Red Carpet Web Promotion has been sponsoring a child on a monthly basis through the charity Christian Children’s Fund of Canada for over 5 years, (since June 2011). We have helped 2 children and their families to have a better life including access to clean water, education and health care.
Click here if you are interested in sponsoring a child.
See our new client testimonial regarding Facebook Ads to recruit participants for research on memory.
We were looking for participants experiencing memory loss to sign up for research studies in our lab in Sherbrooke. We had little success getting enough participants using traditional means. Red Carpet Web Promotion proposed a web strategy including a new website and targeted Facebook ads…
We updated the look of our site and are now using Wordpress. Check it out: https://www.redcarpetweb.com. Comments are welcome!
The User Research Methods course was about the many different ways of measuring the User Experience (UX). Any method from qualitative (“it feels wrong”) to quantitative measurements (“31% of people click on this button”). The course showed us how to differentiate between self-reported data (what people say they do) vs. behavioural data (what people actually do). A short list of the different research methods includes:
Each of these has its own pros and cons, and each has its own best time to be used. The ones we use the most at Red Carpet Web Promotion tend to be A/B testing, Remote and In-lab usability studies, Click tracking, and Surveys.
The Measuring User Experience course was about when to measure a website, and how to know if the data you have is significant or not. The course taught us when to use formative testing (early in the design) or summative testing (to compare a final product with previous versions or with the competition); How many tests and subjects to use, and how to account for errors, either random or systematic. All of these put together allows us to do superior and more appropriate testing, and to sort through the data to get to the good stuff.
The result of these courses was to bring much more vigilance to significant errors when Red Carpet Web Promotion runs tests. We also have expanded the types of tests we can do.
Our goal is to maximize your ROI, and this can’t be done if people don’t have a good user experience. A quick first test is usually simple, and will bring in oodles of high-quality data that might never have occurred to you.
So sign up quick for your UX testing, because the longer you wait, the more conversions you are missing out on.
Last September, I attended some usability training courses in New York City offered by the Nielsen Norman Group (www.nngroup.com). I took UX Basic Training, Measuring User Experience, and User Research Methods. In my own experiences, I have found that a site with a poor UX will not do as well in the search engine results. This comes as a result of people not liking the site, and thus not linking to it. This in turn informs the search engines that the site is poor, and thus the search engines drop its rankings in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP).
In taking these courses I have become UX Certified and may now be addressed as: Shawn Campbell UXC (Ha!). With one more course, I will become a UX Research Specialist (probably next September).
The first course, UX Basic Training, explained UX beyond the website and into everyday life. Problems like a bathroom scale that is too complex to use, or a teapot that drips every time you pour it, these are usability problems that affect the user experience. We learnt which research methods to use and how to analyse the data we acquired. We learnt how to use the data to improve the user experience, and how to make UX an important part of any service or product. With this knowledge, we can now properly evaluate how to measure their usability.
A great take away from this course was to always make sure that your core service was easy to use, and that the peripherals did not interfere with the usability of that core service.
Shawn attended classes in New York City this week and completed his certification in User Experience. Congrats Shawn!
Click to see the certification details. https://www.redcarpetweb.com/ux.html
I attended a Conference at Google’s Montreal office yesterday. I got an excellent refresher on all the of the advertising opportunities in YouTube and with the Google Display Network. A few things stood out as I learnt about some great new features, some of which are still in the beta stage, and also more about Gmail ads which have been available for about 1 month. Any advertiser can now use Gmail ads to target the user based on keywords or domain names that appear in email messages as well as Google search queries on the Web, sites visited and Google Profile information.
Another interesting feature for display ads and YouTube ads is Brand Lift. Brand Lift uses one question surveys to measure the effectiveness of your ads and how they affect awareness and branding.
Overall it was a conference worth attending and will help me to offer the most appropriate Google ad opportunities to my clients.
See this Infographic comparing a UX designer with a UI designer.
http://i.imgur.com/bvD3WBF.png
This week Google added mobile friendliness as a factor in search engine ranking. Some of the factors in determining mobile friendliness are the text size, button size and the amount of space between links. A good solution is to have a mobile responsive site which means that as you adjust the screen size the layout changes to accommodate. This avoids having to zoom in and scroll side-to-side when viewing a site on a smaller device. See this site for example: plomberiedaeva.com and drag your window size smaller to see how the page adjusts. Notice that the menu also becomes a drop down menu which is easier to use on mobile.
We have been converting many sites to mobile responsive so that sites are easier to use on mobiles. If your website is not mobile responsive, please contact us to help with this transition.
A Google representative said mobile friendliness was “one of many” factors used by the search engine to rank results. In a blog post the company said it would have “a significant impact”.
You can check this link to see how your site scores for mobile friendliness: google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly. The plumbing site I linked to above scored “Awesome”.
