The 25 best free eBooks for digital product managers
Digital product managers are responsible for overseeing the entire life-cycle of a product. The role has multiple functions from strategic to tactical and also provides cross-functional management in engineering, marketing, sales, and support teams. For that reason, product managers are considered to be the glue that binds the many aspects of digital products.
Website Design: The Importance of First Impressions
According to a user eye-tracking study conducted by the Missouri University of Science and Technology, it only takes a fraction of a second for users to formulate an opinion about a website. This same study revealed that it subsequently takes users about 2.6 seconds for their eyes to land on the most influential part of a website — the company logo (users spent 6.5 seconds focused on the logo before looking at different elements of a site).
7 Simple Tips That Will Help You Become a Better UX Designer
A UI/UX designers job is extremely creative yet demanding. The idea of being responsible for a product’s overall feel is most certainly challenging. In today’s world, when things are changing ever so rapidly, interests, preferences, and customer’s needs are changing too. It becomes extremely important for UI designers to be on their toes and understand latest trends to cater accordingly. There’s always some scope left for development and the learning never stops.
UX Design for Email Newsletters: 5 Things to Know
While UX design isn’t the first thing that comes to your mind as important when you first think of an email newsletter, it certainly plays a big role. The main reasons you are sending the newsletters are to engage with your users, attract their attention and maintain a good relationship – their experience with the newsletter should be good.
The 5 Best Tips to do User Testing on a Small Budget
By definition, user testing (also referred to as usability testing) is the process through which the interface and functions of a website, app, product or service are tested by real users, who perform specific tasks in realistic conditions. To get the best results, testers shouldn’t be directed too much and should be allowed to interact with the website or app naturally in order to really test if the platform is easy to use by people who aren’t yet accustomed to it.
7 Quick Psychology Hacks to Improve your SaaS Onboarding
Many experts stress the importance of structuring teams, upselling, cross-selling, and retaining customers. Of course, these are very important ingredients for success, however, we shouldn’t forget about onboarding — a topic which is critical for any SaaS business.
The 10 Best Online Courses on Usability and User Testing
There are plenty of resources available online to learn more about user testing and usability tests. However, most of these resources offer limited information, which will then entail having to invest a significant amount of time on research alone to gain the necessary skills.
Online courses offer greater value in learning about usability testing as they provide details on the essentials of usability testing and even more details on the tools necessary to conduct usability testing. The following list includes the 10 best online courses you can take on usability testing.
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The Most Important Rule in UX Design that Everyone Breaks
Psychology and user experience (UX) may be two different branches of knowledge, but they still have a lot in common. In fact, UX gets most of its knowledge from psychology because the latter defines what people perceive to be a good web design and how information should be presented online to maximize the chance of retention.
A great example of a psychological concept being used in UX is Miller’s Law. It was first described in the famous 1965 article “The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information” and theorizes that people can hold up to seven objects in their working memory.
E-commerce Replatforming: UX Mistakes You Need to Avoid
Replatforming your e-commerce storefront may be some of the most rewarding and excruciating work out there. For those who don’t know, replatforming an e-commerce website means to essentially migrate it to a different platform. If you are unhappy with the way your site performs currently, this may be your only option. Continue reading
How to Improve your Content Marketing Strategy with the help of UX and CRO
Content creation is an anchor of digital marketing that has the power to generate new leads and improve a company’s overall sales potential. However, content marketing cannot function on its own. You need to provide customers with quality user experience (UX) and optimize conversion rate to maximize the potential of the content marketing strategy.
6 Ways Product Managers can apply Design Thinking
As a product manager, you need to deeply understand problems, issues, needs and wants of current and potential customers. The design thinking method can help you making the right, data-backed decisions during product development. Learn more about the design thinking approach to product management in this post.
UX Review – TransferGo Money Transfer Service
TransferGo is a platform for international money transfers. We tested the website in the context of user tests. The UX Review result: a good user experience with smaller but annoying usability issues.
Best Ways to Anticipate Your Customer Needs [Infographic]
![Best Ways to Anticipate Your Customer Needs [Infographic]](https://cdnblog.userbrain.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Anticipate-Your-Customer-Needs.jpg)
A great entrepreneur focuses on increasing profits while anticipating customers’ needs. It’s truly important to know what your clients want in order to satisfy their demands. If you are not aware of their preferences, climbing the success ladder might be harder than expected. You must put yourself in their shoes, remember their needs, and always pay attention to their feedback.
138 FREE ebooks on User Experience, Usability, User Interface Design and more
Human behavior is amazing. That’s probably why it’s so easy to fall in love with user-centered design. It’s a broad subject that is based on human-computer interaction, psychological triggers, behavioral patterns, and then spits out user interface design, user experience design, web design and more.
It’s a science that pokes into users minds with relentless curiosity. And relentless curiosity is what all creatives have in common. Continue reading
“Alexa, How Will Voice Impact User Experience?”
Voice — or designing interactions for voice experiences — is the next frontier of UX or user experience design. What makes things a little tricky is that it’s essentially “invisible” and includes no visual elements, at least in the conventional sense. There are no animations or accents to help portray action. There are no colors or shapes involved, heck pictures and video don’t have a role on voice platforms at all.
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Learning Web Design: How to Get Started and Not Give Up
Web design is one of the most sought out skills out there right now, so you might be thinking – why not get into it?
Building a website from the ground up can be both challenging and rewarding. Especially in today’s ever-changing times, it can be difficult to know where to start.
5 Factors That Affect a Shopper’s Psychology
Have you ever come back from a shopping trip and wondered why you bought an item? It’s because external factors had an impact on your subconscious causing you to make that purchase. Shopper psychology.
Watch out! 10 UX Design Myths that can trip you up
User Experience designers need to be skilled in many areas to create an excellent experience for users. The essence of great UX goes way beyond providing a checklist of features. It’s a challenging, complex and multi-faceted role to slip into.
Which is why it doesn’t help that there are certain myths floating around. We decided to look at some of these UX myths and bust ‘em.
5 Places to Find Customers for Your E-Commerce Site
If you’re anything like me, you’re trying your very best to improve your business and land more customers every single day. If not, you probably should ask yourself whether you should be doing this at all.
A critical aspect of business growth is the marketing process, which whether we like it or not and whether we’re good at it or not, will influence our business performance.
Everything You Need to Know About Proactive Usability Testing
Proactive Usability Testing – what the heck is it, how does it work and why would it be smart to make a habit out of it?
Usability testing is one of the most common ways of identifying issues when it comes to how your digital product or service is used. But this article is here to show you that usability testing is not just great for fixing problems, but it can actually drive your creative process.
Why Prototyping is Fundamental For Good Design
The thing is, it’s already acknowledged in engineering circles that prototyping is a necessary component innovation’s design “life cycle”. But just why is it important to prototype no matter if you’re in the soft- or hardware business? Well, let’s take it back to the basics first.
A Designer’s Go-To Guide for Usability Testing
When it comes to design and usability testing, one thing is certain – you can’t master one without the other.
When we at Userbrain talk to people, everyone seems to agree that testing is important. But have they ever actually carried out a usability study? Nope.
5 Simple Steps to Take your UX Design from Good to Great
Your website’s UX design can never be perfect or completely done. But no matter what stage you are at, there are always some simple ways to tweak and improve. Continue reading
Waterfall, Agile or Hybrid – What Development Method Should I Choose?
When it comes to software development, one thing you’ve got to have is a set method of development. Waterfall, Agile or Hybrid?
Which one you choose depends on a lot of things. The context of your project, your developer’s skill set and of course the project leader’s ability to make the right decision.
How to Maximise Conversions With the Perfect CTA Button
Does your business thrive on online campaigns?
Maybe you’ve tried social media, email marketing, and online ads to get your message across. But no matter how well-crafted your online campaign is, your business won’t do well unless your online visitors …click.
Richard Branson’s Top 5 Hacks on Improving Your Customer Support
As one of the worlds’ most inspiring businessmen and the founder of Virgin Group, Richard Branson, is definitely a person that can teach us a thing or two when it comes to doing business and how to treat the customers that come along with it. Continue reading
Do You Agree that Product Thinking Is the Next Big Thing in UX Design?
UX designers often get caught up in trying to design the best possible interface or product which is both streamlined and easy to use. In addition to that, they work hard on providing users with a set of features which enables them to do things just a little bit easier. Continue reading
UX Teardown: TransferWise Money Transfer Service (9.2 of 10)
Sending money abroad online is now easier than ever, but how simple is it really?
In order to answer this question, Userbrain is currently carrying out an in-depth benchmarking study, analyzing the user experience of sending money online with TransferWise and nine other leading providers.
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7 Basic UX Rules for Your Online Business
User experience is the overall perception and feeling that users get after interacting with a digital product. The experience that users get when interacting with e-commerce sites is very crucial since it determines whether browsing a site will end up as conversion in sales. Continue reading
11 Tips to Writing Customer Centered Content
When it comes to creating content, you’ve probably heard it a million times: “it should be customer-centered”. But what does this refer to, after all? Does it mean you have to address the customer directly? Continue reading
How Graphic Designers Can Smoothly Switch to UX Design
Graphic design is the closest link between the public eye and design itself. This makes it one of the hottest careers at the moment, with a myriad of job opportunities. Out of those job opportunities, the most promising and highly paid design path is user experience or UX design, with a median salary of $100,000 per year for experienced designers. Continue reading
How to make usability testing a habit
Before we tell you how to make usability testing a habit, you might be interested in why we think this is important. Continue reading
Artificial Intelligence and Customer Engagement
Artificial Intelligence or AI has been well-received in every industry in the world, because of its endless potential and countless abilities. Automation software and AI can do unimaginable things for your business, and there is no saying as to where it will lead from here. Continue reading
7 Emails Your E-commerce Store Needs to Send Out on an Automated Basis
Emails. People have been using this communication medium for decades, but its marketing potential has been largely uncovered until now. What about you? Are you truly aware of how automated emails can fit into and optimize your marketing strategy?
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How to Make Your Content Crystal-Clear with These UX Tips
User Experience is a broad subject and covers all kinds of elements of a website from the interface to the way the content is laid out, each element just as important as the last. However, many website owners and designers seem to be drawn to improving the technological side of things rather than the way the content is digested by the reader. Continue reading
How to Turn Customer Pain Points Into Pleasure
As an entrepreneur and business owner, your main goal likely revolves around increasing sales and growing your business.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this; after all, you wouldn’t enter the business world if you weren’t intent on becoming successful, right?
How To Benchmark User Experience On Your Website
User experience is relative. A customer’s decision to transact (or not transact) with you is significantly influenced by how good (or bad) their experience is on your website compared to competition. In an industry where all websites are equally bad, customers are more likely to transact with a site that sucks the least.
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10 of the Best Christmas Gifts for UX Designers
Christmas is coming and everyone is running around looking for gifts. But how to present your freaky friend who is doing some weird User Experience design stuff? Don’t worry – just dig into our 10 Christmas gift suggestions for UX designers.
How Milanote iteratively improves their product by testing everything with real users
The notes app Milanote is used by creative professionals working at big players like Apple or Facebook. We got together with Ollie, Co-Founder and CEO at Milanote and talked with him about his obsession over design details, the constant struggle of keeping the product simple and how he makes sure everyone on the team has some regular contact with real users.
How to Test Your eCommerce Site for Conversion
There are a number of reasons why your eCommerce website may not be converting. The reasons could be as simple as your price being high or because you charge for shipping. At a more nuanced level, reasons for low conversions could include factors like your website not rendering properly on the customers’ device, or your checkout button not being placed prominently enough.
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How the Google Ventures Design Sprint Works for Your Startup
In today’s competitive market, startup businesses that dawdle too long to get their product developed and their business launched, may not even get the chance to reach the market in the first place.
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What Programming Language Should a Startup Choose?
If you ever want to turn a room full of engineers into a real battlefield, just say that one programming language is better than another. Mind you, there will be profanities.
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Why Testing Designs with Users Is Still a Major Challenge for Companies
The good folks at UXPin have just released their annual Enterprise UX Industry Report. They surveyed over 3.000 professionals – mainly product managers.
The good news: things are slowly but steadily changing, and increasingly more people expect useful and usable business products. The bad news is that user testing remains a major challenge for companies in 2017. Continue reading
New Userbrain Feature: Annotations
We’re excited to release a much-anticipated feature that makes the analysis of your usability videos – and therefore, your workflows – even better: Annotations.
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Customer Onboarding: 5 Crucial Tips for SaaS Startups
We run a SaaS startup. While building Chanty business messenger we’ve learnt that a software itself doesn’t matter unless you have a well-thought-through onboarding process. If you don’t, customers will bounce right before they even get to use your product.
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How you can make user testing a habit with Userbrain [VIDEO]
Hell frezes over. Userbrain finally got an explainer video. The awesome peeps at Mindconsole did a great job of translating our vision to fancy moving images.
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This is the Relationship Between UX Design & High Conversion Rates
When landing on your site, what does a visitor want to do next? Part of your job is to predict what the consumer wants and deliver it. On average, people will stay on your website less than a minute, so you must capture their attention within the first few seconds. This is only the beginning.
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Why an obsession with demographics will hurt your user tests
A couple of months ago one of our blog posts mentioning our view on the (non existing) value of demographic targeting for user testing got featured on Designer News. Man, we had to face harsh criticism for that piece. But this happened already a couple of months ago, so I thought it’s time to fan the flames.
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Why online usability testing works
Online usability testing for Web products and mobile apps is a quick, reliable way of answering the question “Can people use the product?” Compared to traditional, in-person usability testing, conducting online usability testing has several advantages:
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10 Ways To Make Your Lead Generation Website Convert On The First Visit
Why Are First Visit Conversions Key? Because: 84 Percent of Website Visitors Convert on the First Visit.
Straight North has been validating website sales leads for over two years. Based on the review of more than 300,000 true sales leads, we have learned something startling: 84 percent of website visitors convert on the first visit.
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5 Ways to Track & Optimize User Experience in Google Analytics
In today’s environment, user experience isn’t a plus. It’s a must.
Users are expecting that your website will be easy to navigate, and take them on a logical journey. They want it to be as friendly as possible and fulfill any needs they have.
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4 Big Questions Your Wary Web Users Want to Ask Your Brand
Web users are constantly being pulled in all directions. You need to make sure that your site is answering all their burning questions and engaging with them on multiple levels. You’ll need to engage their hearts and their minds before you get anywhere close to their purses.
Here are some key things that users will want to ask from you – make sure that you’re offering them a well-rounded experience that goes beyond usability to brand advocacy and loyalty.
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2 Essential User Tests You Should Run Weekly On Your Ecommerce Site
Last year more people than ever shopped online over the holidays.
In numbers according to the latest study, this means that nearly half (47%) of consumers shopped online this season, 33 percent of them from mobile devices. Online shopping therefore increased by 18 percent compared to 2015.
Knowing this numbers now – it’s really vital for your business that your customers are able to use your eCommerce site without struggles.
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Lessons learned from having a booth at a conference with over 53,000 attendees
Doors opened and people started pouring into Hall 2. Just a few minutes later our booth was crowded and we had to answer many questions about our product.
We were attending WebSummit in Lisbon as an Alpha Startup. A conference with over 53.000 attendees. And this is what we learned…
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How to prioritize usability issues
A typical usability test may return over 100 usability issues. How can you prioritize these issues so that the development team knows which are the most serious ones?
Below I describe three different ways to ensure that you find and fix those issues with the biggest impact on the experience of your users.
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Watch Young People Desperately Trying to Use Old Technology
Kids are good at latest technology because they grow up with it, but what if you let young people use some old tech for the first time? As it seems usability testing old stuff with kids can really be fun to watch. 😉
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We are selling usability wrong. And it sucks.
As UX designers our job is to analyze and understand the goals, motivations and behavior of people and create easy, understandable and efficient solutions tailored to their needs.
Why do we still suck at doing the same when selling our work to our clients? No kidding, I mean it – we still stick to finding an easy, understandable and efficient approach to sell our own work, which is building easy and understandable things for others.
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6 Psychological Phenomena Website Marketers Need to Know
Marketing and psychology have always gone hand-in-hand since the Mad Men days of the 1950s when advertising executives first began to study and utilize human psychological phenomena to their advantage.
Some may call it manipulation, others call it marketing—who’s to say what it should be called when it works. When you understand how the mind works, you can target a campaign more effectively.
Here are just a few of the psychological phenomena used by political strategists and marketers to sell a product, person, or brand.
The 10 Best Customer Feedback Tools For Your Website
If you had a real store it would be easy for you to chat with your customers about their experience.
It’s often not that easy to gather feedback from angry, frustrated or disappointed customers on your website because an alternative offer is just a quick click away. They just leave without telling you why.
You need to find processes to capture feedback from your visitors at the right time and right place.
Here you’ll find a collection of the 10 best tools to help you gathering customer feedback on your website.
47 Product Management Videos That Are Worth Your Time
Do you wish you had time to gather all the quality videos on Product Management so you can learn more?
Well your wish came true. These videos are collected from all around the web, in a hunting spree that lasted for over 30 hours! (Good thing you never got around to doing it 🙂 )
Now the best talks from various conferences and events are all in one place, ready for the taking.
Take your pick, dive in, learn, improve, NAIL THAT PRODUCT!
Top 45 Product Management SlideShare Presentations
Today products are much more complicated and Product Management is a dedicated role that requires your fullest attention and involvement, and loads of internal communication.
Our team is always looking for advice and knowledge to pick up from those with more experience, and on that hunt we started from the basics – the videos on Product Management Essentials.
So take a look at what we’ve hunted down, contribute if you have something (don’t be shy), and join us next week to see what else we find and add to our Product Management bookmarks.
16 Killer Videos on Product Management Essentials
Are you thinking of beginning a career in Product Management? Or just want to expand your knowledge on the subject?
Then these hand picked videos and talks will be a great beginners guide to Product Management, helping you learn what it takes to be a great PM and gain more understanding of the role.
Take a look, get inspired!
UX Teardown: Influenster.com – Two testers, different approaches, head to head
Welcome to our second episode of UX Teardowns!
For this week’s episode we decided to test with two users and compare their experiences by showing you the videos head to head.
UX Teardown: Brayola.com – A man shopping for a bra
Welcome to the first episode of Userbrain’s UX Teardowns!
In this show we will be deconstructing user experiences of websites and web apps, through the power of user testing (also called usability testing).
How to Optimize Mobile Conversion with User Testing
Graphics designed by Freepik
At some point during the summer of 2015, mobile devices overtook desktop computers as the preferred method of conducting a Google search. That announcement stirred up the already frenzied buzz over the e-commerce potential for mobile-initiated sales.
The reality, though, is that conversion rates for mobile still lag way behind desktop conversion.
Userbrain Backstage: Making Usability Testing a Habit
Want to learn more about how we started Userbrain, how we work, and our future plans and projects we have in store?
If so then this Founder Talk interview we recently did with the lovely Sabine Elsässer, the co-founder of Startup Valley News, will be a good read.
She got to know us and our path to where we are right now, along with what Userbrain is all about and what we set out to achieve with it.
7 Step Guide to Guerrilla Usability Testing: DIY Usability Testing Method
In the field of User Experience and Product Development, research and planning rule the show.
Neglecting either of them will backfire on you and your organization with high user abandonment, increased need (and cost) for customer service, increased cost and time for development, and all in all—a complete waste of available resources.
But what can you do when deadlines are near and the budget is low?
You can do Guerrilla Usability Testing, a lean and agile approach to testing which doesn’t break the bank.
In 7 simple steps, we will show you how to conduct Guerrilla Usability Testing to get the maximum out of it.
Philipp, Lead Designer of Firefox, Talks Usability & Empathy
A few weeks ago we met Philipp Sackl, the lead designer of Firefox at Mozilla, at the UX Day in Graz where he gave an inspiring talk about empathy and design.
How to Grow From Exposure to User Feedback in 3 Simple Steps
How to Improve Website Conversion by Optimizing for Repeat Business
Top-performing websites are effective in generating sales, but are they just as effective in retaining customers and generating residual income?
The question you should ask yourself is: What happens after I close this sale? Is that it? Will I ever see this customer again, or is this a once-only sale?
If your website isn’t designed to encourage repeat business, there are several strategies you can implement to turn things around.
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5 Essential Usability Tips to Get Your Website Ready for 2016
Boom! Another year is over.
What did you do in 2015 to make your website more user-friendly?
Not enough? Don’t worry!
Here are five main tasks to start off with in 2016.
Usability Case Study: How TawiPay Solves a Problem for 200 Million Migrants
If you’ve already had to send money to a foreign country, you’ll know it’s neither cheap nor easy.
Realizing that globally such fund transfers represent over 500 billions of dollars annually Pascal Briod was frustrated with the amount of money people lose on transfer fees. So he co-founded TawiPay,as an easy-to-use alternative for international money transfers.
We spoke with Pascal about the problem he’s been solving for 200 million migrants, feedback from frustrated customers as a way of validating product-market-fit, and the challenge of integrating user tests into the working process.
How To Find Out What Users Really Experience
Did you ever notice that user experience is a lot like health?
User experience designers are doctors. Developers are surgeons. Users are of course patients, and bad user experiences are like a disease.
11 Most Inspiring Usability and User Experience Talks
Let these 11 inspiring talks from the smartest UX and Usability people on the planet motivate you for your upcoming user experience and user research efforts.
Listen up and let the learning begin.
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5 Mistakes People Make When Writing Usability Tasks
While running Userbrain we noticed 5 common mistakes that we would like to share with you in the interest of learning. And also to tell you how to avoid making those same usability mistakes.
10 Best Slide Decks for Usability Optimization
A complete list of the best slide decks for usability optimization, containing useful tipps for usability testing, user experience design and user research.
I’m missing your favorite? Be sure to add a comment at the bottom letting me know which one you would include.
7 Steps to Effective Usability Testing
Effective usability testing is all about smart use & spread of resources. That’s why we believe that making ongoing testing a habit will yield the best results.
The User is Always Right? Wrong!
As someone who might be called usability expert I’ve often referred to the old saying that the user is always right.
As an interface designer on the other hand, I can’t agree with this statement at all.
Userbrain vs. Usertesting.com
Looking for an alternative to UserTesting? Think UserTesting’s service is expensive and complex? We do too. That’s why we created Userbrain.
Userbrain is a dead simple and automated user testing service for startups and busy product teams.
Below, you’ll find information to help you compare Userbrain and UserTesting.com, including features, pricing and thoughts from current Userbrain customers who have made the switch.
How to Excite Stakeholders to Start Usability Testing
We asked our readers to tell us about their biggest challenges when it comes to usability testing.
It seems like getting buy-in from internal and external stakeholders is one of the hardest parts for many of you…
5 Biggest Usability Fails in Movies
In movies, and especially in science fiction, stuff usually works.
User interfaces in film are more exciting than they are realistic, and heroes have far too easy a time using foreign systems.
Jacob Nielsen
That’s part of the fun of science fiction movies. But unfortunately technology failure is a part of our everyday life. And once in a while creative producers add entirely new levels of complexity to technology used in movies. Enjoy the following five examples.
Why You Don’t Need To Test With Your Target Audience
Graphics designed by Freepik
It’s hard to believe, but you don’t need representative users for Usability testing!
Again, you don’t need representative users for usability testing. Here’s why:
How To Save Up To 40% More Time at Remote Usability Testing
If you’re improving your website with the help of remote usability testing you’re already saving up to 60% of the costs and time involved, compared to traditional Lab Testing.
Hurray!
But I’ll now show you a simple yet very effective method of speeding up your remote usability testing cycles even more.
How to Easily Find and Fix Usability Problems
If you think your site has usability problems, you’re probably right about that. Every website has them and it’s a constant battle to find and fix these issues.
The easiest way to do it is by watching people use your site in job-based usability tests.
5 Funny Usability Testing Videos
As it turns out usability doesn’t have to be a dry subject. It has the potential to just be fun from time to time.
Below are 5 videos showing perfectly – and in a fun way – why it makes sense to integrate usability testing in your workflow.
3 Things You Shouldn’t Ask in a Usability Test
Usability tests let you find out what’s clear and what’s not clear to people as they use your website.
Usability testing is NOT about opinions and that’s why there’s not much use in asking your participants the following questions:
6 Usability Tasks You Haven’t Tried So Far But Really Should!
Usability testing can be a really easy thing to do. You can do almost anything wrong – as long as you get your tasks right, your usability testing will always work.
Stefan has already explained how to write better usability tasks if you’re starting from scratch.
How to Write Better Tasks to Improve Your Usability Testing
Usability testing is easy and you’ll get valuable insights even if you’re doing it for the first time.
You can do almost everything wrong – as long as you get your tasks right your usability testing will always work.
How to Integrate Continuous Micro Feedback Into Your Business
I once read a story about a great lecturer. After delivering his presentation he had the habit of asking everyone he had the chance to talk t what his interlocutor had absolutely disliked about his talk.
If people hesitated, he told them that he only had been invited as a speaker today because of his listening to and acting on every single negative feedback he received.
5 Simple Steps to DIY Usability Testing for Creators
Illustration by Juhan Sonin
Usability testing can help you dramatically improve your website or app by watching people use it.
We all know this to be true and yet so many of us don’t do a lot of testing. Let’s change this, now!
You don’t work for a startup, you play in a band!
Product design is like songwriting.
UI/UX design is like playing guitar.
Lorem Ipsum Has to Die
Designers around the whole world know and use Lorem Ipsum or whatever type of text as placeholder.
The portfolios of some colleagues are full of commissioned works showing only placeholder texts instead of real information.
Some people may think that this is of no importance but I am actually absolutely unable to understand this…
How to Design Better Websites by Writing Them First
Imagine you’re working on the signup process of a website. Your goal is to create a great onboarding experience for your users.
You’ve done some research and want to start designing now.
How do you actually begin?
Why We Speak of “Paying” Attention
Money is an invention. Attention is real, it’s limited, and it’s valuable.
Your attention is probably the most important resource in this world.
That’s why we speak of paying attention. But how do you pay your attention? What do you trade it for?
Why Designers Should Do Usability Tests
We did a lot of usability tests in the past – for our own designs as well as for web sites and software designed by other people.
Just lately during one of these tests for some digital product, I made a profound discovery: UI designers should do their own usability tests.
3 Things Poor Interfaces and Zombies Have in Common
1. They don’t respond to any external stimuli
According to the Zombie Apocalypse wiki this is especially true for zombie type 0, which although undead, fortunately only represents a moderate risk. Zombie type 0 does not react to any external stimuli whatsoever, neither to light nor to any kind of sound.
How to Better Understand Your Website Users’ Behavior
Your website (app, etc.) doesn’t have a user experience, your users do.
That’s why you have to understand your user’s behavior and find out why they do what they do on your site.
Design The User Not The Experience
Help people become better versions of themselves. That’s in a nutshell what I believe to be the secret of any great design.
It’s not about the user interface or the user experience or anything like this – it’s all about the user.
How to Have Successful Conversations With Your Visitors
Visiting a website is not the same thing as riding a roller coaster.
Most people don’t come to your site to experience the joy of using it. They come for the content.
They come to have a conversation with you.
Why You Should Watch First Time Users
There’s real value in watching people using your website for the first time. Be sure to observe unexpected behavior and instantly see what works, and what needs to be improved.
How IT people see users, using their app for the first time (Source: The Hipper Element)
Embrace Failure – or How to Get Over Your First Usability Test
I remember one of our first usability projects.
We were asked by a big Austrian technology company to evaluate the usability of their hardware product. We ran a usability session with a couple of participants, and the technology company kind of freaked out when we showed them videos of real people struggling with their product in various ways.
How to Determine the True Value of Every Design Job
This post is for people who find themselves in one of the following situations:
- You take on design jobs for clients on a regular basis
- You just got a job opportunity to design for a startup
Chances are, you’re afraid of making a wrong decision now. Maybe you make a bad call, and either end up working for a client who doesn’t value your work, or you invest your energy in working for a startup, that doesn’t even exist in 12 months from now.
3 Reasons Why Usability Testing Isn’t Part of Your Workflow
We believe the Web is about people.
And that usability testing is the perfect way to understand these people and to improve your website based on their goals and needs, their feedback.
While that’s great, usability testing is not part of most designers’ or developers’ workflows.
Let me give you 3 quick reasons why that’s the case and how you can change this for maximum gain & growth.
Why Userbrain is Different From Other Usability Testing Services
“You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”– The Rolling Stones
People ask us about the difference between Userbrain and all the other usability testing services out there.
The answer is simple:
Userbrain helps you get what you need, instead of just giving you what you want.
