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Screen shot 2012-06-27 at 3.55.52 PM Theory

How User Scenarios Help To Improve Your UX

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Why would I take the effort to write a user scenario? I know my target group—is that not enough to design for them? Knowing your target group is important and working with personas definitely helps to ‘get to know’ your users. What personas do not tell you is why users come to your site, what exactly they are looking for and how they go about it. A good user scenario helps you grasp your users goals and design your product to perfectly match them. Get to know your users, understand their motivation for visiting your site and then start designing. Let’s have a look at how working with user scenarios can help us to achieve a high user experience.

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Design for Conversion report – persuasion on the web in Cologne Theory

Design for Conversion report – persuasion on the web in Cologne

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We had a long and very exciting day yesterday in Cologne. The 6th Design for Conversion was very well put together. The interesting and broad talks on the how and the why of persuasive design on the web gave enough ammunition to get our hands dirty in the real life case.

We met some nice people that we will definitely see again.

For now, we will leave you with some pictures below. Thanks all!

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How to overcome resistance to the implementation of User-Centered Design Announcements

How to overcome resistance to the implementation of User-Centered Design

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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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5 Effective Ways for Usability Testing to Play Nice with Agile Design

5 Effective Ways for Usability Testing to Play Nice with Agile

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Usability testing has been a fundamental tool in the UX arsenal for decades now. The value of actually meeting your customers and letting them experience your product makes a significant impact to the shape of that product. In it’s most formal version, testing can be a multi-day, multi-thousand $/€ process that delivers final analysis days if not weeks later. With many organizations moving to an Agile philosophy and methodology, UX practitioners are finding it difficult to integrate formal usability testing into this faster-paced, iterative approach to software development.

See? Lions and zebras can get along. So, too, can Agile and Usability Testing.

See? Lions and zebras can get along. So, too, can Agile and Usability Testing.

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The Vampire Effect: Sucking attention away from content Demo UX Cases

The Vampire Effect: Sucking attention away from content

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Senior drama critic at The New Yorker John Lahr once exclaimed:

“Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising”

Does this craziness translate into sales? Can sexual stimuli interfere with the effectiveness of an ad? After all, most of us like to look at sexy models in sexy lingerie, don’t we? Let me show you how a remote test can shed light on these questions.

Lavazza's titillating ad

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2013_02_featured_smurfs Theory

These Smurfalicious personas will engage your users

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Have you ever wondered what it would be like if you had to do business with the Smurfs? There are more than one hundred Smurfs, each one with its own idiosyncrasy, traits and quirks that demand special attention and care. How would you communicate to each Smurf? How would you engage each Smurf to listen to you, and eventually buy what you’re selling? Quite a smurfy-question don’t you think?

Well, here at Usabilla we always spend our time constructively thinking of major issues like this. So we smurfed our research and we present it to you.

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Use Gestalt Laws to improve your UX (Part 1) Design

Use Gestalt Laws to improve your UX (Part 1)

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An overall good user experience is an essential aspect for creating a successful website. The term user experience seems to be a popular trend lately, but how can we describe user experience and how can we make sure to offer enough of it on our websites?

To keep it simple, user experience describes how users perceive a website, what kind of emotions they have when visiting a website, and whether or not they are motivated to return. This subjective experience is in a large part based on the visual appearance of a website.

Of course web design is its own field of expertise and one could claim that only experienced designers are capable of designing a good website and therefore provide the basis for high user experiences. There are some basic principles, though, that help not just professionals to design an appealing website – the so called ‘Gestalt Laws’.

Figure 1 - Law of Similarity (http://sensingarchitecture.com/tag/gestalt-principles/)

Figure 1 - Law of Similarity (http://sensingarchitecture.com/tag/gestalt-principles/)

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