Design
Trust and confidence are important factors that users will take into account when considering your product or service. A high level of trust is of particular importance if your site includes any commercial elements. Research has shown that distrust of the Internet undermines e-commerce (pdf). The study shows that over 50% of users believe that “going online puts privacy at risk”.
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Links
As community manager and writer at Usabilla, I stumble over quite a number of interesting articles every day. Whenever I read something interesting, I tweet or retweet it in the hope that more people will see and enjoy it. Now, twitter can be a tricky thing. People easily miss your stuff, especially if you are not persistent enough to tweet the same link over and over.
Today it’s the last day of the month and we would like to share with you our favorite articles from this month. Let me give you just a brief summary on each of them and then let you decide for yourself if they are worth your time. I bet they are, though.
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Discoveries
The customer is king. And we want the king to feel comfortable, right? Especially on the Web, where people can leave our site with only a mouse click, it is essential to keep them happy. Happy customers will stay to find the information they came for, they are more willing to trust us, and they will be more likely to spend their money with us. There are many different things you can do to make your customers comfortable, one of them is by making them feeling safe.
Here are some tricks that I discovered to help you make your users feel safe and as a consequence comfortable enough to spend their money on your site.
Design
Personality is one of the major factors to influence web credibility. We love the feeling to actually interact with a real person, rather than a machine. The design of a website and the personality that comes with it can trick us into this idea, even if we are very well aware that all we see is basically some code sent to us by a faraway server, interpreted by our web browser.
- If you have any feature requests, you have an amazing idea [...], you need support, or just want to say “Hi”, please contact us.
Quotes like the one above can make a big difference when it comes to how trustworthy users perceive your website. The text shows that the people behind pulpfingers.com are not only truly interested in what their users have to say, also their tone of voice is very human and authentic.
Discoveries
Not very long ago, when looking for information, we turned to sources like books or maybe our parents and grandparents. These are sources that we knew were reliable from experience or simply by sensing the superior aura of a library. The way something or someone makes us feel strongly influences our perceived level of trust. Therefore we can easily judge offline sources by our relationship with them, their external features and previous experiences.
Those who can design for credibility gain a strategic advantage. — BJ Fogg
On the web, it all becomes a little more difficult. Most of the times we use diverse search engines to find information, which ultimately leads us to numerous websites that all seem to know something about the one thing we are looking for. How do we know whom to trust?
Demo UX Cases
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:
Design
Many sites are designed to convert visitors into users by getting them to create an account. The sign-up form is the last hurdle a soon-to-be user needs to jump over, and it’s crucial that you make that hurdle as low and non-threatening as possible. In this post I will provide design suggestions for solid sign-up forms for web services and applications. Many forms can be improved by making them more targeted, more persuasive, or by keeping them as brief as possible. I will use examples from my list of sign-up forms on Usabilla Discover that shine in these areas.
Theory
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
Design
Do you believe to be an empowered Internet user? You use the Internet as a source for information and your decisions are solely based on this information and your own conviction? If you answer this question with “yes, absolutely”, I’m sorry to have to tell you, that you might not be quite as empowered as you think. No one is.
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Demo UX Cases
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