ModCloth_UXR

Nielsen Norman report on iPad usability

Diary Study Program

Why not to second-guess pricing from customer complaints - written by a social media consultant, but good point re price for the people who are ready for it

Why did you click on this blog post? Right now, you're probably able to answer that question with relative ease. Micro-surveys are short and to the point. Similar to the question above, they only have one or two questions and they're extremely targeted. This means that they're not only easy to answer, but easy to create, implement, and analyze. If your company is practicing agile, or just trying to move quickly, you can easily integrate micro-surveys into your existing schedule.

Usability and user experience testing is vital to creating a successful website, and only more so if it's an e-commerce website, a complex app or another website for which there's a definite ROI. And running your own user tests to find out how users are interacting with your website and where problems might arise is completely possible.

Originally published: May 11, 2004 Back in the late 1970's, the US government commissioned a study to look at effective group decision making. In the study, they asked 30 military experts to study intelligence data and try to construct the enemy's troop movements. Each expert analyzed the data and compiled a report.

UX practitioners, both consultants and in house, sometimes conduct research. Be it usability testing or user research with a generative goal, research requires planning. To make sure product managers, developers, marketers and executives (let's call them stakeholders) act on UX research results, planning must be crystal clear, collaborative, fast and digestible.

This Sample Size Calculator is presented as a public service of Creative Research Systems survey software. You can use it to determine how many people you need to interview in order to get results that reflect the target population as precisely as needed. You can also find the level of precision you have in an existing sample.

If you are a UX professional, you've probably struggled at times to get your voice heard. Between ladder-climbing product managers, cowboy engineers, and a workload that leaves you out of breath every day, rising above the shenanigans of corporate life can be a challenge. All you really want to do is design truly amazing experiences for your customers, but the politics and red tape of your workplace get in the way. Or do they? It's easy to blame the "system," but in reality, we all control our own destinies. The following tips will help you take control, especially if you work on a product team in a corporate setting. Using any combination of these strategies will help you push past your day-to-day challenges to have an even bigger impact on your team.

The holiday shopping season is in full swing, and once again, we find ourselves scrambling to figure out what to buy our friends and family. Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone but I still have plenty of shopping to do. My wife started dropping subtle hints about a month ago, but I'm still not confident that what I end up getting her will be what she really wants. And this isn't a new pattern of ours. Every holiday season when we exchange gifts, she thanks me, she smiles at me, she hugs me, and then she inevitably returns everything.

Ecommerce sites should consider how they can personalize their sites using Facebook data, as a new study shows 50% of visitors to ecommerce sites are currently logged in to Facebook. Using Facebook social plugins and Connect integrations, sites can leverage Facebook data to show visitors what friends bought or shared, what products relate to their Likes, and which friends they might want to invite. The study was conducted by Sociable Labs, which helps websites implement social functionality, and looked at 456 million visits to over a dozen ecommerce sites catering to different demographics.

As a social psychologist, I'm interested in how social commerce works. Not for academic reasons, but for a purely practical reason. Understanding why it makes commercial sense to help people to connect where they buy and buy where they connect provides businesses with a strategic advantage; the opportunity to reap the rewards of a powerful insight-led social commerce strategy, as opposed to merely deploying social commerce as a set of tactical tools. Jumping to the conclusion of a rather long post, I think that a psychologically informed understanding of how social commerce works points to the possibility of six particularly effective social commerce strategies.

Inforgraphic on social shopping behaviors & stats

Talk by Janice Fraser at Startup Lessions Learned Conference in May 201. Case Study discussion from Cooper - Tim McCoy - Director, Integrated Product Development, Cooper Case Study: TheLadders - Jeff Gothelf - Director of User Experience, TheLadders Case Study: LUXr NYC - Josh Seiden - Program Director, LUXr NYC Case Study: SideReel - Zach Larson - Entrepreneur/Former CPO, SideReel

Experience maps have become more prominent over the past few years, largely because companies are realizing the interconnectedness of the cross-channel experience. It's becoming increasingly useful to gain insight in order to orchestrate service touchpoints over time and space. But I still see a dearth of quality references. When someone asks me for examples, the only good one I can reference is nForm's published nearly two years ago. However, I believe their importance exceeds their prevalence. I'm often asked what defines a good experience map. You could call an experience map a deliverable, although, as the current 4-letter word of UX, that may make some people gag a little bit. But really, it's a model. A model on steroids. It's an artifact that serves to illuminate the complete experience a person may have with a product or service. But it's not just about the illustration of the journey (that would simply be a journey map). And it's not a service blueprint which shows how a system works in enough detail to verify, implement and maintain it.

Eye tracking on Facebook Profile Page

If you're like most of the marketers or business owners I talk with these days, you're wondering what exactly are the benefits of Facebook fans (i.e., "Likes") to your brand. Also, how much more likely are they to do business with you than those who don't "like" you on Facebook? Those who profess to be fans are much more likely to participate in "desirable actions" using Facebook, such as making a purchase, installing an app, entering a sweepstakes or voting online in a contest. That's according to SocialCode, a full-service social agency owned by the Washington Post Company, which looked at 50 brands and more than 5 million Facebook ads over a five-month period earlier this year.

What is the biggest missed opportunity in ecommerce optimization? Is it A/B testing? Performance testing? How about cart recovery? We put a lot of focus on optimizing the cart, getting the customer through to conversion, yet still it's not uncommon to have abandonment rates of 50% or higher. We know a good chunk of abandonment does not occur because the button wasn't big enough or green enough or our web forms are too long. Some got distracted, some wanted to hold items for later, some left and couldn't remember your site URL, some even thought the transaction went through when it did not.

Infographic