User Experience - The Usabilla Blog

Useful, Saleable, Buildable: The Role Of UX In Defining Requirements

on May 8, 2012 / by Mike Hughes / 2 Comments

This is a guest post by our friend Mike Hughes.

A mentor of mine is fond of giving the advice “Do what you love to do in the service of those who love what you do.” Whenever I hear UX professionals complain that they are continually having to promote the value of what they do, I wonder if they are serving the right people. If people in your organization are not seeing the value you add, maybe you haven’t positioned yourself where you can add the most value.

In this article I’ll explain how my role has evolved from that of a usability expert to that of a user experience (UX) architect. In making that transition, I have increased my impact on product strategy and I have established a higher perceived value in the organizations I work for. Essentially, I will discuss how my emphasis and contribution has shifted from just making the product usable, to defining a product that is useful, saleable, and buildable.

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Discoveries

How The Look & Feel Of Your Website Affects Your Users

on May 3, 2012 / by Sabina Idler / No Comments

Good design has to live up to many expectations. Design translates features into a visual interface, and ideally it manages to do so in a logical and usable way. As if that’s not enough, design also needs to be appealing. Good design is therefore useful and usable, and at the same time it’s aesthetic, draws attention, and it fits into a given context. I believe all of these aspects have been covered a lot lately, except for the look & feel that comes with the context of a website.

In the following, I’m going to discuss how the look & feel of a website affects the way we perceive it and what we feel just by looking at it. Visual aspects like layout, typography, images, or colors can make your website appealing, authentic, credible, entertaining, and much more.

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Theory

Guaranteed Success With Emotional Marketing In Only 5 Steps

on May 1, 2012 / by Sabina Idler / 2 Comments

Any good marketing strategy is built on emotions. This is not a secret. What seems to be a secret at times is how we know which emotions to work with. It can be quite tricky to appeal to a target group and to actually reach the right people with a marketing campaign. Here are the good news: It doesn’t have to be that tricky. Most of you might not know about it, but there is a great way to turn your target group into real and tangible people to help you better understand what makes your customers tick: The so called Sinus Milieus.

In this article, I will briefly introduce the concept behind Sinus Milieus and then guide you through 5 steps towards effective emotional marketing. If you are in a position where you need to reach people, I really recommend you to read on.

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Design

Personalize Your Website And Gain Credibility

on April 26, 2012 / by Sabina Idler / 2 Comments

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.

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Theory

A Cry For Looking To Other Methods For User Centered Design

on April 24, 2012 / by Tristan Weevers / 1 Comment

This guest post is written by our friend Tristan Weevers.

In 2004 and in 2005, Neville Stanton wrote two books with 200 methods and tools for Human Factors. In 2010, Chauncey Wilson added another 100 specific for user-centred design (UCD). In addition to books like these, people started to collect methods online. I found a lot of them, some better than others. However, it seems that no one really uses these collections, or even knows about them.

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Discoveries

3 Ways to Increase Web Credibility Through Content Presentation

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

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?

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Design

How To Design Effective Navigation Menus

on March 29, 2012 / by Sabina Idler / 2 Comments

Navigation menus are the key to finding what we are looking for on a website. Without a navigation menu that meets our expectations, a website will most likely not be effective. A website that is not effective will most likely not be successful. There are many different kind of websites that range from simple to extremely complex. In any case, a good design should focus on the users and their goals: Finding certain information as quickly as possible.

By glossing over a few examples I discovered, I will go over best practices that help you nail your navigation menu.

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Design

Form And Function Go Hand-In-Hand

on March 20, 2012 / by Sabina Idler / No Comments

There have been plenty of discussions lately about usability. Still I notice that people get the usability confused with the actual look and feel of a website. A good website requires a lot from us as designers: Clean coding to make sure everything works and everything works fast; great usability to meet all expectations people have when visiting our site; and at the same time an exceptional user experience to differentiate us from competitors and to help us build a relationship with our users. Where do we start to design a website that meets all these requirements?

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How-tos

How to Set Up A Usabilla Survey

on February 29, 2012 / by Sabina Idler / No Comments

With Usabilla you can collect feedback on any digital interface, be it the scan of a sketch, a wireframe, mockup, or webpage. Just set up a test, invite participants, and analyze your results. Check out the video below to see how you can create a test in no time, or read on and we will guide you through setting up a test with Usabilla step-by-step.

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Design

7 Content Foundations For Web Designers

on February 28, 2012 / by Sabina Idler / 1 Comment

Web design is much more than just the appearance of a website. It also includes other aspects, such as the choice of content, your tone of voice, or how much fun users have on your site. In other words, the content of a website influences how we perceive the design. That’s why I consider these rather practical aspects content premises in web design. If you can’t convince people with your content, you will have a hard time to do so with your design. I put together a selection of seven tips that will help you build a solid foundation for your design.

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