Experience Design for online panel ask:us

USECON operates – since many years – a database with testpersons in co-operation with the research partner CURE (Center for Usability Research and Engineering). After more than 15 years, it was time to re-launch this panel and offer it to the community for an active participation. The creation of a positive web experience was the main focus in the re-launch.

The project ask:us – we participate

The aim of the project was to offer a web portal to the community to make it easier for testpersons to participate in our studies and offer interested people the possibility to register online. At the same time, members can change their personal data by themselves, close down their account during holidays for example or participate in usability tests or user experience studies.

We stick to our credo “the user is the center of all activities”, hence we offered long-time testpersons to put the new portal to the acid test for a week. For this usability test, the website has been opened for these selected people and we gave them tasks to fulfil during the week.

Regarding accessibility we also included some people with handicaps to the beta-tester. After a few small adaption, to satisfy the needs of our community, ask:us – we participate was ready to go online.

Concept, Experience Design and Implementation –
Increasing the Web Experience

For our new online panel ask:us, we introduced a convincing web experience, which helps to increase the participation in Usability and User Experience studies as well as in online surveys and promotes the regular use of the website. The focus of Experience Design was to boost the trust in security and privacy of the users and offer at the same time joy and fun using the web portal. Interested visitors are being welcomed and invited to join the community in only a few steps.

At the same time we created a logo whith a high recognition value and that reflects the inclusion of the user. “ask:us – we participate” with a colon (ask:us) and a tagline (we participate) in the colours black and turquoise, communicates trust, security, a community-thinking and the participation and asking the users: “ask us!”

During developing the concept we also registered the name and logo with WIPO (International Trademark System) and also created some business cards, flyer and give-aways.

Usability is our daily business. Naturally, we include our users when creating a web portal for them. ask:us makes it easier for testpersons to participate in studies, eases the (cost-free) registration for interested people and for us it is easier to select the adequate end-user for the particular request.

Mag. Raphaela Ch. Müller, Management User Panel ask:us

ask:us as part of USECON Experience Tools

Meanwhile the user panel ask:us is an integral part of USECON Experience Tools. The online Experience Tools enable us to gain user & customer feedback, insights and user-centred ideas even faster and more efficiently. Various values of benefit (satisfaction, usability, emotion, trust, etc…) are being measured, feedback is asked or the real behaviour of usage is discovered.

Many of the new methods are optimised for the online world and can be used within the context (at home, in the office, etc…), hence offer a broad user sample in a short period of time. Find more information on the Experience Tools website.