'Net Features : usabilla

6 Ways to Prime Your Web Design

Linc Wonham — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 20:30:00 GMT

Just like shopping in the brick-and-mortar world, website users are exposed to direct and indirect cues online that can unconsciously nudge them into making different decisions down the line. This process is called priming.

Web designers can use priming to their advantage if they understand how and why it works, and how different situations call for different methods of priming. Priming describes the exposure to a stimulus that activates mental pathways. At a later point in time when these pathways are still active, they are more easily accessible for a similar stimulus than non-active ones. This leads to a priming effect.

An example of this is seen in television commercials. Watching televised advertising activates different mental pathways, and these pathways usually only link to positive memories – which is exactly what ad designers get paid to do.

The next time you visit the supermarket and see a product from an ad, these positive memories are triggered and they leave you with a positive attitude towards the product. If you need to choose between a hundred different types of yogurt brands, you are most likely going to go for the one that gives you a positive feeling.

How Designers Can Use Primes
Priming does not work by forcing a decision upon your customers, but you can use it as a means to effectively support their decisions. Primes that can be used to guide your customers and support their decisions through website design include the following:

1. Colors
Colors have different meanings and can be used to prime emotions. You can color your background or only specific elements like buttons or content areas, for example. Be aware of your target group and their understanding of colors and the emotions they elicit.

2. Text
Text can also be used as a prime, of course. Include the exact wording of your menu items in your content and build a nice story around them, for example. Then when customers look around your site, the primed menu item will lead their thoughts back to your story -- which makes elements of the story accessible.

3. Metaphors
Use metaphors that refer to information to help your customers make a decision. For example, imagine you try to sell vacation trips. You could use the metaphor of a shell to trigger positive emotions like sun, beach, palm trees, ocean, waves, relaxation, etc.

4. Images
Use pictures to prime your customers. These pictures can either be in the background or a central element of your webpage. You can prime emotions that come with the purchase of your product or you can prime a desirable action that requires the purchase of your product, for example. Both times, you trigger memories that might only be distantly related to your product, as a way to guide your customers’ decisions.

5. Video
Use videos to prime a whole process of actions. Showing the sign-up process with the different steps involved will make it easier for your customers to sign up, for example. Different memories related to a sign-up process will be accessible that help to make the right choice. Besides, when your customers see the sign up button, the process of signing up will be more accessible to them than it would be without the prime.

6. Audio
Include audio on your website to prime any action you want your customers to engage in. Make sure that you don’t tell your customers what to do, but rather give them the idea that they figured it out themselves.

Ensure that you pay attention to the atmosphere on your website. The emotional perception and elements that refer to emotions are important primes when it comes to the perception of your site. And for the rest, be creative! Anything that activates information in the minds of your customers can be used as prime.

It is important to note that priming is not the same as subliminal messaging. The two are related, but subliminal messaging includes ‘hidden’ primes and is considered by many to be an unethical marketing practice. Besides, not much research can be found to prove that subliminal messaging really works.

Priming, on the other hand, has been proven multiple times to influence our judgment and decision-making, and is a recognized marketing tool. Priming includes visual or at least sensible primes that can be identified, such as pictures or odors. These primes should be context-sensitive and part of your website design.

Primes influence our choices, but they support our decision-making processes instead of forcing a decision upon us. However, primes only work if they are not identified as such, which also offers some food for thought.

About the author: Paul Veugen is the CEO and founder of Usabilla, a Web-based usability testing tool that allows marketers, analysts, designers and usability experts to collect visual feedback on their websites. Participants answer questions with points and notes on top of a webpage, mockup or sketch, and the results are analyzed and presented visually with charts and heat maps.

Usabilla's Design Templates Optimize User Experience

Linc Wonham — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Usabilla has introduced a series of new testing templates that enable companies to set up a number of diverse design tests for their webpages in 30 seconds.

The new templates allow marketers, designers, analysts and usability experts to use design feedback to optimize user experience (UX) and offers a dashboard that lets them see how their tests are performing in a clear overview. A video demonstration of the new feedback templates can be viewed in action.

The new Usabilla ready-made testing templates for design feedback include the following:

•    A call-to-action test to find out if users know how to contact you
•    A likes and dislikes test to collect feedback about what your users think about your webpage
•    A trust test to determine which visuals help to gain user trust
•    A priority test to measure what users think is the most relevant content on your page

Groups of participants answer questions about attitude and user experience with points and notes on top of a website page from their computers or mobile devices. The collected feedback and results of a survey are then analyzed and presented visually with charts and heat maps.

Usabilla’s customers involve their users and the public to create user-inspired design, and can use these visual insights to improve user experience and optimize their websites – all without slowing down development cycles.

Eyes on the Prize: Top Tracking Tools for Merchants

Allison Howen — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 21:30:00 GMT

Have you ever wondered how your site is viewed through the eyes of your consumers? What if you could easily answer questions like, "Where do the most clicks happen?" and "How far do consumers scroll down?"

Not only can these questions be answered, but with the right platform a merchant can capture and review every move that a visitor makes on their site.

The following solutions provide tools and data that merchants can utilize to not only increase clicks and conversions, but also to create more clickable links, make their sites more user-friendly and analyze potential problems that consumers face when visiting their sites.

Crazyegg
This solution provides deep analytics about a user’s experience. Features include a heatmap tool that shows the most-clicked content, a scrollmap that reveals how far consumers typically scroll down a page, an overlay tool that provides the number of clicks of each page element, and a confetti tool that segments clicks so merchants know where their traffic is coming from. Furthermore, this solution provides a 30-day, money-back guarantee, and the basic plan starts at $9 a month.

ClickTale
Used by more than 60,000 companies, this is a popular solution for small- and medium-sized businesses. It provides valuable tools for following customers' every click and scroll, such as click heatmaps, mouse-move heatmaps, attention heatmaps, conversion funnels, form analytics, visitor recordings and more. The silver plan is the most-used solution, with a price of $290 a month; however there is also a limited free plan, as well as bronze, gold and enterprise solutions. Additionally, ClickTale offers a 30-day, money-back guarantee.

Userfly
Increase your conversions with easy usability testing from Userfly. This solution provides merchants with videos of how consumers navigate their sites, as well as data from every mouse move and click. The platform starts at $10 a month for the basic solution and reaches $200 a month for the enterprise solution. There is also a free option available for merchants that want to test the solution before committing to a larger plan.

Tealeaf
With Tealeaf’s Customer Experience Management (CEM) solution, merchants can obtain visibility and insight into their visitors’ navigating habits. The solution captures what a consumer sees when visiting your site, and therefore allows merchants to see their website from a customer’s point of view. It provides cross-session analysis and reporting, customer experience improvements and ROI statistics. The insights from the solution can also help retailers resolve application problems, improve first-call resolutions and improve site usability and design.

Usabilla
This solution is a little different than the previous platforms, because it focuses more on testing the usability of a website instead of visitors’ clicks and scrolls. Features include mobile usability testing, website design testing for any stage of development and user feedback, which aims at helping merchants monitor which links consumers click the most. Usabilla offers free testing of its solution, with its other plans starting at $49 a month. Currently the solution is used by more than 10,000 marketers, researchers, designers and analysts.

Report Studies User Experience of Financial Websites

Michael Garrity — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 17:00:00 GMT

Web-based usability testing tool Usabilla recently conducted a study on the user experience, as well as usability similarities and differences among some of the largest retail banking websites in countries around the world, including the U.S., Germany and the U.K. Though it is focused on sites in the financial sector, many of the takeaways from the study provide insights that can be used to help websites in any industry.

Among the banks included in the report are Bank of America, Barclays, Chase, Citi, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland and Wells Fargo.

In the study, 400 participants were asked to perform simple, everyday tasks on these various websites and then provide feedback about their experiences. They were asked various questions, such as which aspects of the sites made them trust the banks, where they had to click to get information about credit cards, where they had to click to find information about how to meet with someone from their nearest branch of the bank, where to click if they have had a card stolen and what they would change or improve about each site.

Usabilla took the data from this report and gave each site a mean score based on accuracy and the time it took users to locate important information on the site. From there, each site was ranked from best to worst based on its overall performance.

Some of the most important findings from the study include the following:

- Often, many of these sites have a divide between a user's priorities and the priorities of the banks. Most of the "information is often based not on the most frequent actions a user takes . . . but on the services the bank wants to sell."

- A user's trust in a website is based largely on visual factors. Pages that display a padlock icon by their login and sign-in sections are often much more trusted than those who don't. Also, if they have clear banners and links that make reference to their security measures or programs, they appear more trustworthy; on the other hand, sites with many ads and/or offers appear less trustworthy.

- Most banks performed poorly when it came to offering a "Lost Credit Card" button by failing to place one somewhere that was easy for users to access. Many of the participants in the study said that "the experience of losing a credit card could be much less stressful" if banks were to make this button simpler to find on their websites.

- The sites with the cleanest designs on their credit card pages performed the best in the survey, with all participants agreeing that too much information made it difficult to find desired content.

"The retail banking sector occupies a critical corner on the Internet, and consumers place their financial livelihood in these companies every day," says Paul Veugen, Usabilla Founder and CEO. "We decided to test and highlight these leading retail banking websites due to the level of trust that consumers place in them combined with the intrinsic customer-centric nature of the banking sector."

Of course, it should go without saying that much of the information gleaned from this study can be worthwhile for any website. For instance, a common issue on many webpages is that businesses often don't adapt fast enough to meet user needs or wants, and recent trends on many sites are swinging towards customization for users. Likewise, it has long been known that the more cluttered a page is, the less usable it will be for people visiting the site.

Thus, it is good for website owners and designers to pay attention to these kinds of reports because, if nothing else, they show that even major companies can still make mistakes on the Web. The major findings of the study, when broken down to their essentials, are all about having a clean and easy-to-follow design and providing relevant content to users. I think that those concerns should be contemplated by any website.

User Experience Report on Travel Websites

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 01:00:00 GMT

Web-based usability testing tool Usabilla published an interesting report today on the user experience and usability of websites within the travel industry.

Participants who tested the hotel and comparison websites were asked questions about what they liked best and least on each company’s homepage, while participants who tested the airline website home pages were asked to locate where they would click to print their boarding pass and were timed to see how long they took.Airline sites tested include American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines, and travel sites inclde Sharaton, W Hotels, Priceline, and Travelocity among others. 800 people participated in the study.

“The travel sector occupies a very recognizable corner on the Internet, and there are a myriad of ways to book an airplane ticket or accommodation,” said Paul Veugen, CEO and founder of Usabilla. “Given the intrinsic customer-centric attitude of the travel sector, these companies strive to deliver a pleasurable online customer experience by embracing the importance of usability and user experience, which is why we decided to test and highlight them.”

So did the travel websites in focus live up to the high expectations?

Among airlines, The Delta Airlines homepage scored highest in terms of accuracy (67%) of participants locating the boarding pass, and Delta also scored best in terms of the time (15.3 seconds) it took to find it.

Those testing hotel sites revealed some interesting information as well. Those sites with a “clear header, ease of navigation and beautiful visual design” all stood out in a positive way. Sites with “scattered testimonials, social media buttons, buttons that don’t fit with the navigational structure” received negative feedback.

Perhaps most surprising was the responses related to the Facebook ‘Like’ buttons on these travel websites. The reaction of participants to the buttons was overwhelmingly negative across all travel sector tests according to Usabilla. Participants "strongly disliked" the buttons and stated they “really hate the pushy appearance of a company asking for an endorsement” or “begging” a user to ‘Like’ their company or brand without any benefit to the user.