Usability Testing

The New Media Age Effectiveness Awards promotes the quality of new media usage in the UK, emphasising effectiveness to allow smaller companies to compete on an equal footing with larger ones. Providing a benchmark of excellence for the industry, illustrating the importance of usability and accessibility, in building an effective online presence. Demonstrating the power of interactive media to the wider business world.

Foviance is sponsoring and conducting the usability testing for the shortlisted entries, in the ‘Business’ and the ‘Best use of Web’ categories, with Catriona Campbell, founder of Foviance, judging at the event.

By Lis Shorten

Have you ever wondered what it might be like to browse a website with a visual impairment? Or wondered how your website is perceived by a person with a vision disorder?

There are many different types of vision disorders that can affect a user’s ability to view web pages and way too many to cover off here. However, to give you an idea, I have simulated how the Foviance website homepage might look to someone with cataracts, macular degeneration, glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy. These are four of the most common types of vision disorders. Cataracts is the leading cause of blindness worldwide and in the UK, 2 million people are visually impaired with macular degeneration (40%), glaucoma (13%) and diabetic retinopathy (8%) being the three most common causes. Read more…

BBC News Election 2010 micro-site. The BBC News website is the Internet arm of the biggest broadcasting newsgatherer in the world. Election 2010 is a microsite developed specifically to provide in-depth coverage of the 2010 General Election in the UK.

With the impending UK General Election, BBC News developed a separate content area as part of its main site. There was an internal discussion to decide whether this should follow the index approach of the main BBC News website, or whether it should be a micro-site with additional, user-driven functionality. The team wanted to deliver a great election experience to two very different types of target users – Novices and Super Users – by including additional features, while ensuring the Election micro-site was as accessible and usable as the main News site.

Download full BBC News case study (945 KB)

If you do not have Adobe Reader you can Download it here

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 23/04/10 and is republished here with permission.

When the graphs are going up and to the right, people are generally happy. Life feels fine when there’s good growth in the right kind of metrics and despite the tough economic trading conditions over the past 18 months, the digital economy has generally been doing OK. Here in the UK spending on online advertising grew by just under 5% in 2009 compared to 2008 with spend on Search up by just under 10%. Whilst that isn’t the kind of stellar growth seen in previous years, the indicators are positive. Business confidence amongst advertisers is higher than it’s been previously and we’re continuing to see growth in the active online audience (up 10% vs. a year ago), some of that being driven by the growth in population of social networking sites such as Facebook. Read more…

lowcostholidays.com aims to provide the best value holidays on the web and deliver quality service to all their customers. They continuously measure the effectiveness of their website, monitoring and enhancing the customer experience. With so much competition in this sector, holiday websites have to be fast, logical and easy to use.

lowcostholidays.com’s successful relationship with Customer Experience consultancy Foviance, led them to engage in their services again. Foviance replicated test setup for lowcostholidays.com’s website and used the previous findings as a basis for a new usability evaluation. This proved to be a perfect example of the benefits of interactive testing.

Download full lowcostholidays.com case study (389 KB)

If you do not have Adobe Reader you can Download it here

A few weeks ago, Foviance was commissioned by a major UK retail bank to conduct user testing sessions on online application processes. The main objective of the research was to compare the newly designed process with the current one. And from there, stemmed a finding that challenges one of the most profound customer experience beliefs: the simplest way is not always the best. Read more…

By Lis Shorten

There is a distinct difference between ‘accessibility compliance’ and ‘an accessible experience’. Read more…

July 30, 2009 – Foviance, the experts in customer experience, were appointed in 4Q 2008 by Turner Broadcasting to evaluate the user experience of their newly developed Cartoon Network website launching across 12 EMEA territories in 2009.Research was conducted by Foviance in the UK, Poland and Spain, working in collaboration with Xperience Consulting in Spain and UseLab in Poland. This research played a key part in the user centred development of Cartoon Network’s new website, which aims to increase the level of kids’ engagement, entertainment and reward. The UK website has recently launched as part of the EMEA wide rollout. Read more…