Entries Tagged 'User Experience'

At Boston Interactive, we view websites as living, breathing, evolving things. They need to be consistently updated, maintained, and refreshed in order to be effective. One way to regularly make sure that your website is operating optimally is through A/B testing.  However, to continually improve your website and better serve your customers you can never go wrong with A/B testing, a form of research that allows you to test different copy and design elements on your website and determine which are most effective.

What is A/B Testing? 

A/B testing involves deploying multiple versions of a website or e-mail and measuring how each performs in order to determine which design or copy elements are most successful. It is important in A/B testing that variables are isolated, so that you can identify exactly which factors are making the test more or less successful.  The tests are generally preformed on a live website rather than in a controlled environment and usually without the user’s knowledge. Read On

When was the last time you brought a significant other shopping to help pick out furniture? Perhaps you sent a friend a picture from a dressing room via text to get a second opinion or asked a co-worker for book recommendations before stopping by Borders. If you’re like most of us, you do this all the time. Many of us rely on the recommendations and opinions of our friends when making purchasing decisions, so it’s only natural to add social elements to e-commerce as well. While many sites have featured product reviews and “send to a friend” buttons for years, Visa, Amazon, and Facebook have recently raised the bar and introduced some exciting new features to the online shopping experience.

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Yesterday the 9th Annual Usability Professionals Association (UPA Boston) Conference took place at the convention center at Bentley University, sponsored by Boston Interactive.  The event, which sold out this year, brings together hundreds of user experience professionals from around New England to learn about trends and best practices for user-centered product development, usability research, web, and mobile design. Read On

While doing my morning blog reading I came across a great list of “101 Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Web Site” from the great people over at Inside CRM.  I realize that 101 tips is a lot of information, so I have summarized 10 big ideas and made the whole thing a little easier to digest. Read On

When building a website you cannot simply hand it off to a design company and say “here, I want a new website with flash, lots of pictures, and I want it to be interactive.”  It is not a set and forget situation.  Designing a new website requires constant contact with key decision makers to make sure things like visual design and text placement align with the organizations vision.  Below I have put together a list of some of the things you can do to make both your web designers and your own lives easier. Read On

Content is King.  Without original, meaningful, and compelling copy and content, your website is likely to fail.  It is important that you be sure you put just as much time into developing your content as you did to developing your website.  You can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a website but if you only devote two hours to your content all your efforts will be worthless. 

However, writing for the web is more challenging than writing for any type of print media because the web is a very different medium.  Web text should be built around keywords so that search engines can index the page properly and should also be written in an easy to understand manner.  Below are some things to keep in mind when writing content for the web.
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