usability | Internet Marketing Blog

How to make a mobile commerce site for £200

Fed up with sky-high quotes for reinventing the wheel, I chose to develop my own mobile site. £200 and a couple of months later, we were live and taking orders.

I was quite excited at the birth of the smartphone, and the pending delivery of my very first one. Manufacturers had got it bang on, no messing around with new languages or protocols, these phones were designed to accept and display data in the same way your household PC does.

Essentially, my 2004 Sony Ericsson P900i was a mini-laptop, a small internet browser. We didn’t have to do anything to make our website work through smartphones, it just did.

However, visitors from smartphones just didn’t convert.

by Pat Wood 18 October 2011 09:28am 29 comments

World Standards Day 2011: What does it mean for usability?

14 October 2011 is World Standards Day where the three major international standards bodies IEC, ISO and ITU celebrate the contribution that standards make to international commerce. The theme this year is ‘Creating Confidence Globally’ and it strikes me that this is particularly relevant to usability.

Most creators of digital products design their products to be usable: effective, efficient and satisfying. Although sometimes this is hard to believe, I do not think anyone deliberately ignores their users.

However, what some designers quite frequently fail to do is to apply current usability best practice or test out their products before launch. When real users find the products difficult or cumbersome to use or fail to get the desired results and stop using the product, this can come as a surprise to the unwary designer (and their bosses who see the costs of their investment rising and the benefits diminishing).

by Tom Stewart 14 October 2011 13:16pm 0 comments

Ask the audience: how do I user test?

There are currently some brilliant tools for carrying out user testing on your website. The basic premise is to invite a number of people on to your website to complete a specific task.

You then gather feedback about their experience which will highlight any usability issues.

by Chris Rowett 30 September 2011 08:40am 0 comments

67 questions usability testing can answer

From experience, usability testing is THE most enlightening and powerful activity that brands can carry out to answer an extensive range of questions which can be crucial to how their website performs.

As well as providing genuine evidence of what people are doing on websites, usability testing provides compelling insights as to WHY people are doing what they are doing. OK, stay with me on this, I know I’m not enlightening anyone so far with this statement…

The problem (or opportunity) is the term usability testing, or user testing, whichever you prefer to use. Testing is much more than just testing the ‘usability’ of a website, much more than just testing how affective a website is in achieving its goals.

by Paul Rouke 07 September 2011 13:11pm 5 comments

Usability and AB/Multivariate Testing – a special relationship

Website optimisation teams are so much more effective when UX/Usability Consultants and AB/Multivariate Testing experts work closely together.

We have seen first-hand the difference this makes to the conversion rate optimisation process.

by Chris Gibbins 26 August 2011 10:14am 7 comments

Travel shoppers react badly to Facebook Like buttons: report

Consumers on travel sites had an overwhelmingly negative reaction to Facebook 'Like' buttons, seeing this as a unnecessary distraction, according to a travel usability study.

The study from Usabilia used 800 participants and looked at the user experience on airline, hotel and travel comparison websites.

Here are just a few highlights from the report, as well as a couple of infographics based on the data...

by Graham Charlton 18 August 2011 10:59am 7 comments

How to use ClickTale to analyse visitor behaviour effectively

ClickTale, for me, is one of the best tools to use when you want to improve your website performance. However, it is difficult to find any guides on how to extract insight from the videos and heat-maps you are seeing.

There is a wealth of knowledge surrounding the implementation of the tool on any type of website, and tracking in all sorts of clever ways. However, it has taken me years to get to grips with using the tool to find truly valuable insight.

I want to share some of my findings with you...

by Chris Rowett 27 July 2011 14:28pm 3 comments

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.

by Kathryn McDonnell 14 July 2011 10:32am 1 comment

Javari provides the best customer experience: study

Online shoe retailer Javari has the best user experience of 51 leading e-commerce websites, according to a new study.

Javari, which is an offshoot of Amazon, achieved this thanks to excellent scores for search and navigation, as well as its delivery and returns process.

I've been looking at the eDigital Research report in detail, as well as what Javari is doing well online...

by Graham Charlton 10 June 2011 09:39am 5 comments

How does the new Republic mobile site shape up?

Republic launched its first mobile commerce site this week, becoming the latest fashion retailer to do so.

From the various mobile site and app reviews I've written, consumer surveys and more I've compiled a checklist of key points to create a usable mobile site. (Please suggest any others I may have missed out).