Archive for 'Online Experience'

Jan13

Ian Everdell

4

Web Forms Done Right – Form Best Practices

As promised in my post about bad web forms, here are some form best practices to get you started on making sure your forms don’t suck. Credit – Rather than re-inventing the wheel, I’ve borrowed several examples from Luke Wroblewski, one of the web’s most authoritative voices on web form design. If you’re looking for a really in depth look at forms, check out his book. Do you really need that information? This is probably one of the most common problems out there: you want 12 pieces of information from your visitor, and they’re only willing to give you two. [...]

Jan10

Guest

0

Multilingual SEO: by language or by country?

With only around a quarter of internet users being native English-speakers, and with the majority of multilingual users placing more trust in websites written in their own native language when it comes to making purchases online, website localisation and multilingual SEO are becoming increasingly important aspects of online marketing. Indeed, Common Sense Advisory studies suggest an average return of US$25 for every $1 spent on localization. The benefits are clear, but once you’ve decided to take the plunge, you still have to decide whether to target foreign markets by language or by country. By language Many languages are spoken across [...]

Dec08

Ian Everdell

0

Are You Losing Conversions Because Your Forms Suck?

Have you ever been frustrated by a web form? Me too. And lately I’ve been on a bit of rant because I’m finding more and more forms that suck. So I’m going to show you some examples of recent sucky forms that I’ve found so that you don’t make the same mistakes. You will lose conversions if your form sucks – unless you’re giving me something incredibly valuable, I’m not wasting my time. Most of these examples come from contests I’ve recently entered. That’s really their only saving grace – the fact that I’m willing to put a lot of [...]

Nov04

Ian Everdell

4

5 Landing Pages Tests You Might Not Have Thought Of

You’re probably familiar with the “standard” list of things you can and should test on your landing pages: Headline Content Calls to action Form length Images Colors Layout … and so on. But here are 5 things that maybe you haven’t thought of testing. 1. Make all of your form fields optional Sales and marketing folk always want to get the best possible leads, so they tend to ask for lots of information on landing pages. Making all of your form fields optional might sound scary, but could actually work out for the better. Which Test Won shows us an [...]

Oct05

Ian Everdell

4

Eye Tracking Google Instant: Does It Change Searcher Behavior?

If you’re not in New York, or decided to go to one of those “more exciting” sessions at SMX this morning, you will have missed being the first to hear about whether Google Instant is changing user behavior. But fear not, I’m offering a recap of the preliminary findings here. Methodology We did two things to collect some user feedback: a 20-person lab study with eye tracking, and an online survey. For the survey, we got about 150 responses from our newsletter, Twitter, email, and other social sharing of the invite. Questions were basic use and preference questions about Instant, [...]

Sep17

Ian Everdell

2

Yahoo! and Bing Making User Interface Changes Too

Everybody’s talking about Google Instant – is it faster, is it easier, is it a better experience? But they’re not the only ones tweaking their interface in the hopes of changing the search experience. In the last couple of days, both Yahoo! and Bing have announced changes to the way they present search results as well. Yahoo! takes a stab at presenting a richer experience when you search for entertainment-related information, and Bing has used the power of HTML5, Windows 7, and IE9 to make the search experience more desktop-like. Let’s look at Yahoo! first. Yahoo! the Entertainer Announced in [...]

Sep10

Ian Everdell

4

Don’t Bring Good Prospects to a Bad Site

Unlike baseball, “if you build it, they will come” doesn’t really apply online. So you’ve probably put a fair amount of money into making sure you’re ranking well organically and driving traffic through paid advertising. Your clickthrough rate has skyrocketed… but your number of new customer acquisitions has not risen accordingly. What’s going on? You might be suffering from poor user experience on your site. This could stem from any number of things, including: Content that doesn’t address your potential customers’ needs and pains, doesn’t speak in their language, or doesn’t show how your offering can benefit them Information architecture [...]

Sep07

Ian Everdell

1

Calls to Action: Combat Distractions, Coach Conversions

The web can be an overwhelming and distracting place. I strongly suspect I’m not the only one who’s been in the middle of a task, only to be sidetracked by the YouTube video of the cute kitten, checking my Twitter feed, sending an email, reading the Ask.Enquiro blog, and… wait, what was I doing? To help combat these distractions, you need a call to action. Ultimately, you want visitors to your site to download that whitepaper, sign up for that webinar, or contact you for a trial. Everything on your site (or at least on a specific page) should be [...]

Jul30

Ian Everdell

1

The UX of a University Website, xkcd Style

Ever had to visit a university campus and tried to use the campus map on their website to figure out where you need to go? It’s not easy. Between my wife’s recent acceptance to medical school (and the ensuing flurry of activity to get her registered, find a place to live, move across the country, and so on…) and a number of university experiences myself, I’m fairly confident in saying that, in general, universities have less-than-stellar website usability. “But Ian,” you say, “as the upper echelons of higher education, shouldn’t these institutions be well-equipped to serve the needs of their [...]

Jun17

Ian Everdell

12

A Big List of User Experience Best Practices

I promised some user experience best practices in the latest episode of The Expert Eye, Thinking Like A User, and I intend to make good on that promise. There are all kinds of lists of best practices out there, ranging in size from small (like Nielsen’s Ten Usability Heuristics) to gigantic (like Usability.gov’s Guidelines), and there will always be debate about what’s most important, valid, easy, or any number of other adjectives. But there is one thing that I think most UX specialists will agree on: if you are aware of these best practices, you can at least evaluate whether [...]

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