Here at eVOC, we spend the majority of our time focusing on online usability; whether it’s websites, products, or mobile apps, we consider ourselves experts in the customer experience online. And we’re really proud of that!

But when this passion of ours starts to seep into the world outside the Web, we officially morph from experts into…

USABILI-DWEEBS

It’s ironic that we can be considered dweeby as soon as we extend our craft away from the computer. After all, when you think of a dweeb, don’t you think of this guy, always at the computer? But the Internet has become such an integral part of doing business and getting things done, that our dweeby computer and web knowledge is now actually considered an advantage rather than an object of ridicule. And that’s OK with us – especially since “experts” sounds more professional than “dweebs.”

From “dweeb” to “expert”…who’s laughing now?

A few times a month, as your resident Usabili-Dweeb, I’ll give an example of a real-world usability problem that I’ve encountered outside the job. In each case, someone will be failing to adhere to basic design principles that apply to the real world in the same way that they apply to the Web. I hope these examples help steer you towards best practices that can be applied to your websites.

In this edition…

Week 1: Going Up?

Our office is on the 16th floor of a historic building in downtown San Francisco. Recently, they updated all of the lighting in the lobby, which included the fixtures next to and above the 8 elevator doors.

Before: Indicator light was mounted to the right of each elevator on one side, and to the left on the other Upper half turned white when it was going up Lower half turned red when it was going down One cause for confusion Did each light refer to the elevator on the left or the right? (Severity: Moderate)

After: Indicator light is mounted above each elevator Entire light turns white when it’s going up Entire light turns red when it’s going down Bright wall lights hang between each elevator (also white) 4 causes for confusion New elevator lights are very dim in comparison to wall lights and are hard to see (Severity: High) Dinging noise of arriving elevator is now quieter, making it more difficult to know which one to walk towards (Severity: High) All wall-mounted lights are the same color (white), causing a delay in figuring out which one is lit (Severity: High) For those new to the building, it is unclear whether the white indicator light signifies a direction, or just that the elevator is open (Severity: Low)

Bring in the Usabili-Dweebs

The changes they’ve made have really bothered us Usabili-Dweebs, so much so that we have mentioned it to the folks at the front desk (they hate us). We told them that the new design violates usability principles in the following 3 categories (shameless plug: these are some of the metrics upon which we evaluate websites when we do heuristic expert reviews).

1. Aesthetic Integrity
          Is there a clear visual hierarchy with graphic elements and visual cues to help users?
          – Nope.

2. Feedback
          Does the design keep users informed and indicate task progression?
          – Not very well.

3. Communication & Relevance
          Can users rely on recognition rather than recall?
          – Definitely not.

So how does this apply to a website?

Let’s run through the above 3 usability principles again.

Let’s start with aesthetic integrity: Just as it’s crucial for people to quickly access their desired floor in a building, you want to make sure that users click on a link, view a promotion, find information, or purchase something on your website. It is imperative that the visual cues are clear so that your site visitors are not lost or delayed. Because, unlike in the office building, they might get so frustrated they actually leave.

Feedback: People must be well informed of what happens during a process. A good example of this is online checkout: users want to know what step they’re on, how far they’ve come, and how far they have to go. Feedback also helps orient them on the site. When I’m standing in the lobby and I don’t know how long I have to wait or where I need to go, I get frustrated.

And communication: Any site has to be learned to some extent. But if users have to remember where things are, even after coming to the site time and time again, the site is not intuitive enough. Similarly, when I walk into my building and push the elevator button, I can’t easily recognize where the arriving elevator is, and it takes me a few seconds to figure it out every time.

In closing

Many of the guidelines we use to evaluate websites apply very well to real-world examples. Perhaps this isn’t such a surprise. After all, the online realm was created to mimic, simplify, and enhance our real-world experiences. So it’s only natural that we can apply so many of our web-based design and usability principles to our own lives.

In the coming weeks, look for more real-world examples of common usability problems – from me, the Usabili-Dweeb! And if you happen to run into any dweebs out there, please do not take my lunch money.

Faster, Better, Cheaper. This has been the mantra of the Internet since the late 1990s to save us time and money by shopping online versus in-store. And for over a decade, this mantra has held true. Consumers are hooked on online shopping. Despite the economic downturn in 2008, and leading into 2009, sales among the Top 500 online retailers continued to grow - increasing 11.7% - while total in-store retail sales only grew 1.4% according to Internet Retailer. In addition, among 41 of the 50 biggest retail chains, e-commerce revenue increased, while in-store revenue declined.

While online retailers are not immune to the economic downturn, they are somewhat protected compared to their brick-and-mortar counterparts. The costs to maintain a Website are significantly lower than the costs to manage, stock, and staff a retail store. As a result, some retailers have not weathered the storm, most notably Circuit City who declared bankruptcy last year. However, savvy online retailers continue to survive.

Amazon.com reigns as the leading online retailer, showing a 30% increase in Web sales last year to $19.2 billion. Amazon is king because it continues to expand and add new retail categories year over year. Amazon also has the benefit of carrying and cross-selling multiple products and multiple brands. Amazon is the one-stop-shop e-tailer for you name it: books, clothing, electronics, sporting equipment, garden supplies, etc. Amazon represents products and brands in over 75 retail categories and is continuing to expand with its recent acquisition of Zappos.

Other brick-and-mortar retailers have been working every angle to increase Web sales through Internet exclusives, daily deals, 2-for-1 promotions, free shipping, and loyalty programs. While these perks may offer some short-term gains, they do not guarantee long-term stability. The retail leaders that will withstand the test of time are those that are thinking Faster, Better, Cheaper for a new generation.

Amazon is obviously on to something = one-stop-shopping. Are brick-and-mortar retailers up to the challenge? Who will survive in this marketplace and still deliver a Faster, Better, Cheaper Web experience for the next generation?

Gap Inc. has taken on this challenge. Internet shoppers are tired of multiple usernames, multiple passwords, multiple emails, and now multiple credit cards to avoid spam and identify theft when shopping online. Gap has responded to this pain and consolidated its Web presence across its 5 major brands, including Gap, Old Navy, BananaRepublic, Piperlime, and Atletica under one umbrella site, Gap.com. This consolidated Website not only allows users to browse all Gap Inc. brands within one single user session, but also leverages one global shopping cart for all brands. This offers a significant improvement for the customer experience by eliminating the need for multiple usernames and passwords, with one universal login, and offers a seemless checkout process with one flat shipping rate.

In addition, this consolidation offers a significant opportunity for Gap Inc. to diversify its audience and cross-sell brands to all visitors, for example introducing Old Navy to Banana Republic shoppers and vice versa. Moreover, the company can leverage cross-promotion of deals across brands, benefiting from larger transaction sizes, such as offering free shipping for all brands if a Piperlime product is added to the shopping cart.

With Gap Inc.’s e-commerce revenue increasing 15% in the first half of ‘09 to $491 million from $427 million in ‘08, while offline sales declined, Gap understands the power of online. Gap’s brick-and-mortar counterparts can benefit from this lesson on Website consolidation. Williams-Sonoma’s e-commerce revenue decreased by 21.9% in the first half of ‘09, from $507 million in ‘08 to $404 million in ‘09. Opportunity exists for Williams-Sonoma’s brands including Williams-Sonoma, PotteryBarn, PotteryBarn Kids, PB teens, and Williams-Sonoma Home, to follow Gap Inc.’s lead.

So Gap Inc. is on to something = consolidated-shopping (aka one-stop-shopping). This evolution may not become the new mantra for the Internet, but it will be the foundation for delivering a Faster, Better, Cheaper Web experience for both consumers and businesses alike in the next generation.

Contact us with questions!

Liz Webb and Cheryl Jordan-Aguilera traveled to FedEx Headquarters in Memphis last week for World Usability Day. FedEx’s newly created Digital User Experience Team organized a day-long conference for Fed Ex Employees focused on Usability and User Experience Research Methods and Practices.

FedEx invited 10 key vendors to provide lectures as well as informative sessions on various research techniques and discuss how usability impacts day-to-day life for marketers as well as consumers. Liz led 2 sessions during the conference, the first on eye tracking and its applications to websites, advertising and email marketing. The second session focused on measuring online brand and ROI. eVOC Insights enjoyed being part of such a well organized and educational event . World Usability Day was celebrated on November 12 and included 200 events taking place in 43 countries.

The sign-up form is one of the most critical points in the process of users developing a relationship with your site. It’s also the point where a flaw in the interaction can be the difference between a user becoming a new customer or becoming a bounce statistic on your web analytics. While many things can be wrong with a sign-up form, here are the top seven mistakes (in no particular order) we think are critical flaws that are guaranteed to frustrate users and likely to drive them away.

1. Benefits of signing up not being clear or not stated at all

Ideally, a user will know why they want to sign up when they do. However many sites that offer a lot of content pre-login will interrupt a user’s experience with a sign-up requirement, but not explicitly state why the user needs to register. Do not assume that the user remembers or understands why they should sign up. The benefits of a site are far too often left to the user to discover on their own, yet it costs nothing to remind them with concisely worded text.

If a user is not motivated to sign up, they are going to be a lot less tolerant of any issues they run into elsewhere on the page. For example, Going.com is a great concept, but makes a big assumption that users know why they need to sign up, running the risk of turning off users who haven’t bought into the idea yet. Simply writing a benefit tag-line at the top can remedy this issue. “By signing up you can quickly let others know what’s going on in a city”.

2. Requiring too much information with no benefit to the user

Sign-up seems like the perfect opportunity to get all kinds of information about your user. A few straight forward things like gender and birthday are good for marketing segmentation, but at what point does a form get too intrusive? The line is simple: when the information obtained does not benefit the user in any clear way.

Demographic considerations such as income, job title, browsing habits, are all nosy questions. Would you ask a person you just met on the street how much their household income is? No? That’s because we all know it’s rude. The same standard should apply on your site. The benefit of having some marketing data is never worth the very real risk of losing actual users who are ready and willing to continue with their experience on your site. Instead, make this information request clearly optional and people may actually provide it to you if you ask nicely and tell them why you would like to know.

3. Not pointing out where a user did not fill out a field correctly and/or erasing everything the user has already entered

We’ve probably all experienced this at least once, especially in earlier days on the web. Fortunately most major commercial sites are no longer committing this design sin. However, this problem still lurks throughout the web, most often on niche forums and government sites.

The biggest problem with this kind of flawed interaction is that it signals to the user that the site does not value their time at all and undermines a consumers’ confidence in what happens to the information they are sharing with you. Ensuring that the user’s hard work does not disappear and letting them know what needs to be fixed is not simply a “nice to have” anymore. It is a “must have ” that any professional site needs to implement if they expect users to register.

4. Username and passwords requirements being too stringent

Requiring passwords to have 6-10 characters that include letters numbers and special characters seems like it would add a level of security and build user trust. What tends to happen is that different sites have different combinations of these requirements: some have a range for character count while some simply have a minimum. Some require special characters and some don’t. Some want a number and some don’t. Some are case sensitive and some are not. The variations are endless.

Why is this an issue for a user signing up? People generally don’t keep distinct passwords for every site they use. Instead they rely on a single phrase that’s easy to remember. But with the proliferation of inconsistent password requirements across sites, the burden is now on the user to remember which site has which requirement. (Do I use “welcome”, “Welcome”, “welcome2009” or “welcome09$%”?) Having a slightly more secure password quickly stops being worth the cost of increased user frustration. Letting users know how strong or weak a password is without forcing anything on them is a great way to ensure passwords stay secure and that users stay in control.

5. Not explicitly indicating which fields are required or optional

Recently there’s been some research that suggests that most users are probably going to go ahead and fill everything out in a form. The best practice emerging from this finding is that it’s not actually necessary to put those little red asterisks on every single required field—it’s better to simply mark which fields are optional.

A good example of a site that has taken this to heart is Yahoo Mail’s sign-up form. While this leads to a visually cleaner form, what happens if all of the fields are required but there’s no indication one way or the other. Why should a user signing up for an email account assume that indicating their gender is required? Adding a simple message at the top of the form saying that each field is required is an easy, low cost enhancement that attentive users will appreciate.

6. Not explicitly indicating formats for dates, times, and phone numbers

While this type of information can be entered in a myriad of ways, a clear convention still has yet to emerge. Each sign-up form does this in a slightly different way with the result being that users are never quite sure how to enter time information on each site they visit that does not explicitly state a required format.

A clumsy (and unfortunately often used) solution is to use drop downs for month, day, and year. However users will often find frustration in having to scroll down through a dropdown for days like the 29th of 1969. Yahoo Mail has an elegant solution to this problem. They keep the dropdown for months since it’s a relatively short list, then simply have two separate open fields for Day and Year, indicated with grey background text.

7. Dumping the user back at the home page after signing up

Don’t assume that a user signs up before doing anything else. It’s far more likely that the user has browsed around and found value in something the site offers. From their perspective, sign-up is a hurdle they have to jump through to get what they want, not the first step of their intended task. If the flow of the site takes them back to the beginning, it will undermine any earlier efforts they have taken on your site. From a development perspective it does take a bit more work to ensure that the sign-up does not interfere with the task flow, but it is most certainly necessary to deliver a top-notch experience on your site, especially for new visitors.

Conclusion

What do you think? Are there any other critical mistakes in form design that are guaranteed to drive users away? Let us know!

There’s no doubt about it—online video has arrived. According to eMarketer, comScore reported that US Internet users viewed 12.7 billion online videos during November 2008 alone, and that more than 77% of US Internet users (146 million) watched an average of 87 videos per viewer. They also predict the trend continuing with online video viewing reaching 88% of US Internet users by 2012.

Given the recent explosion of online video, we thought it would be helpful to cover some best practices for implementing video viewing on your site. While powerhouse sites such as YouTube and Hulu have very likely already trained your users on what to expect, keeping a clear checklist of usability standards of your own will ensure your users get the most intuitive viewing experience possible.

Screen Size and Placement

• Widescreen is emerging as the convention with 640×360 dimensions being the most common. This offers a good balance of being big enough for users to see easily, but not so big that image quality suffers.
• When placing the video, consider the opportunity costs. Video in the upper left is a natural location and leaves room on the right for utility links for related videos and also advertising. A centered layout employed by Hulu allows for comfortable extended viewing.
• To provide intuitive access to the content, ensure the video is not below or split by the fold. A large play button overlaying the video is also helpful for indicating a playable video.

Control Bar

• Users will expect the control bar itself to appear directly below the video. Control bars that appear upon mouse-over are increasingly common, but users who aren’t as familiar with watching video will find this less intuitive.
• If the video automatically plays, ensure that the pause button is clear and easy for users to find.
• Controls for audio volume are generally identified by icons that show a slider bar on mouse-over. Be sure that the icon for audio controls is not so abstract that it users overlook it.
• In choosing an audio control layout, consider the tradeoff—Vertically aligned bars give a natural sense of raising or lowering volume, while horizontal lets you control volume without covering actual video content. While Hulu has a horizontal alignment, vertical alignment is more conventional across the web.
• A timer that shows the total length of the video and time viewed so far allows users to get a sense of how long the video is, helping them decide if they’d like to invest the time in viewing the video.
• Timeline navigation allows users to choose where in the video they want to skip to. Offering a display of the exact time on the timeline when the user mouses over allows for intuitive navigation.

Buffer Display

• Connection speeds vary and a good way of handling this is offering a memory buffer. Taking it a step further and showing how much video is buffered lets users know for example that if they pause for a few seconds, they can watch the rest of the video without it slowing down or freezing up.
• Youtube does a great job of graphically displaying how much has buffered, so even if a user doesn’t know what buffering is, they can get a sense of the video loading properly.

Embedding Advertising

• 15-30 second ad before and during natural breaks in the content is generally accepted, but can become annoying if it’s the exact same ad over and over. Short videos (under 90 seconds) with 30 second ads in front of them are also frustrating to users.
• Ensure that the audio level of the ad matches the audio level of the content. A surprising loud ad can be counterproductive in promoting a product.
• Offer a time until content display to let the user know they only have a few seconds before they get to the desired content.
• While the effectiveness of overlay ads at bottom of screen while running is debatable, users simply find them distracting and diminish their experience.
• Placing static ads near the video player related to the in video content is a great way to reinforce awareness of the ad without impacting viewing experience.

For my final post on benchmarking, I want to address when and how often you should be conducting benchmarking studies.

While most people understand the importance of measurement and being able to demonstrate ROI in today’s economic environment, many people do not take the appropriate steps to ensure that they can demonstrate that ROI, so the first rule of when you should benchmark is: Benchmark your current performance, even when you know it needs to change. In order to save time and costs, many clients do not want to run a benchmarking study on a site they know needs serious revision, preferring to run the study only after a redesign or once changes have been made to correct the issues on the site. Understandably, most feel, “Why would I want to spend money on a study that will tell me that things are not working on my site? I already know that.” The problem with this idea is that the study you run after the changes are made will have less impact and will not be able to tell you the degree to which the changes made impacted the site experience. Additionally, even if you believe you know what is wrong with your site, the “before” benchmark study can confirm any hypotheses as well as potentially uncover issues you did not consider.

Once you have a baseline, what type of schedule should you consider for a benchmarking program? This question does not have a single answer that applies to all companies, however there are a few factors you need to consider:

How often does my site change? Anytime you make a major investment in the site it is important to measure the impact of the changes and make sure that you have moved the needle in the right direction. For some companies, this may mean establishing a quarterly benchmark, for others it might mean they would not test their site for a few years, if changes to the site were the only factor.

How often does my direct competition change their site? If you biggest competition completes a major redesign or implements key new functionality, you may want to understand how that impacts the experience users are having on your site and whether or not users’ expectations of your site are shifting based on the competition. However as I discussed in Part 1, your direct competitive set is not the only competition you face on the internet.

When did I last benchmark the site experience? If your site does not change frequently, nor do the sites of your direct competition, you still need to understand how changes to the internet overall have impacted your business. I told a story in Part 1 of a client who saw drops in key customer experience attributes year over year, despite not making any changes to the site – they just hadn’t responded to the evolving customer expectations based on what was happening online in general. To keep abreast of how the internet is impacting your site, an annual benchmark is key even if you have not made any changes, in order not only to measure, but to allow you to maintain the health of your site.

By establishing at least an annual benchmark, you will be able to gain insight into the impact of your changes, those of your competition, and those created as the internet evolves on the success metrics you have established for your site. By tracking these metrics over time, you will expand your understanding of the levers that influence the experience of users on your site and how to make better, more efficient changes to maintain a strong online presence. You will also be able to show the impact that site changes have had on your site performance and satisfaction.

Good luck with your benchmarking program!

Last week, Skittles launched a radical new marketing campaign designed to take advantage of social media and harness user-generated content in a way not done before by a consumer brand.  The company replaced its Website, almost exclusively, with user-generated content.  Initially, Twitter became the site’s home page, but the company had to shift strategy after some “tweets” became profane and inappropriate.  The company has been changing the site it uses as its home page, first Facebook, then the Wikipedia entry dedicated to Skittles and, now, YouTube.  Skittles provides the information architecture for the site, but the majority of the links head to user-generated content.

This strategy took to an extreme the type of idea Aaron addressed in his blog post on the necessity of a home page, by asking, “Does a consumer products company need to generate its own content?”  While the final analysis has yet to be done on this campaign and its success, it is an interesting and in my opinion, a worthwhile experiment.

The site has certainly gotten people all over the Web talking about Skittles!  As CPG companies contemplate how to make their Websites relevant, I think the Skittles experiment can serve as a reminder to be thinking about the Web in a different way – to create brand ambassadors by incorporating user-generated content and collecting feedback in any form in which they choose to offer it.  This method, unfortunately, can backfire if the supposed brand ambassadors are not actually proponents. That said, one wonders if negative buzz is ever really negative. Even if I say that I don’t like Skittles, someone else may fervently disagree and go out and buy 20 packages!

I think Skittles has provided an interesting glimpse into the next generation of Websites, but has also demonstrated that there is still a lot of work to be done to determine how best to capture and employ the on-going online conversation about a brand in a meaningful and powerful way.

We want to know - what do you think about the campaign?  Tell us in your comments below!

Back in November, I first wrote about benchmarking, considering who you should be benchmarking your site against. Now I want to talk a little about what metrics you should be benchmarking over time and against the competition.

When thinking about the metrics you want to use to benchmark the experience on your site, there are a few key issues to keep in mind: how do you define success on your site? How can you measure the impact of changes to your site on the customer experience? How does the site experience influence other aspects of your business? There are some benchmarking methods which look at a single metric, such as NetPromoter which looks only at likelihood to recommend. While these numbers can be useful, we feel it is important to understand how your Website impacts a wider range of metrics in order to understand how changes to your site, your industry and the internet impact both the customer experience on your site and the ramifications that experience has for your business. To that end, there are a few areas we suggest you look at to come up with the metrics you will benchmark throughout time and against the competition:

1. Clearly define success metrics for your site. One of the questions we ask clients in each project kick-off meeting is how they define success for their Website. To us, it seems like a very basic question that will allow us to understand how we can help a client drive toward greater success. What seems like a simple question often draws a blank from our clients, so this is the first place that you should begin within any benchmarking project, defining success for your site. This can be very different depending on your industry or even the specific area of your Website you are focusing on. For a consumer products company, your Website may be successful if it increases brand awareness and positive feelings towards your brand, while for an e-commerce site, sales, conversion and a sales per cart may define success. So step 1 is to define these metrics and determine how you are going to measure them (questions to ask, scales to use, etc.)

2. Measure the customer experience on your Website. Typical customer experience metrics to track include success (the ability to complete the task the user came to the site to complete), overall satisfaction with site experience and likelihood to return to and recommend the site. The benefit of these customer experience metrics is that not only do they give you a picture of what is happening on your site, but you can also measure them on your competitors’ site(s) through a head-to-head evaluation. While you may not be able to determine how your competitors rank on the success metrics you have defined, customer experience metrics are measurable and can help you identify key areas in which the competition is outpacing you as well as areas in which you are excelling. These metrics also allow you to measure the impact of changes to your site quickly in ways that may not have bubbled up to the level of your success metrics yet.

3. Impact across the business. Finally, you want to make sure you are not only thinking about the Web experience, but how that experience may drive offline actions, such as visiting a brick and mortar outlet, or impact your brand, as could be seen in the increase in positive feelings toward your company. With these metrics it is likely you may measure them in brand tracking studies or other surveys that measure offline activities. The key here is to make sure you include them in your online benchmarking, asked in the same way, not only to measure the impact the Web is having on them, but also to be able to compare across the customer data you are collecting from a variety of sources.

Once you have defined these metrics, define the scale and the way the questions getting at this data will be asked and be consistent. By collecting this data in a consistent manner across your research, you will quickly build up a set of benchmarking criteria to help inform decisions as you move forward.

Stay tuned for the next post: Part 3 – how often should you be benchmarking?

Usability Labs have long been considered a speedy, effective method of uncovering fundamental usability barriers on Websites. They are especially useful before launching a site or conducting an in-depth quantitative study. Here is a quick refresher on how Usability Labs work:

Target users of a Website are invited to a research facility to participate in a usability study A moderator (from eVOC) conducts one-on-one interviews with the participants, asking them to complete tasks on the site(s) and answer questions about their experience Sessions are audio and video recorded, while clients observe the sessions from a separate room through a one-way mirror
	Usability Lab

What Sets Usability Labs Apart
Usability Labs are so effective because:

1. All variables are accounted for
• Internet connection speed, monitor resolution, and physical environment are the same for everyone
• The moderator can control exactly which pages users explore
2. Users’ facial expressions, physical reactions, and site behavior can all be observed
3. The discussion guide is flexible
• The moderator can probe on key areas on the fly
• More specific, user-driven recommendations can be collected
4. Usability interviews take 30-90 minutes, which exposes participants to more content than a survey would

It’s not surprising that many of our clients choose Usability; in fact, it’s unbeatable for evaluating a site’s information architecture, nomenclature, and overall navigability.

But what about effectiveness of navigation, ease of use, and information flow? Sure, Usability findings are great at illuminating these areas. But an advanced technology called Eye Tracking is now enabling us to uncover insights that, when combined with Usability, paint the most complete picture of a Website’s performance. We have found that Eye Tracking allows us to make discoveries about Websites that we never could have made doing Usability alone.

How Eye Tracking Works
So how does it work? Using a special Eye Tracking monitor that tracks participants’ eye movements, we can log exactly where users are looking as they browse each page of a Website. The data can then be visually quantified:

www.evocinsights.com

What Eye Tracking Tells Us
The Eye Tracking software also allows us to capture usage data, such as how long it takes users to click or complete tasks, and what percentage of users take a particular path. Here are just a few examples of the insights we can glean when we complement Usability with Eye Tracking. We can:

• Determine what areas users overlook (e.g., advertising) and complement with usability findings to explain why
• Calculate how long it takes users to complete tasks in different navigation designs and choose which one performs best
• Discover if users tend to notice certain page areas early or late, and provide recommendations on prioritizing navigation and content
• Study what paths users take as they browse a site and determine their effectiveness, as well as key differences between user segments
• Learn how users scan information and find out the most effective content layouts

We strongly encourage any company that is planning to conduct Usability Labs to consider adding Eye Tracking, particularly to test visibility of key areas, navigation, messaging, and/or ads. To learn more, go to http://www.evocinsights.com/services_labbased.html#eyetracking.

In the first week of 2009, eVOC held its annual kickoff meeting, during which we excitedly discussed our plans for the year. It was great to have everyone together and we are looking forward to a wonderful 2009!

Here is a photo from the event: