Usability, Design and Human Behaviour
Recently, valsplat dipped its toes in the exciting waters of playtesting. And it felt good.
Swords & Soldiers is a critically acclaimed Wii game, about to be released on PlayStation 3. The Wii controls make the game easy to learn and a lot of fun. The challenge was to match this with the arguably less intuïtve PlayStation controller. For this, a playtest was needed.
Recently ReadWriteWeb wrote an article on Facebook and its partnership with AOL. Facebook and AOL announced that they were going to integrate users Facebook friends into the AOL Instant Messenger. Nice to know, but the most ‘funny’ thing happened afterwards when ReadWriteWeb began receiving odd comments of Facebook users on their article:
Nowadays it seems that – as an internet user – there is the opportunity to rate a product, service or piece of information whenever and wherever you want. From clothing to handymen and from articles to restaurants.
Often the first phase in recruiting test participants for either on- or offline research is send a mailing with a screening questionnaire to potential participants. The goal of the mailing is to get as many responses as possible. In other words: you want a high conversion rate.
Recently halfway through mailing a limited set of potential participants, the desired response was far below target. Focusing on the e-mail’s subject, body text, call to action and the incentive we were able to increase the conversion rate of the mailing by a whopping 330%. Here is what we changed.
The last couple of years online communities have been developing applications for users to share daily updates about their life, thoughts and whereabouts. Hyves provides a ‘WieWatWaar’ and Facebook has it’s own ‘Wall’ where users can update their friends. Twitter does it the light-weight way. It allows an easy and light-weight form of communication and enables users to broadcast and share information about their activities, opinions whereabouts and status. But why are we using Twitter anyway? Is it a tool that nourishes our social needs or is technology increasing our needs to keep track of out ‘friends’ every minute of the day?
There seems to be a tendency to try and keep online processes (registration, checkout, etcetera) as short and flat as possible. This could have grown from the false notion that “people won’t click more than three times”, or the idea that longer processes lead to higher drop-off rates. The latter often being true, certainly when the process contains unnecessary steps: you might feel you really need a user’s net income when she is subscribing to your newsletter, she might very well feel differently.
One of our clients is a very successful online store. The design of their product pages is fairly traditional, and includes a nice old similar items block. This block shows a picture, the price and product name for three similar products.