Rumball Motors Interactive » Usability Testing

Rich Internet Application Screen Design | UX Magazine

admin — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 20:27:11 +0000

Designing a rich Internet application RIA can test even an experienced design team. The hardest challenge is to blend Web and desktop paradigms to create a responsive and intuitive experience. Some paradigms that exist in the desktop environment are ill-suited for the Web, while many of the Web paradigms people are familiar with paging, explicit refresh are no longer necessary with RIA technologies like Flex and Ajax. As this space matures, we are learning more and more about which boundaries can be pushed, and which patterns transcend time and technology. While working on the book Designing Web Interfaces, Bill Scott and I explored hundreds of Web applications searching for these patterns. Armed with a crazy amount of examples, we distilled the patterns into six principles:

via Rich Internet Application Screen Design | UX Magazine.

20 Fantastic Usability & Conversion Analysis Tools | Spyre Studios

admin — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:30:54 +0000

Usability and conversion rates are inextricably linked. If customers are confused, bored or unmotivated by any aspect of your site, you’re going to find it much more difficult to get them to do what you want, whether that’s buy a product, fill out a form or join a mailing list.

Usability and conversion analysis tools, such as the examples listed below, will help you design or redesign your site to make it easy and enjoyable for visitors to navigate around. Such tools can be expensive, but they needn’t be. Amongst the pricier ones below you’ll find many that are cheap or completely free to use.

Don’t feel as though you need to test on hundreds of people, running tests on just five participants can be enough to provide statistically sound results. It’s all about choosing the tools that are best suited to your specific needs and, of course, your budget.

via 20 Fantastic Usability & Conversion Analysis Tools | Spyre Studios.

Impressive Website Usability Resources – WebM.ag | Web Design Magazine

admin — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:21:43 +0000

Testing your site’s usability is something everyone really should do, usability covers things such as colour contrast, website speed and performance, ensuring elements are placed correctly and general on site aspects such as broken links and cross browser compatibility.

Below are 8 interesting tools which check various aspects of your site and provides you with information and gives you some idea how to rectify any issues it encounters, all of the tools below are free to use.

via Impressive Website Usability Resources – WebM.ag | Web Design Magazine.

A List Apart: Usability Testing Demystified

admin — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:55:46 +0000

There seems to be this idea going around that usability testing is bad, or that the cool kids don’t do it. That it’s old skool. That designers don’t need to do it. What if I told you that usability testing is the hottest thing in experience design research? Every time a person has a great experience with a website, a web app, a gadget, or a service, it’s because a design team made excellent decisions about both design and implementation—decisions based on data about how people use designs. And how can you get that data? Usability testing.

Jared Spool will tell you for free that when his company researched the causes of failed designs, they found that lack of information was the root of all bad design decisions. The point of user research is to make good, solid, confident decisions about design. Why usability testing as opposed to using other methods? I contend that 80% of the value of testing comes from the magic of observing and listening as people use a design. The things you see and the things you hear are often surprising, illuminating, and unpredictable. This unpredictability is tough to capture in any other way.

The other 20% of the value comes from the pre-testing discussions team members have as they decide what their Big Questions are and the post-testing discussions about what to do with what they’ve learned.

via A List Apart: Articles: Usability Testing Demystified.