Usability Testing

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)

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…

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…

Due to the decision to extend the free version of CREDITFOCUS to all small businesses in the UK, Clearlybusiness were suddenly in the situation where they had an external website that was not up to the job of promoting CREDITFOCUS, and did not represent the worthiness of the application.

Rapid wireframing was used to meet the needs of Clearlybusiness as they were looking to deliver some quick wins in a very short space of time, from the first day of discussing requirements to the delivery of wireframes within 6 days. The final deliverables included a set of 11 wireframes that formed the basis of the developed site.

Conrad Ford, Head of Existing Businesses, was extremely pleased with the designs produced.

Download full 55KB .pdf case study

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

The past few weeks I have been looking at the need for organisations to focus more heavily on the user experience and to more rigouroulsy understand what their customers want online and how best to deliver that to them. Good customer insight is core to that process and insight comes from a range of systems, methodologies and techniques. Last time  I looked at the use of quantitative approaches to customer insight and this week I want to look at some of the more qualitative approaches. Read more…

We’ve all been there. Sitting round a conference room table discussing with our colleagues about the design of the website, the flow of a particular user path or the layout of a particular page. Opinions differ on what would work best, whether the call to action button should be red or blue, square or round, flat or bevelled. We all know best, because we’re experts. Aren’t we? In some cases it may not matter how expert we are, because the loudest voice will win or the most important person’s opinion will be the one that counts. Read more…

By Lucy Carruthers

Chris Lake of Econsultancy recently published a blog called 50 swinish ways to annoy web users. It’s an amusing read, but what struck me is that the first 7 items related to forms of advertising on the web (Auto-play, interstitials, death by Adsense, death by banners, pop-ups, etc.)Advertising on web sites is an interesting conundrum. The participants in our studies are often quite vocal in their annoyance of them, yet online advertising generates big money for companies so we must be clicking on them. In fact, the IAB have recently released a press release stating that in the US Internet advertising revenues surpassed $23 Billion in 2008, reaching a record high. So like them or loathe them, adverts are a big part of our online world.

Our clients often ask how best to approach advertising on their site. Is brighter and bolder better? Should adverts be contextual and personalised? Should they wait until the end of a customer journey to upsell or is that too late? How can they create a design that provides the best balance between increasing their revenue without infuriating their customers at the risk of damaging their revenue?

I recently tested a high-fidelity black and white prototype for a financial client that contained placeholders for adverts. On pages containing non-personal content, the advertising wasn’t questioned by the participants as it appeared relevant to the main content, and also offered potential savings and discounts to the users. The participants were less keen to see similar material on pages where the main content was personal to them; however, their attitude was that as long as they weren’t distracted from their tasks they weren’t too bothered. But, as soon as the same participants saw the same pages but with the graphic design overlaid their attitude immediately changed; they were enraged to see ‘advertising’ amongst their personal account information despite the savings promoted. The graphic design had made the adverts far more prominent and as far as the participants were concerned they were intrusive and out of place.

So what can organisations do?

Firstly, organisations should see how their competitors are doing it and determine what works and what doesn’t. Online banking, for example, is an area where adverts are becoming ubiquitous and I think some banks have got their placement right, while others rudely interrupt the users journey.

Secondly, they should look for innovative new ways to advertise while keeping the users goals and needs in mind. Pixazza, a company in the States, have developed a means of converting photos on web sites into interactive advertisements. James Everingham, who is behind the concept, says that many adverts are an “obnoxious intrusion” and that “ads work best when they don’t resemble ads but rather a feature that helps shoppers find items they may already be interested in buying”.

Lastly, it’s crucial to test any designs with users and to test iteratively. Testing with early prototypes can catch key issues before it gets expensive to make changes, and testing once the final design has been overlaid can ensure that with the graphic design the site still meets the users needs and expectations. The graphic design can have a major impact on both on the usability of the site and the user experience; and satisfaction levels for the overall customer experience.