During a recent podcast with the VP Head of Design at SAP, Janaki Kumar, she discussed the benefit of using games to build engagement amongst workshop participants. Following on from this, we wanted to hear from you. What games had you played, or use, and why are they great?
We ran a competition and chose our favorite submissions. Below are the games that won and we thank all of you who sent in game ideas. You are a playful lot!
Fact #1: Many companies spend thousands of dollars on their website.
Fact #2: Most of these companies have little idea whether their website is achieving its goals.
UX testing is the mechanism that informs a company as to whether their website is working for them or against them.
The following article provides a high-level report from one such case study.
For many companies, competitive benchmarking is a foray into the world of espionage. Being able to see which elements of your competitor’s website are working, and which are not, can be a revelation.
One of Loop11’s great features is the ability to run user testing on practically any website. It was this ability which Loop11 Consulting used to great effect in the below case study.
Loop11 consulting was engaged by an online pharmacy to carry out unmoderated online user testing on comparative industry websites to assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of each.
By 2017, app downloads are set to reach 270 billion worldwide. So it’s fair to say that the app marketplace is pretty crowded. Any app that gives users a less than 5 star user experience is doomed to failure.
And yet despite this cut-throat environment, some apps still hit the marketplace riddled with usability issues thanks to sub-par user testing. In fact, according to a report by Perfecto Mobile, 44% of app errors are found not by testers but by users after the app is launched. It’s not only unfair to make the unsuspecting user act as a usability test guinea pig, it’s also bad business: shoddy app usability leads to abandonment, loss of investment and time wasted.
It’s not only the little guy app developers who fail foul of bad usability; even the big guys can get caught out. Take Google Wave, which launched with a hugely complex feature set and commensurately low usability levels, and predictably flopped. That’s not to say that Google didn’t run usability tests on the Google Wave app before launch – of course they did. But it’s possible they didn’t run them adequately.
This article is a guest post by Tim Brown, a web designer from Minneapolis.
User Experience (UX) is such an interesting subject because it’s really just the study of humans, and our ways of interacting with things. It calls us to pay attention to the perspective of those around us – it helps us take into consideration the habits and tendencies of others to really make something that’s easy to use and pleasant.
I was in community college for Web Design and Interactive media when I first heard about User Experience. It was really a bit mysterious to me for a couple months until I dug into it – toured a local agency that was hiring interns for UX, and read a couple amazing books on the subject: Steven Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” and “Lean UX” by Jeff Gothelf.
I got excited and started chatting with other people in my class that wanted to get into the internship – so we started a project together, got a real client, and even got her to pay for coffee shop gift cards used to bribe people to do user experience testing with us on her chiropractic website.
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At Loop11 we’ve long been a tool that our clients go to when they need to run dozens, or even hundreds, of participants through their user tests. They then use our reporting suite to extract insights which feed back into their design process.
Many clients have used Loop11 in conjunction with other qualitative tools which provided videos of a participant’s session but there was always a certain disconnect between the two data sets.
Today we are excited to announce the launch of Loop11 Videos (Beta). Now, when you run a project within Loop11 your results will also include user videos*. For the first time you will now be able to see not only the what but also the why all from within the one tool.
The introduction of Loop11 Videos means you will no longer be spending hours watching irrelevant videos and can now go straight to the user footage containing the insights you need.
Best yet, why spend thousands of dollars on your user testing, getting limited data from only a few participants, when with Loop11 for only $199 per month you can run hundreds of users through an unlimited number of usability tests!
Sign-up today for 3 free user tests on our 14 day trial.
Toby
CEO, Loop11
* Videos will only be recorded for projects using the Loop11 JavaScript.
This episode is the second in our mini-series, Design Horizons, where we speak with design leaders from around the world. We discuss issues they believe to be the highest priority in the design and UX industry.
In this episode we look at the UX Design education problem and hear how to schools (plus Google) are looking to fix it.
Originally published on True North.
This episode is the first in a series where we speak with design leaders from around the world. We discuss issues they believe to be of the highest priority in the design and UX industry.
In this first episode we look at diversity and hear how one lady in particular is not only thriving in a male dominated arena, but also helping to pave the way for other women.
This episode features Jeff Gothelf, Jared Spool, Andy Budd, Georgie Bottomley & more…
Originally published on True North.
