Kathryn McDonnell is a User Experience consultant with a background in user research, usability testing and interface design and has been working in this area for over 10 years. She has worked for a range of clients on the web, mobile devices, interactive TV and even paper forms.
Kathryn currently works as a consultant for WhatUsersDo.com, providing expert usability reviews for clients, usability testing consultancy and contributes to their site review blogs.
How easy is it to invest online?
Pensions, as with many other financial products, can require a good deal of research before users can make a decision on which is right for them, so how easy is it to do this online?
With the help of user testing videos from whatusersdo, we have been looking at the online user experience provided by two of the largest UK institutions, Barclays and Nationwide.
We asked users to look for products that would act as a nest egg for when they retire. Having very different online personalities, we wanted to see which fared better in their ability to gain people’s trust and understanding of options available.
Waitrose's redesign: where did it go wrong?
Waitrose relaunched its online shopping service recently, and this prompted a hail of complaints on its own discussion board and several column inches of negative publicity in newspapers and blogs.
The list of complaints ranges from performance speed to pure usability issues. Implementing change to an existing service can be difficult so we decided to test the new site with some potential users to see if this was a case of people reacting badly to something new, or whether indeed there was valid reason for concern.
What do users do on travel websites?
A few weeks ago, Econsultancy posted a survey on what customers say they want from travel websites.
As the survey outlined, 85% of respondents use the web to research or book holidays, which underlines the importance of the web to the travel sector.
However, there are a few areas where the online user experience on travel sites could be improve, so we decided to take a closer look at what users actually do when booking holidays.
