User Experience (UX) testing is a way of learning about how your customers experience your software, in their natural environment. UX testing techniques developed from the idea of tracing cognitive processes as methods to study actual behaviour at an atomic level, the use of verbal reports and protocols for their analysis in data collection has evolved largely from efforts at understanding human problem solving in the field of psychology (Ericsson & Simon, 1980; Newell & Simon, 1972).

How UX is conducted

The UX testing technique most often used today is the Think-Aloud Protocol (TAP) method developed by Lewis (1980) at IBM research. In think-aloud protocol (TAP) sessions, the participant is asked to vocalise their thoughts, their actions, their expectations of the results of those actions and, any confusion or concerns arising, in the presence of a facilitator. This facilitator also observes the session and may prompt the participant in order to keep the commentary alive. There are two distinct types of TAP, which produce the best results when used in conjunction - Concurrent Analysis and Retrospective Analysis.

If you have a business which you think is suitable for selling products or services online you may already have thought about creating an ecommerce enabled website. You may even already have your product catalogue online in some form, though not necessarily in a form that lends itself easily to an ecommerce setup. Here I’m going to talk about what to look out for when considering an ecommerce implementation, how these systems are put together and how you might structure them and their connection to your existing work methods.

In the beginning was the 'brochureware' website when businesses just wanted to get some details of what they do and where they are online. As security and trust became more established the big players started selling things online and so too did the smaller players. That's one of those advantages of the Internet, you can compete a little easier, sure you still have limited resources but ecommerce is all about working smarter and not necessarily harder. Small businesses are often smarter and more flexible than the big players. So, in order to work smarter you need a system that’s fairly easy to manage on a day to day basis that is a storefront on the Internet for you.

Marketing strategies incorporating information systems, such as email, social networking and media, search engines and websites may be classified as emarketing strategies. To develop an understanding of how your business might leverage information systems to support marketing efforts,  a series of approaches to marketing are first discussed here. Later in this series we will discuss various techniques to use technologies in your marketing efforts.

Mass marketing

The classical approach to marketing is an exposure maximisation strategyThe classical approach to marketing has been the exposure maximisation strategy of mass marketing. The more people that see your message, the more people buy your products and services. It is the one-to-all approach selling whatever you have to many people, with the expectation that there is a direct correlation between exposure and sales. This strategy has been relatively expensive in the past, using print, TV and radio based media to push the message out. As the communication phenomenon that is the Internet has begun to provide easier ways for marketing online, it has become a cheap method for distributing your marketing message.

Determine your own feedback loop to discover what is the most you should pay for advertising, or determining the value of a visit to your ecommerce website. The process of moving visitors through your ecommerce website, from landing page to purchasing is a sales funnel. Here I show you how to find out what a visit to each step through the sales funnel is valued at. There are two major elements in play, 1.) knowing your conversion rates between the steps your visitors take and 2.) knowing your average order value, or profit per order. Once you know those then you can work backwards to determine the value of a visit to each step is worth.

Example

Meet Sports Shop Seán. Seán owns an online shop that sells sports equipment. He running a back to school advertising campaign for kids sports gear. He knows his average profit per order is around €10. He's wondering how much is too much to spend on a Facebook or Adwords advertisement driving visits to his shop.