May 19th, 2010
Christine Perfetti – May 19, 2010
At Perfetti Media, we've recently been sending our email newsletter to subscribers on a weekly basis. A few months back, thanks to a recommendation from our good friend Jeff Patton, we signed up for Mad Mimi, an online tool for writing, sending, and tracking online emails to customers. Based on our experience so far, it's clear the design team at Mad Mimi has been thinking about their customers.
This month, we sent our first email newsletter using the Mad Mimi service. Immediately after hitting the "Submit" button to send an email to our subscribers, Mad Mimi responded with the following message:
In addition to congratulating us on sending our first message with Mad Mimi, as a courtesy, the team volunteered to review our message before it was sent to our entire audience. Why is this such an important detail for new customers of Mad Mimi's service?
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May 13th, 2010
By Christine Perfetti – May 13, 2010
Many of our clients come to us requesting usability testing consulting services. One of the reasons they reach out to us is because they think usability testing must be a complex and scientific process. As a result, they'd prefer to have an outside consulting company conduct their tests.
The first thing I tell people who contact me is that usability testing is not a complicated process. It's a technique that anyone can learn with training and lots of practice. In this series of articles, I'll share the essential steps when conducting your first usability tests. In part 1 of the series, I shared the steps for planning your usability tests. In this article, I'll discuss best practices for recruiting your users.
When considering your first usability tests, you'll want to find people who are representative of your target audience. You have a couple of options for doing this. With in-house recruitment, you can assign someone internally to find your users. Or, you can outsource to a reputable recruitment agency. We use both approaches at Perfetti Media and they've worked well for us. Usability Works and AlphaBuzz are two of the organizations we recommend for their recruitment services.
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May 10th, 2010
By Christine Perfetti – May 10, 2010
Many of our clients come to us requesting usability testing consulting services. One of the reasons they reach out to us is because they think usability testing must be a complex and scientific process. As a result, they'd prefer to have an outside consulting company conduct their tests.
The first thing I tell people who contact me is that usability testing is not a complicated process. It's a technique that anyone can learn with training and lots of practice.
Read the rest of this entry »
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May 6th, 2010
I'm very pleased to share the interview I recently conducted with expert usability practitioner, Dana Chisnell. Dana is the co-author of the wonderful book on usability testing, The Handbook of Usability Testing, 2nd Edition. Dana has been conducting usability tests since 1983 and is one of the world's leading UX experts.
In my conversation with Dana, we discuss how usability tests have evolved over the years, including the emergence of remote testing tools and low fidelity prototyping techniques, such as paper prototyping. Dana also shares indispensable tips on how to get stakeholder buy-in for usability testing and how many users are necessary for usability tests. I think you'll really enjoy Dana's insights.
Read the full interview with Dana Chisnell
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June 17th, 2008
On your site, the content page is the user’s most frequent final destination. This page contains the information the user came to the site to find. Sites often have hundreds, if not thousands (and in some cases, millions) of these critical pages.
How can design teams be confident their content pages are understandable to users? How does a team ensure they’ve designed content pages that communicate the essential information effectively?
A simple usability testing technique can help design teams quickly measure how a content page performs with users. It’s called the 5-Second Test. In case you missed it, a few years back, I wrote an article about the 5-second test methodology, outlining how to set up these types of tests and when they are most effective.
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