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.
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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!
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?)
Lightbox is a great tool to enlarge pictures on a web page, and offers multiple possibilities. Recenlty, I have seen this alternative on Nixon watches website: the enlargement of the product is displayed in a div with no border and no background. The result is interesting and the design simple. I don’t know whether or not it is Lightbox, but it looks cool!
In an article on Adviso blog, I once started thinking about best practices for email newsletters. We see a lot of them, but best practices are still quite undefined. This is probably partly due to the fact that statistics are very difficult to get. And one of the key questions for me was to determine whether or not it is worth displaying pictures in emails. We all know the spam folder, and all email newsletters try to make it to the inbox, which is already a victory. Then, I have studied what is the ideal size for an email, according to the numerous email services (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) But what for images? Based on the main email providers and their policy related to pictures in emails, my conclusion was that 77% of the readers don’t see the pictures at first: they have to click on Display images, which is one click further from them actually seing them.
In a recent article on their blog, Future Now (which I consider a very reliable source) published a few best practices for email newsletters. One of their point is related to images, and here is what they say:
“Assume that your prospects are viewing your emails with images blocked. There needs to be substance to your emails beyond the images you feature. To take this a step further, don’t get caught up on the design of the newsletter.”
I totally agree. And personally, I remain conviced that images in newsletters are not enough added value to justify their presence in email newsletters.
During the last days, I have been programming an online survey with Survey Gizmo. It was brand new for me, but I found the solution is very practical and quite intuitive. Though, I got myself blocked at one point, which kept me thinking hard for a few hours: how to implement multiple OR conditions for a page or a question?
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Let’s not let newsletters aside, and go on talking about it, as there are son many things to say! Studying email newsletters best practices and optimal width lately, I have just discovered a new online tool. As useful as Email on Acid, and as well as free and intuitive, Newsletter Archive is a good way to build a benchmark of significative newsletters without spending a thousand hours on it (and transforming your email box in an over-spammed list). The concept is very simple: visitors are invited to share the newsletters they receive, and so the website can build a impressive database of newsletters. If you are looking for a benchmark, you can browse by period (the website started gathering newsletters in May 2009) and by sender. So, basically, if you have done your competition analysis, you can browse for their newsletters.
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Adviso has just conducted some research about ideal email width, and here are the main points of the article published on the blog, translated in English for your convenience. Of course, every agency and webdesigner has at least once been confronted to that question: how wide should my newsletter be? That’s a very good question, because a few more or less pixels can change a lot, and display a horrible horizontal scrollbar on your beautiful content! Anyone can find a lot of figures on Internet, and it is quite easy to find that an email width should be between 500 and 700 pixels. A few months ago, I published another article on Adviso’s blog, with 12 best practices for email newsletters, based on Norman & Nielsen Group’s Email Newsletter Usability Report. Knowing the exact optimal size of a newsletter was the next step!
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Disons que je veuille mener un sondage en ligne, pour recueillir l’opinion de mes visiteurs sur un sujet ou un autre. Quelle devrait être la taille de mon échantillon pour que celui-ci soit représentatif ? Ayant étudié en marketing, je me souviens avoir rempli des feuilles de ces formules statistiques. Évidemment, c’était il y a quelques temps, et toutes mes notes de cours sont dans un carton, dans le grenier de mes beaux-parents en France… La recherche de ces formules mathématiques sur Internet est incroyablement compliquée, et je n’ai réussi à trouver une explication que j’ai été capable de comprendre qu’au bout de quelques heures (les statistiques n’ont jamais été mon fort, alors je vous laisse imaginer le résultat 5 ans après mon diplôme !) Pour ne pas avoir à mener cette recherche à nouveau (et pour vous l’éviter tout court), la voici donc ci-après : Taille de l’échantillon = (1.96² * 0.5(1-0.5) / 0.05² = 384.16 individus (je vous invite fortement à lire la suite pour comprendre l’équation…)
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Working on a new article on Adviso blog (scheduled for Thursday), I have just found this very useful online tool: Email on Acid allows you to test a newsletter in 9 most used webmails, including Windows Live, Outlook and Yahoo Mail. It is free, you only have to register to be able to run a test. The test requires either the URL of the email or its HTML code (which basically means we could test other companies newsletters too, which of course I did). Coming soon on Adviso: the answer to the famous question “How wide should my email be?”
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