In February the interaction design community gathered in Savannah for three exciting days of keynotes and workshops at IXD10.
Nate Bolt, one of the founders of the US based usability research firm Bolt | Peters, gave an interesting presentation about remote research. Nate has overseen hundreds of user experience projects for customers like Sony, Oracle, Volkswagen, Greenpeace, Autodesk, and many others. In about 30 minutes he shared his experiences on remote research.

In his presentation at IXD10 Nate also shared his experiences with Usabilla (skip to 15:00 min):

“It’s (the heatmaps) a great deliverable internally… It’s really easy to understand.”

“We like it as an add-on to other kinds of research, because it’s so easy to create. It just takes a few minutes.”

Be sure to check out the book deal we’ve set up with Rosenfeld: upgrade your account and receive a copy of the book ‘Remote Research‘ by Nate Bolt & Tony Tulathimutte.

We’ll be attending UX Lx 2010 in sunny Lisbon from 12 to 14 May. If you’re fast you can order early bird tickets and meet the international UX scene in beautiful Portugal. Great speakers (Steve Krug, Jared Spool, Peter Merholz, Luke Wroblewski, and many others), interesting workshops for everyone (beginners, intermediates, & advanced).

UX Lx is a unique three-day User Experience event set in sunny Lisbon, Portugal on May 12-14 2010. A premier event for User Experience Professionals, Designers, Information Architects and Usability Practitioners, UX Lx will bring together more than 300 professionals. Coupled with a set of world renowned speakers, all of them published authors and leading experts in their fields, UX Lx will be one of the largest events of its kind in Europe.

With 12 though-provoking talks, 16 hands-on workshops and 16 open sessions, UX Lx will pre- sent the latest knowledge in the field, giving attendees the information and techniques they will need to push their work forward. Workshops will be split in three levels: Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced, enabling newcomers and seasoned professionals alike to hone up their skills and techniques. Talks will present all the latest topics in a thought-provoking fashion and are set to be starting points for discussion and further investigation. Open sessions will allow free submis- sions and will be curated by the organising committee, enabling up and coming professionals to show their knowledge and gain recognition. A range of networking events and side activities is also being laid out so that everyone can have a great time at UX Lx.

Meet us in Lisbon and order your tickets here: ux-lx.com

We made an interesting deal with Rosenfeld Media.  If you upgrade your account to a standard or large plan now, you’ll receive a free copy of Rosenfeld Media’s newest publication: “Remote Research” by Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte from Bolt | Peters. “Remote Research” is a must read for everyone who wants to learn more about the ins-and-outs of remote testing. Nate and Tony are excellent guides in the world of remote research and share their experiences in more than 200 usability tests in this funny and easy-to-read book.

Sign up for a Usabilla account now and receive a free copy of this book.
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What others say about this book

“Nate and Tony have done it! They’ve described beautifully one of the user experience profession’s best-kept secrets—conducting remote usability tests. This book is a must-have for anyone thinking about remote testing, since it tackles everything you need from soup to nuts. I can’t wait to get a copy for my own bookshelf. Oh, it also will melt your face remotely.”
—Jared Spool CEO and Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering

“Remote user research helped us find a good mix of users whose intent was to conduct the same tasks that we were examining on the AAA TripTik Travel Planner. It was thrilling for our team of developers, researchers, and managers to watch and hear travelers interact with the application in their own environments.”
—Renuka Sastri Manager of Publishing Marketing, AAA

“The techniques in this book will make every designer’s and user researcher’s life much easier. Nate and Tony use the attitude and power of Web 2.0 technologies to create a new way of thinking about user experience research. They share their expertise clearly, concisely, and with a great sense of humor, giving practitioners step-by-step details to conduct remote research of virtually any complexity.”
—Mike Kuniavsky author, Observing the User Experience

Interested in our deal? Sign up for a Usabilla account now and receive a free copy of this book. Already got a Usabilla account? Log in to your account and upgrade directly.

We’ve just released some minor enhancements for the test details page, to solve some important usability issues. These small improvements include extra feedback on the status of your test, disabled buttons instead of disappeared buttons, and some improved styling.

Fixed issue: ‘Disappearing’ actions were very confusing

We do no longer hide the ‘Activate’, ‘Preview’, and ‘Analyze’ buttons when these functions are not (yet) available. You can’t start a test that doesn’t contain at least one page and one task. We’ve used disabled styles, a tooltip, and a additional message to explain why the ‘Activate’ and ‘Preview’ buttons are disabled. Showing the most important actions, regardless the state of a test, should also help to create a more complete picture of the entire testing process from the start.

Fixed issue: Ordering tasks was a ‘hidden feature’

In one of our recent releases we’ve added drag-and-drop functionality to change the order of tasks. You can simply drag and drop tasks to order them any way you like. Many users did not notice this feature. We hope we’ve solved this issue by simply adding a small icon.

Aesthetics: finetuning

We’ve made an enormous amount of small visual changes. We hope all these small changes together improve the look and feel of our application. We’re also working on user experience improvements for the front-end. We hope to be able to launch these changes in a few weeks. Stay tuned.

Login to your account (or create one) and please tell us what you think.

Mashable made a fresh start of the new year by launching a redesign. The intention of this new design was to put more focus on the stories, removing clutter, and dividing the content into sections (Home, Social Media,  Mobile, Web Video, Entertainment, Business, Tech, and Jobs). In the past week more than 150 people commented on the blog post about the new design. Most reactions on Mashable seem to be positive about the new look and feel: ‘Fresh & clean’, ‘I like the sections’, ‘More professional’, and ‘Clean and Simple’. What are the most important changes in this design iteration and what can we learn from feedback? We asked 60 social-media-savy participants for feedback.

Mashable: What draws attention?

Read this case on UX Booth

Social networks can be an interesting place to recruit participants who are interested in your website, product or service, to participate in a short test.  Usabilla offers some simple ways to promote your tests on Facebook and Twitter by posting the URL of your test and a short message on these social networks. You can also use the Redirect URL in Usabilla to make it easy for your participants to invite other participants and trigger a small viral effect.

Promote your test on Twitter & Facebook

In the promote dialog of your Usabilla tests you’ll find links to invite your contacts on Facebook and Twitter to participate. These links redirect you to Twitter and Facebook, with the following sample message:

Please help us to improve our website. Share your opinion: http://usabilla.com/rate/1234567890 #usabilla #usability

The standard Twitter message is tagged with the hashtags #usabilla and #usability. You can change the text of your message before you post it to Twitter or Facebook. Just use your test URL and provide some additional information about your test.

Ask participants to invite participants

Another interesting way to spread your test is to redirect your participants after your test to Twitter with a predefined message. The Redirect URL of your test is the target destination users are being redirected to after they’ve finished your test. You can customize your Thank-You page and ask participants to help spreading the test by posting a message on Twitter.

An URL can’t contain any special characters or spaces. So to create a ‘Post to Twitter’ link you’ll need to URL encode your message. You can do this by using this simple online tool. You use your encoded message to create an URL that looks like this:

http://twitter.com/?status=Help+to+test+the+Firefox+homepage.+ One+task%2C+10+seconds%3A+ http%3A%2F%2Fusabilla.com%2Frate%2F15940513564b1++%23usabilla+%23usability

The first part (’http://twitter.com/?status=‘) sends a user to Twitter, with the second part (your URL encoded message and test URL) filled in as message on the Twitter homepage.

We’re very happy to announce that we’ve just launched our first ‘official’ public release. We’ve renewed our homepage, launched paid plans, and offer PDF reports for all your test results. Log in to your account to try the new reports and other new features.
With the help of our beta testers we have been able to build a useful tool to collect feedback on webpages, mockups, sketches, and other images. In the past months Usabilla has proven its use in a large number of different cases. More then 2500 usability experts, web designers, online marketeers and other web professionals are using Usabilla to conduct remote usability tests and collect feedback.

Check out your new PDF reports

You can now export your test results as a PDF report. Create and customize your reports in our analysis tool. You can also use the new ‘Save as PNG’ feature to save parts of your visualizations and use these in your own reports or publish them online. Log in to your account and analyze one of your tests to see these new features.

Upgrade your account

During our beta period we have been offering beta accounts to test our service. We will continue to offer free accounts, which will be limited to 5 pages and 25 participants. You can upgrade your free account to one of the following plans: Small ($49), Standard ($199), and Large ($950).

• Small – 10 pages – $49 / year – 250 participants – Upgrade
• Standard – 50 pages – $199 / year – 250 participants – Upgrade
• Large – 250 pages – $950 / year – 500 participants – Upgrade

We use PayPal to securely proces your payments and we don’t use automatic recurring payments, you simply renew your plan after a year if you want to continue to use our service. Please contact us for more information about upgrading your account or our custom plans.

Create a test in 4 minutes

Take a look at our new screencast to learn more about creating and analyzing a test. In just 4 minutes we’ll explain how to create an Usabilla test and analyze your results. Sit back, relax, and watch the movie:

Usabilla – Hassle free usability testing from Paul Veugen on Vimeo.

Questions or feedback?

Please let us know if you got any questions about our service. Send us a mail (support@usabilla.com) or contact us on Gtalk (support@usabilla.com) for help or if you want to discuss a test.

Press?

Read our press release

Tomorrow morning at around 9:00 (GMT+1) we’re going to upgrade our servers. Unfortunately this will cause a few minutes downtime for all our customers. We’re launching a new Usabilla version, implement our paid plans and will add an extra server. If everything works out as planned we will only be down for a very short time span and our new release will be up and running at 9:00 AM (GMT+1). We will send out a newsletter to our customers after our release tomorrow, with more details on the update and paid plans.

A/B testing is a popular method to optimize conversion on a website. Basically you set up two or more variants, measure the differences in conversion rates between these variants, and select a winner based on your test results. The winning variant is the one with the highest conversion rates. A/B testing is a great way to improve your webpages one step a time. Unfortunately implementing tests is not always as simple as it sounds, even if you use for example the nifty interface of Google Website Optimizer. To set up a test, you need to have access to the source code and someone who’s able to adapt it, a live website with visitors or a working prototype, etc.. We’ll show you an example of how Usabilla’s One-Click-Tasks can be used as an interesting and low-budget alternative for A/B testing.

The original Firefox A/B test

The website abtests.com shows examples of A/B tests and their results. To demonstrate the use of Usabilla to quickly measure differences between multiple variants we picked a case submitted by Firefox (original writeup at the Mozilla blog). Firefox tested two variants for the button on their homepage that needs to trigger users to download the latest Firefox version. They used two variants of a call-to-action button: “Try Firefox 3″ and “Download Now – Free”.

Download Firefox - Variant A: 'Try Firefox 3'

Download Firefox - Variant B: 'Download now - Free'

In the original A/B test conducted by Mozilla 9.73% of all visitors (+/- 150.000) visiting variant A (’Try Firefox 3′) downloaded Firefox. Using variant B (’Download Now – Free’) 10.07% of the visitors (+/- 150.000) downloaded Firefox. Variant B has a 3.6% higher conversion than variant A.

The Usabilla test

We’ve set up two similar tests in Usabilla in about 5 minutes, using screenshots of variant A and B.  We created a new test (let’s call it ‘A’) and used a screenshot of the Firefox homepage showing the call-to-action button with the text ‘Try Firefox 3′. We’ve created another test (test ‘B’) using the screenshot of variant B (’Download now – Free’). In both tests we asked participants to perform only one task: ‘Where do you click to download Firefox?’. To compare the performance on Test A and B we focused on ‘time per task’, which is a standard Usabilla feature.

Short introduction for participants

Participants read the task before they start

Participants perform the task by clicking on the screen

We sent about half of the participants to Test A and the other half to Test B. We invited participants via Twitter and asked them at the end of the test to help to spread the test. We used the the ‘Redirect URL’ for in Usabilla to redirect users to Twitter to post a message about this case.

Test results

We exported the test results for both test cases as XML and imported this in a Google Docs spreadsheet. We used the test data to calculate the Geometric mean (preferred type of mean for task times).

Usabilla as an alternative for A/B tests

In this demo case we set up two simple Usabilla cases in about 5 minutes as a quick and dirty alternative for A/B testing. We measured the task performance (time) on the task ‘Where do you click to download Firefox’ for two different variants of the Firefox homepage for a total of 388 participants, split into two different groups. It took participants in test A (’Try Firefox 3′) on average 5.3 seconds to click the download button. Participants in test B (’Download Now – Free’) clicked the download button in 4.8 seconds (almost 10% faster).

We demonstrated that simple comparative Usabilla cases like this one can help you to improve your conversion. The results of quick tests can give you guidance when you want to improve your website, without worrying about development, a release protocol, server access, and other difficulties. Use mockups or (edited) screenshots to test multiple variants in a short time span.

You can now easily export all your test results as PDF. Select a page and your tasks, customize your reports and save them as PDF. You can also export your visualizations as PNG to save them locally, include your charts in your own reports, or publish them online. Take look at a sample report.

Analyze your tests and create custom PDF reports

Export your visualizations easily as PNG