Web forms are a crucial communication channel between your organization and your audience - so making sure they deliver a first-class User Experience (UX) is imperative.
Turning a one-way flow of information into a two-way dialogue with your users, web forms can play a key role in facilitating the completion of tasks that are more often than not inextricably tied to the success of your organization. This may be an online purchase for those in the e-commerce sector, an application for membership of a particular institution or service, or a request for information for those operating in B2B industries.
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However, audiences today are fickle, and many users will be unlikely to persevere with a form that’s unclear and difficult to use, no matter how much they…
Optimize your customer experience on mobile to avoid being left behind
Not long back, the secret of business success on the Internet seemed to be all about product and service quality. Whereas quality is an enabler of success, it’s not the big secret that makes e-businesses successful. The secret is – customer experience.
Econsultancy conducted a survey for Digital Market Trends, and the results made it obvious that most participating business executives considered customer experience as the most exciting opportunity of 2017.
Customer experience has supplanted content marketing and mobile marketing as the secret of e-business success for entrepreneurs.
User experience is important from an SEO perspective as well – websites where users don’t spend more than 10 seconds, because of messed up user experience designs, fail to sustain their rankings. What’s more, a Walker study predicts that customer experience will be more important than price as well as product by 2020.
The…
Hidden navigation menus, such as hamburger menus negatively affect discoverability, increase task time and perceived difficulty of the tasks.
Quantitative user testing studies aren't as common as qualitative studies in the world of User Experience Research, but this brilliant study by Nielsen Norman Group (NNG) with 179 participants found that hidden menus, such as hamburger menus led to worse discoverability on both desktop and mobile devices.
Methodology
The study by NNG used remote unmoderated testing, which involves users recording their screen and voice at home, whilst working through instructions. Six live websites were tested across desktop and mobile, including three types of navigation:
Hidden navigation: where the main navigation is placed under an icon (e.g. hamburger) and the user is required to click or hover over the icon to display the navigation
Visible navigation: main navigation shown clearly in a navigation bar
Combo navigation: a combination…
When businesses use eye tracking data to help them design their website they could be missing vital information about their web visitors
Eye tracking studies are undoubtedly useful. Let’s get that fact out-of-the-way first. These specialist studies show exactly where people look on web pages and as a result web designers can ensure that specific elements are positioned for maximum visibility. But are these studies as valuable as they might seem? In this article I shall explain why eye tracking studies have limitations which companies should consider when they are building their websites. What you’ll discover in this article is:
How eye tracking works
What eye tracking tells you
What eye tracking does not tell you
The major flaw with eye tracking
Filling in the gaps of eye tracking
The place of eye tracking in marketing
How eye tracking works
Eye tracking can be performed in various ways, but generally small cameras track the movement of the pupils as…
Better usability testing for websites and apps: the top 10 mistakes to avoid
Done well, usability testing enables organisations to validate ideas and designs for websites and applications with real-world users, helping increase engagement, satisfaction and conversions. But executing a successful user testing strategy brings with it numerous challenges and potential hazards. Think about your redesign and conversion optimisation projects. Are you at risk of committing any common testing mistakes?
Introduction to the value of usability testing
Research from the IEEE has found that fixing problems with software once development’s already begun is twice as expensive as resolving them before development commences.
Conducting lab-based usability testing that provides valuable insight into how users perceive and interact with your site or application before your project goes live can, therefore, deliver significant returns; in fact, it’s been found that for every dollar a company invests to increase usability it receives $10-$100 in benefits, and wins customer satisfaction…
New research: The SimpleUsability Online Experience Index for UK Fashion E-commerce sites
This article summarises our review of the clothing retail websites for Marks & Spencer, Hobbs, Karen Millen, French Connection, Boden, Oasis and Fat Face. Reviews were performed in the week of 10 March 2014. The aim is to highlight best practices and areas for improvement that can be applied by retailers. You will see from the Radar charts for the retailers that there are substantial differences in experience of each of the customer journey and overall.
Understanding, measuring and improving the customer experience is a pretty fundamental part of everything we do at SimpleUsability.
Whether we’re working on competitor or comparator testing at the start of a project, multi-platform testing across a number of devices, or an expert review, our research and the resulting recommendations help our clients to improve their customer experience and benefit from the associated commercial gains around…
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January 7, 2013
Answering the right questions on the path to conversion
Whether you're working on increasing conversions for an online enquiry form, quote request form, e-commerce transactions or an online application process, answering more of your visitors questions will help them and your business. It's a fundamental of web marketing.
For more practical examples of testing and optimisation approaches to increase leads and sales, hear Paul Rouke of PRWD speak in a webcast at the free Smart Insights #marketingpriorities2013 Digital Marketing Summit on 11.01.2013. View the full programme of speakers at http://bit.ly/priorities2013.
Of course, what you're asking visitors to complete and what your product/service is will dictate the amount and type of questions that they may have, but by identifying and answering typical questions you are more likely to encourage more visitors to ‘do what you want them to’.
In this post I'll look at:
A case study showing the potential of this approach
Some…
An introduction to the value of investing in User Experience Design
It seems there’s a myth accepted by some in online marketing that UX isn’t needed; simply put, “let’s just make it look good” is the attitude, but I believe this a dangerous stance to take.
To explain why, let’s start by looking at what User Experience Design (UX) is and what it does.
In layman's terms I'd say:
"UX is designing something to give the user the best experience and to tasks to be completed easily and efficiently as possible".
Usability is at the heart of UX, we want the user to be able to complete their tasks as easily as possible, to be satisfied with the experience. Take this common real world example:
This door gets me every morning! There’s actually a push…
Every website owner wants to know how visitors behave on their website, but how do you get all that information and how can you improve your pages with it?
Web analytics tools like Google Analytics can give you some good information about previous pages and the most popular links, but to show interactions in detail, additional tools are often useful. It’s these specialist tools that I focus on this review.
For more background on applying heatmaps to improve sites, see these two tutorials:
Using Heatmaps to Optimize your Site (Referral Candy - shows examples Click, Scroll and Mouse movement heatmaps)
Using Clickmaps to Understand your viewers - a nice summary of why and how to use heatmaps
There are various ways to collect more information about the behaviour of visitors on your website.…
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February 16, 2011
Examples of how to improve conversion rate through applying common findings of usability studies
Value: [rating=4]
Our commentary: Paul Rouke, our expert commentator on all-things usability, recently gave a UX 101 talk at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Although billed as a usability presentation, much of the guidance covered by Paul featured examples of how changes to marketing messages and navigation on home pages and landing pages can increase conversion rate.
Usability & User Experience 101 - #UX101View more presentations from Paul Rouke.
Marketing implications: If you review the slide deck you may pick up some ideas on "quick win" changes you can make to your site to increase conversion rate or changes to the design that can be…
