(in French) Les 26 et 27 janvier 2012, j’ai eu l’opportunité de donner un cours d’ergonomie Web. Je suis intervenue auprès des étudiants de la licence pro Web design au département Services et Réseaux de Communication de l’IUT de Belfort-Montbéliard. Une première expérience de l’enseignement pour moi, que j’ai hâte de renouveler l’année prochaine. Au cours de ces deux journées de travaux dirigés, j’ai présenté aux étudiants certains concepts-clés de l’ergonomie Web, un extrait des bonnes pratiques essentielles et une présentation appliquée des outils de conception. Le but était de sensibiliser ces futurs designers aux problématiques de l’utilisabilité, et de leur donner une base d’outils et de méthodes de travail pour concevoir un site ergonomique.
On the 12th January, I had the chance to be invited by the student organization Sorbonne Symposium to their symposium on Neuromarketing. Neurosciences play a role in usability, and the symposium specially covered Functional Magnetic resonance imaging. The idea is to use a scanner (as used in a hospital) to measure the effect a website (or an ad, or any kind of stimulus) has on our brain activity. So we can measure (1) which functional zone is activated in our brain, (2) with which intensity, and (3) whether it is positive or a negative effect.
I’ve been using Omnigraffle for a few years now. But I only recently managed to crop images directly in it. It’s definitely useful, as it avoids opening Photoshop and lets you try different alternatives directly on your wireframe. It was quite evident in Visio, but quite hard to find in Omnigraffle, which makes it kind of a secret. Here is a few steps tutorial to learn how to crop images in Omnigraffle.
Step 1: import your image
This part is easy, right? You just drag and drop your image on your wireframe. The image is automatically imported as stretched. You have to change this in order to crop your image.
Why do users abandon shopping carts? This very relevant ad for Google Analytics shows some evidence in an entertaining way. And I like it! Just wonder if your website doesn’t ask too many questions, or complicated data to recover. Everybody has to gain from a simpler buying process.
Big or small footer? I recently came to this question regarding an oline news website: is it stil a good thing to offer a big footer, with as many links as possible, and a summary of all keywords? The question remains unanswered speaking about SEO: it seems that multiple links in the footer can even be a bad point for Google, and here’s why:
Search engines seem to devaluate links in the footer.
Links in the footer are often not the first links on a page to a URL, which means they don’t have so much impact.
Users rarely scroll down to the links in the footer.
The more links in a page, the less important each becomes.
I found this article from SEO Moz on footer link optimization very interesting. Randfish also shares examples of good and bad examples. Personnaly, I like Firefox footer:
It offers a reasonable amount of links and information.
The design is nice and attractive, though simple.
I like the social and newsletter features.
Because SEO rules for footer optimization have changed, displaying a footer with thousands links is not worth any longer. The trend is to let go huge and unreadable footers, and work on usable footers. They are not any longer read only by search engines: it is time to think some users might read them.
Visual Website Optimizer offers AB and MVT testing services, like Google Website Optimizer, but more complete, if it was possible. I won’t be able to test this service right now, as the price ($49 monthly), though affordable, won’t make me reny Google almighty. But well, maybe, one day… Anyway, Paras Chopra, the founder of this service published a very interesting guide to AB testing in Smashing Magazine. And a very useful free application on the website allows to calculate the duration your AB test should be, according to the traffic and number of combinations. Thanks!
Buying clothes online can sometimes be a hassle: how to know if this rock fits with this shirt? What is the length of this dress, will it fit me? Well, well, the ultimate solution is of course to get to the shop and try them on. But we’re in the 21st century, after all: wouldn’t there be a solution for our online shopping? Summer is the wedding time, and, how they said in this Indian ad on TV, I am not (at all) ready for it. So I started browsing online clothing shops for a dress. And I was happy to find one of these trying-on-clothes application on Camaieu website. The application is very simple, and accessible for every item in the catalog. Quite impressive: you can actually try every combination possible. Even what does not fit together, just for fun.
User Research is a whole process to set up, and I guess some agencies or clients often have rather save some time and money than run user testing. As a Usability consultant, I would love to have that time and money, but I also understand planning and budget restrictions. Hopefully, we can benefit from a bunch of free solutions to help us know users better. I am talking about analytics solutions, like Google Analytics (which as well allows A/B and MVT testing, allowing to go pretty far in user research), but also powerful and specific solutions like Survey Gizmo, for online user testing.
Recently, Adviso has set up a user testing process on Optimal Workshop to validate Information Architecture. It is based on tasks, and you can test up to 3 tasks on 10 users with the free plan. (If you like, please give a hand on Adviso’s treejack project. The testing will still be on for a few days.) Optimal Workshop proposes 3 products, and here are the details of what is available for free:
card sorting – 30 cards, 10 users
tree sorting – 3 tasks, 10 users
first click testing – 3 tasks, 10 participants
The 3-products offer is available for 1 999USD for one year, but you can also purchase each product separately. And I think the free offer can already prove very useful for a lot of projects. Thanks Adviso and Thomas for the link: can’t wait to try it on my next projects. Coming soon: I’ll test each product and see how it works. (Fun, isn’t it?)
Quebec Amerique First Aid application for iPhone was the first mobile application I ever worked on. The application was released on the Apple Store a few months ago, and it is considered a success as it has been downloaded more than 900 times since then. This project was a good occasion to start thinking about mobile Usability and information architecture, and build wireframes, use cases, flowchart and scenario. Not bad, for a start, I’d say!
Adviso, a brilliant web strategy company, for which I have worked during the last years, has recently made the news. In the magazine L’Actualité, the company was ranked as one the 20 fastest growing companies in Quebec, Canada. And the magazine Profit Canada ranked them among the fastest growing companies in the country. Well done: congratulations to all the team and all the best! And it is quite clear that their success does not provide them from having good fun (see pictures below).
