User Effect | Strategic Website Usability

Attack of The Bad Usability

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:13:31 -0400

Inspired by a recent trip to the Sci-fi Dine-in Theater at Hollywood Studios, I thought it might be fun to do a presentation in the style of a classic 50s sci-fi/horror movie. I came up with this tale of the horrors of bad usability, which I hope is both entertaining and educational:

This one's best viewed in full-screen mode, as it contains a number of screen shots of an imaginary website. Enjoy...

Win A Usability Library!

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:55:42 -0400

I recently posted a list of recommended usability books - like most professionals, I've amassed quite a collection over time. I got to thinking about how much money that library represents, and how hard it is to invest in your own education when you're starting out in the field. Self-education is critical, especially in a rapidly changing field like usability, so I've decided to give away a starter library to one lucky reader!

I'll be giving away one set of all of the books on my current usability reading list, which is a collection of titles I personally recommend covering usability, testing, consumer psychology, and more:

Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed

Don't Make Me Think

Always Be Testing

A Project Guide to UX Design

Selling Usability: User Experience Infiltration Tactics

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

The Tipping Point

Web Analytics: An Hour A Day

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web

If you're counting, that's 9 books and roughly a $200 value. What do you have to do? Just write a blog post telling us (the world, that is) why you love usability and want to jump-start your usability training, whether you're completely new to the field, making a transition, or are currently an expert in another field. Once the post is live, either leave a comment on this post or email me to become an official contest participant.

Disclaimers: Contest ends July 31, 2009 - all entries must be in by then. Books will be shipped directly from Amazon.com. They'll be brand new; I'm not trying to pawn off my used books on you. Any substitutions are at my sole discretion. Choice of winner is up to me for any reason I please - if you don't like it, start your own contest. Contest rules and conditions may change at any time, but they probably won't, because let's face it, that just plain sucks.

User Effect Partners With UserTesting.com

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:13:16 -0400

For a while now, User Effect has been using testing services from UserTesting.com, who provides remote usability testing with video and text commentary for just $29/user. It's a great service for anyone who wants to get a fresh perspective on their website without the cost of a large-scale testing project.

I'm happy to announce that we're now an official partner of UserTesting.com. We at User Effect look forward to a productive working relationship and to introducing the benefits of usability testing to many new clients.

In addition to our partnership, we've recently launched a new service, the 10-User Testing Package. This starter package, for just $890, includes your test setup and initial consulting, test administration, 10 users through UserTesting.com (a $290 value), analysis, and an immediate action report telling you how to get the most benefit out of your test results. Contact us today for more details.

Free E-book: Converting The Believers

Tue, 9 Jun 2009 14:05:31 -0400

Last November, User Effect released its first e-book: "Converting The Believers: How to Turn Website Visitors into Buyers". I originally decided to put a price tag on the book, to test the waters a bit for future writing projects. To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised by the initial sales, but after 6 months, I've decided that I'd like to get the book into more peoples' hands before the information starts to become outdated.

So, as of today, User Effect's first e-book is now available as a free download. It's a pretty quicky read (30-page PDF) covering the basics of web analytics, usability, and testing. Visit the >official e-book page for more details and to download.

5 Useful Uses for Wolfram Alpha

Tue, 19 May 2009 12:58:55 -0400

Whenever a new search tool launches, we techies love to try to break it, find the easter eggs, and argue about whether it's a Google killer. As a usability guy, I love new tools, so I thought I'd put Wolfram Alpha (the new computational search engine by the guys who created Mathematica) to the test and see what it can do that I might actually want to use. Here are 5 truly useful uses for Wolfram Alpha:

1. Historical Data

One handy thing about Wolfram Alpha is that you can attach a year to many queries. Let's say you're wondering how past market crashes compare to our current economic situation:

You'll get back some nifty data, including the market high, low, mean/average, and a closing price graph for the year:

Here are a few more date functions that are useful. Check out historical weather for a location, compare currency values to past values, or check the date of a future holiday:

2. Probabilities & Poker Hands

As a usability guy, I'm also a stats geek, and math is definitely Wolfram Alpha's strong point, but non-geeks can have fun with probability, too. Let's say you want to know what your odds are of getting 37 heads in a row on a coin toss (Hint: very, very low):

Nobody puts any money on coin tosses these days, though, so let's get to the good stuff. Is that poker hand you're holding really as good as you think it is?

Wolfram Alpha will spit back a handy sample poker hand (if you're a total newbie), plus your probabilities on a 5-card or 7-card hand:

3. Nutritional Information

One very useful and well structured feature on Wolfram Alpha is the ability to look up nutritional information. Let's say you want to know just how much fat is going into that guacamole:

You'll get back a mock-up nutritional label, like what you'd find on the back of almost any product in a U.S. grocery store:

Wolfram Alpha is pretty good at combining some types of queries, so why not ask it about that entire sandwich you're about to eat?

4. Colorful Facts

This one is for the web geeks out there. Try typing a hexadecimal color code into Wolfram Alpha, like one of the blues here on User Effect:

Not only will it give you the RGB and HSB conversions, but you'll get suggestions for complementary colors and possible names for the color (based on similar colors):

As a Cubs fan, I'm not really thrilled with my options in that example, but I guess I can't blame that on Wolfram Alpha.

5. Words & Wildcards

Ok, I have to admit that I'm not completely sure about the usefulness of this last one (unless you're a crossword puzzle junkie), but I think it's something to watch. One big gap in Google's engine is the ability to handle character wildcards effectively. Wolfram Alpha lets you use "_" as a wildcard. So, you can enter something like:

...and you'll get the suggestion of either "usability" or "uselessly". I think this is a subtle feature that shows how a computational engine differs from the current generation of search engines, and I expect we'll see more verbal gymnastics from Wolfram Alpha going forward.

New Tool: Usability ROI Calculator

Wed, 13 May 2009 16:27:01 -0400

Since I work with a lot of small businesses, one question I often hear is how to justify the price of a usability project (even a small one). It's a perfectly reasonable question. Of course, the short answer is that usability drives conversion and sales, but how much more sales, and how long will those benefits take to pay off the cost of a usability project?

To answer these questions, I've developed a usability ROI calculator, which calculates the potential impact of usability improvements on your website profits, as well as how long those additional profits will take to recoup the cost of a given usability project or consultation.

Let's say that your site gets about 10,000 visitors/month, 125 monthly sales, and your average profit margin is $25. Now, let's say you're considering a usability project that costs $950 (like our 5-Point Website Clinic).

You'd enter all of that into the calculator as shown above (the Usability Costs section is optional), and you'd get back something like this:

The table shows you your monthly and annual profit increases for 4 possible levels of post-usability sales increases (5%, 10%, 25%, 50%). It also shows your projected pay-off times. In this case, we see that the project will take somewhere between 0.6 months (just a couple of weeks) and 6.1 months to pay for itself.

Of course, the proof is in the pudding, as they say (although I have no idea why). Take the Usability ROI Calculator for a test-drive, and let me know what you think.

Anatomy of a Usable Website

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:44:45 -0400

I was thinking recently about all of the elements that can go into a modern website and started sketching out a picture of it in my head when I realized that it might make an interesting resource. A few hours later, I had come up with this:

Download 1-page PDF (625KB)

Essentially, it's a road-map for what a typical, usable website might contain. It's not a design guide, per se - more of a cheat-sheet for the pieces that any site should consider having. Of course, not all pieces are relevant to everyone, and I don't claim this is 100% comprehensive. Any comments are welcome, as this is something I'll consider revising as time goes by.