The Usabilla Blog

This week, we were pleasantly surprised by a slidedeck called Design for developers. It has some solid and no frills advice on interface design.

Don’t know what to ask for the holidays, or want to know what to give a UX geek friend? Check out the extensive Gifts for User Experience Geeks 2011. It’s really good.

Also, check out Easier Is Better Than Better on the paradox of choice, read the article The UX of Learning on A List Apart, and see if you agree with Francisco Inchauste’s statement that UX is 90% Desirability.

We’re an Amsterdam based international web startup and are looking for eager and ambitious web developers. We offer a fast and simple online platform for usability testing. Our users include 12,000 usability experts, designers, web analysts, and marketeers from all over the world. Companies like Disney, Electronic Arts, Booking.com, Sony, and even Barack Obama use our product to collect valuable feedback from their users.

Are you up for the challenge to work with a company that breathes user experience and usability and works with the worlds’ leading UX professionals and marketeers? Do you want to learn from the development challenges that come with a fast growing web startup? Do you like to work in the absolute center of Amsterdam in a great office in an inspiring building with other startups and creatives? Join our team!

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A selection of the articles we tweeted about this week:

In the UX Booth article Quantifiable Design: How to Remove Subjectivity from the Process, Stuart Silverstein makes a case for seeing design as “making accurate decisions based on experience and understanding of human beings to help them accomplish a task”. He argues that design discussions shoud be steered from “I don’t like it” to “Does this match our goal”.

Penny Hagen and Natalie Rowland write about Enabling Codesign on Johnny Holland Magazine. “Participants become partners in the design process.”

Furthermore: A crash course in UX, The road to web app success: prototypes and user tests, and Fluidity Of Content And Design: Learning From Where The Wild Things Are. We hope you enjoy these articles as much as we did!

With Usabilla it is easy to add additional information to your participants by adjusting the URL to your test. Adding this additional information just got a lot more useful, because we added filter options directly in the sidebar when you analyze your test.

Before I show you the filter options, I will quickly recap how you can alter URLs.

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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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Justin (of the great Usablity Geek) wrote up an extensive guide to web form usability, which can be of great help for your forms.

The article was also published on Smashing UX Design, where it was aptly followed up by an article from the Baymard Institute which sheds light on an elegant way to redesign the country selector.

Further we tweeted links to an excellent story about what designers can learn from the sciences of human understanding, why Angry Birds is so successful and popular, and a piece on Designing Apps for Kids. All good stuff, we hope you enjoy them as much as we did.

We made it easier to make your test go viral. From now on, tests created with a paid plan have an ‘Enable Sharing’ checkmark in the test details:

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“The way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.”

In their frequently cited book Metaphors we live by, Lakoff and Johnson demonstrate the important role of metaphors in our language, and also in our every day life. They claim that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, which means that we use metaphors to reason and understand the world.

Switch unit of a John Deer tractor

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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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Bret Victor is someone who intends to “invent software-based tools that enable people to understand and create in unprecedentedly powerful ways”. We are big fans and think you can learn a lot from him. Have a look at these two articles we tweeted out this week:

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