UX Staffing Blog

It seems like these days, everything has a loyalty program: your local coffee shop and bookstore, and, of course, nearly all hotels, car rental companies, and airlines. Enrollment must be high, since there are an average of over 18 loyalty accounts per U.S. household. Loyalty programs are pervasive and expensive, and they aren't working for businesses.

Businesses are spending tens of billions of dollars on developing and maintaining these programs, but data from McKinsey shows that they aren't producing the desired business results. Given the increasingly saturated marketplace today, it isn’t all that surprising that many of these programs aren’t working.

More importantly, loyalty programs are not working particularly well for customers either. There is a clear opportunity for user experience changes that will improve both consumer engagement and results for businesses.

To read more please visit: http://uxmag.com/articles/five-ux-changes-for-fixing-loyalty-programs

Way back in 2011, Norwegian bank Sparebanken Sogn og Fjordane (SSF) approached us to take a look at their website. What followed was a year-long, content-centered endeavor that paid off in a big way.

SSF is a small-town bank located on the windy west coast of Norway. Known for being an approachable, full-service bank, SSF has friendly employees who develop strong, professional relationships with their customers.

Their website was a different story, however. Littered with fragmented, tedious, uninspired content, it was anything but warm and friendly. The front page focused on the bank’s news, for example, rather than facilitating their users’ top tasks. Additionally, the bank’s brand had started to diverge from the one their website presented. Something had to be done.

User research and strategy

Fortunately, SSF had done a great deal of user research and strategy work before they approached us. This was extremely valuable in the sense that they already knew their target audience as well as what they wanted to achieve with the redesign: their new website would focus more on their users and less on banners, news and other types of “push” information.

SSF also wanted to reduce the total amount of content comprising the site and make it easier to manage.

Diving into the content

Our group began by defining a list of activities that we wanted to conduct, including working with content on a strategic level as well as rolling up our sleeves and getting our hands dirty with copywriting, metadata and search engine optimization.

To better understand how to go about our work, we took a closer look at the content we were given. How many pages were there in total? How many of those pages were actually being used? How good or bad was the quality of that content? We began a content inventory in Excel. (Though, personally, I have started using Google Sheets as they’re a bit easier to share and collaborate around.)

To read more please visit: http://www.uxbooth.com/articles/banking-on-success/

Nowadays, people are probably not as riled up as they were when Facebook first introduced the Timeline model. For a while, a number of users refused to shift from the old format voluntarily because they found Timeline very disorienting, with its two columns and how it has to be processed in a zigzag manner to follow the events chronologically. This just goes to show how important website design orientation is – whether it’s portrait or landscape or a mixture of both, it has to help the user process data on your site better.

Portrait or Landscape

 To choose the proper design orientation, it depends on a couple of things: the type of content, and the device used for viewing.

Content: Videos, photos, books, lists

 More often than not, videos are best viewed when in landscape format – think TV screens or monitors. Most sites make sure this is the case when viewers choose to watch the full screen version. On the other hand, when the video is to be viewed along with the description and comments, portrait format is used, assuming that after watching the video briefly, the viewer will immediately scroll down to read or type something else.

To read more please visit: http://www.thedesignrange.com/2013/01/17/how-your-website-design-orientation-affects-user-experience/

So 2013 has arrived and I’m sure you’ve all come up with a few resolutions  – but what about resolutions to improve the experience and satisfaction of your customers?

Here are our top 3 user experience resolutions that might help inspire your 2013:

1. Refresh your understanding

People change and businesses and brands change too, so refreshing your research to make sure you really do understand your current and future customers is a great place to start!

Try to make sure you know their habits so you can match your brand to people’s underlying tendencies and wants. Analytics are good at showing you what is happening, but not why. We find that looking at the stories behind decisions and interactions can help you spot something key, giving you that extra edge this year!

Good qualitative research bolstered by quantitative statistics and analytics will validate the decisions you are making, boost success and encourage innovation. We find diary studies give great insights, and are a good qualitative research method to start with.

To read more please visit:

http://www.webcredible.co.uk/blog/ux-resolutions-for-2013

More than ever in the digital domain, companies rely on design to communicate with their customers. Because the experience of visiting a company website is by nature remote—lacking any direct interaction with any tangible assets offered—the company’s digital presence often defines a user’s impressions of the company as a whole. In this context, how customers experience not only the website but also the way the site handles their personal information becomes key to shaping their overall impression of the brand.

In this article, we will dive into the nature of trusted online experiences, why they are important, design attributes that we know people trust, and how design creates trust and distrust. We’ll illustrate the issues around designing for trust with a sample prototype of a healthcare exchange design and user reactions to it.

http://uxmag.com/articles/designing-to-build-trust-the-factors-that-matter