User eXperience (UX) archives

How important are the aesthetics of a website? Does a beautiful site convert better? And what is the relation between aesthetics and usability? In this post, I try to answer these questions What is beautiful is usable? A much cited article on the matter is ‘What is beautiful is usable’. The main conclusion of this »

Google Analytics provides us with lots of information about our visitors. However, we are in complete ignorance about the motivations of our visitors to buy our products.  Why do people shop online?  And how can we influence their motives and make them buy (more of) our products? Thijs already gave lots of useful insights in »

Lately I’ve been intrigued by something called the ‘viewing pattern’ of people. This is a pattern in which people view, in this case, websites. There are really a lot of ideas about this out there. Now I’m wondering: is there one right pattern? In other words: is there one pattern we should follow when designing our product »

Learning more and more about Conversion Optimization, it appeared to me as though testing (A/B or multivariate) is the only way to go.  Most of the sites of agencies claiming to help optimize your conversion, state that you should separately test every freaking little change you make on your page. Of course, I am exaggerating »

Our previous post discussed what we did to improve our checkout page. In this post I’ll share with you some of the technical work we did in that process and mostly: the libraries and techniques we used for checkout field validation. We’ve tried several libraries in the process but settled on these as they were »

Today at Pubcon Matt Cutts of Google once again promoted the use of autocomplete-type, a new property for web forms that works in Chrome (and possibly other browsers, I haven’t checked). Google first introduced it back in January 2012 in this post. I wanted to do this quick post to tell you to turn off »

Conversion rate tests are very useful,  but without proper knowledge of research and statistics, the pitfall of interpreting your results incorrectly is large. 1. Research design is beautiful but NOT flawless As I started to investigate upon the test designs of conversion rate testing, I was astonished and delighted with the beauty of the design »

I read a lot of articles about A/B tests and I keep being surprised by the differences in testing that I see. I think it’s safe to say: most conversion rate optimization testing is not scientific. It will simply take up too much space to explain what I mean exactly by being scientific, but I’ll publish »

Every website needs a a proper call-to-action. Since I wrote the first version of that post in 2012, we have been referring to that same post in a large portion of our website reviews. It seems very hard to add focus on a homepage, somehow. I might be going out on a limb here, but »

During my attempts to optimize the conversion rates here on yoast.com, I’ve met with quite some hurdles and roadblocks. That’s why I thought it would be a good idea to write a post; so you won’t have to invent the wheel twice. Define your Intensive Care Pages Although it’s very tempting to start off your »