting findings and helped us understand how the home pages of politicians differ from other websites. Download the full report on the UX of Republican Party candidates’ home pages Read the rest of this entry »

UX Cases

Case Study: The Emotional Pull of Beauty Brands

on March 8, 2012 / by Sabina Idler / No Comments

We recently wrote about how beauty brands seduce you with emotional design. It was great fun to look at different beauty brands, identify emotional concepts on their websites and make assumptions on how they draw us in. To back up our findings, we invited people to participate in a test case. Now the results are in and it’s even more fun to see how they underpin our hypothesis. Feedback from about 100 participants shows that beauty brands really do appeal to our emotions – but not only to seduce us, also to build their brand and make us trust them.

For clarity, let’s quickly recall the brands that were included in the test: Nivea, Olay, Dove, L’Oréal Paris, Clinique, Garnier and Axe. We gave people the following three tasks for each website:

“Click on the elements that you think ‘build’ the brand.”;
“Click on the elements that make you trust this brand.” and
“Mark the elements that appeal to you and let us know how you feel about them.”

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Theory

A Smashing Redesign

on January 24, 2012 / by Jurian Baas / 7 Comments

Given that we love everything UX and design related, it must come as no surprise we are big fan of Smashing Magazine. Their choice of subjects is always spot on, and their articles show an impressive amount of attention to detail. They recently had their site redesigned, and the result is a beautiful, spacious site, designed from the typography out.

I took a closer look at the new design and I’d like to discuss some of the findings with you. I will not speak only based on my own observations however: I set up a Usabilla design feedback test among 30-some of our loyal followers.¹ They pointed out which elements they like on the homepage and which they would like to improve, and elaborated on both tasks by leaving notes. In total, I got 220 notes placed on an image of the new Smashing Magazine homepage.

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Design

How Beauty Brands Seduce You With Emotional Design

on January 19, 2012 / by Sabina Idler / 2 Comments

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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UX Cases

How Good Is the UX of Mobile Newspaper Pages?

on December 20, 2011 / by Jurian Baas / 2 Comments

I believe that the user experience of mobile newspaper websites can be greatly improved. Armed with feedback from a small remote user test of the mobile pages of two big newspapers, I want to explain why I think these sites fail in some key area’s, and make some suggestions for improvement.

The USA Today and the Washington Post are both among the biggest newspapers in the United States. They differ in their tone of voice, but together they form a very rough average of the mobile newspaper sites available.

I’ll look at the user experience of these sites by discussing two use case scenario’s, and afterwards explain how these sites can be improved by less clutter, better typography, and a stronger visual hierarchy.

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UX Cases

The UX of 8 Leading Retail Sites

on December 8, 2011 / by Jurian Baas / 5 Comments

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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How-tos

Enrich your Usabilla feedback with Wufoo surveys

on November 22, 2011 / by Sabina Idler / 1 Comment

Do you want to power-up your Usabilla test results? You can easily do so by hooking up a Wufoo survey to your test. Set up a form in Wufoo and redirect users to the URL of your test. You can include their answers in the URL and store these with your Usabilla test results.

Let’s have a look at a brief example case to see how simple it is to exchange data between Wufoo and Usabilla.

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Design

How the leading Dutch news network was improved with user feedback

on November 15, 2011 / by Jurian Baas / No Comments

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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Design

User Feedback on Facebook pages: 8 ways to optimize

on November 8, 2011 / by Jurian Baas / 1 Comment

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 Cases

The UX of 8 leading banking websites

on September 28, 2011 / by Jurian Baas / 2 Comments

Every day millions of people deal with their personal finances on the Internet. Banks have to tie a lot of systems together to make this possible, and simultaneously ensure that other information is easily accessible. There are a lot of details for banks to cover on a website: information about mortgages, credit cards, locations, insurances, loans, and much more.

Results for one of the tasks in our report

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