All posts with the tag of User Experience

8th November 2010 by Michael Harris | User Experience

Persuasion is a subtle art, but an understanding of the psychology of donation can help reap great benefits for your cause. This two-part article explores human nature, caring for and helping others, and how we can use these ideas to design websites which turn viewers into donors. Eight tips for achieving this are embedded within the text and summarized at the end of part two. Part one will focus on emotion…

5th November 2010 by Jesús Villanueva and Michael Harris | User Experience

For the last couple of months we have been bombarded with figures about Apple’s massive success. Over 120 million devices sold and 6.5 billion app downloads are astonishing figures. One could think that all apps in the App Store are amazing because everybody is downloading them! That, unfortunately, is far from true. The vast majority of apps are just downloaded to try them out, and then dismissed after some weeks or even days.

15th October 2010 by nomensa | Nomensa thinks

The Internet-enabled TV has been around for a little while, but the fight for control of the living room has begun in earnest now that Google has joined the fray. Instinctively Internet on TV makes sense, after all many people admit to using a laptop, netbook or iPad when watching TV, so why not bring that experience to the TV itself? However, I can’t help feeling that in the rush to get the web onto the widescreen nobody has properly stopped to think about whether it really matches with how anyone uses their TV or consumes information from the Internet. In the UX industry this is known as the “context of use”. If you fail to consider this properly, you end up with a product that isn’t fit for purpose.

16th July 2010 by Tom Waterhouse | Web Design

I love icons. Someone once described them to me as mini works of art – and that’s not far off. They can be miniature designs representing something huge, all to be understood within a blink of an eye.

Not too long ago I was tasked with creating a brand new interface for our Content Management System (CMS) Defacto. With the new interface came a new family of icons and I thought I’d share some insight as to the process of designing these icons.

16th July 2010 by Jon Fisher | User Experience

Recently every news article seems to refer to budget cuts as a result of the global financial meltdown. I have read 20 different articles and still do not feel like I fully understand the problem. How can I begin to understand such a complicated subject? How can the internet help me understand? Tools allow us to understand a subject through exploration and rehearsal without any risk if we go wrong. We all know the best way to learn something is to do it yourself! This engaged risk-free learning, I believe, is the secret strength of online tools. They persuade learning through a subtle and passive process.

2nd July 2010 by Juliet Richardson | Nomensa thinks

Why are big-name pure play sites like Amazon, Very and ASOS losing up to £420 million a month in lost sales?

According to a recent report by Moneybookers, some popular online stores have painfully slow checkouts. Reportedly, some of the worst offenders were “pure play” sites such as Very.co.uk (with a checkout time of 6 minutes 45 seconds), Amazon (5 minutes, 38 seconds) and ASOS (4 minutes, 36 seconds). By Moneybookers’ calculation, this potentially translates into £420 million a month in lost sales.

1st July 2010 by nomensa | User Experience

In order to display error messages on forms, you need to consider the following four basic rules:

1. The error message needs to be short and meaningful

2. The placement of the message needs to be associated with the field

3. The message style needs to be separated from the style of the field labels and instructions

4. The style of the error field needs to be different than the normal field

By combining these four rules, it is possible to provide the necessary information to users where they have made mistakes on filling in forms and how to rectify them quickly and easily. This will encourage and help users to continue with their journey on the site, reducing the number of basket abandonment, not registering on a site, making enquiries about an application form and so forth.

30th April 2010 by Alastair Campbell | User Experience

Imagine 40 people from around the world suddenly scouring your site for bugs,and reporting them to a central system that you monitor and approve / reject. That was my experience recently with uTest, who provide the platform and the community for this crowd-sourced QA service. uTest claim it covers several types of testing, from functional to usability, but how does it compare to traditional usability testing and quality assurance (QA)?