Quality assurance impacts the user experience: when things don’t work, users question their understanding and develop superstitions and inefficient workarounds.
What's worth the most: field studies or user tests? Depends on your company's usability maturity, but user testing is the safe bet if you can do only one thing.
When a multinational company produces a localized country site, usability is often lost. Local advertising agencies design good-looking sites that don't communicate.
User testing on 3 continents confirmed that the main usability guidelines hold worldwide, but many other considerations exist to better support international users.
Although successful websites typically have high usability, average sites can hurt their business by copying design elements that don't work well in other contexts.
Users hate change, so it's usually best to stay with a familiar design and evolve it gradually. In the long run, however, incrementalism eventually destroys cohesiveness, calling for a new UI architecture.
TiVo ran 12 user tests in 12 weeks while designing its new website. As TiVo's experience shows, frequent and regular testing keeps the design usability focused.
Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages... which is worst for business? In these examples, bad content takes the prize for costing the company the most money.
The average business metrics improvement after a usability redesign is now 83%. This is substantially less than 6 years ago, but ROI remains high because usability is still cheap relative to gains.
AJAX, rich Internet UIs, mashups, communities, and user-generated content often add more complexity than they're worth. They divert design resources and prove that what's hyped is rarely what's most profitable.
The more engaged users are, the more features an application can sustain. But most users have low commitment -- especially to websites, which must focus on simplicity, rather than features.
Several usability findings lead directly to higher sales and increased customer loyalty. These design tactics should be your first priority when updating your website.
Although the gains don't fall into traditional profit columns, there are clear arguments for improving usability of non-commercial websites and intranets. In one example, a state agency could get an ROI of 22,000% by fixing a basic usability problem.
An organization that reaches the 'managed UX' stage still has far to go to reach UX nirvana. Attaining these higher maturity levels requires many years of effort.
As their UX approach matures, organizations typically progress through the same sequence of stages, from initial hostility to widespread reliance on user research.
The fads and big deals that get the press coverage are not important for running a workhorse website. To serve your customers, it's far better to emphasize simplicity and quality than to chase buzzwords.
Search engines extract too much of the Web's value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors.