It’s Friday again, and in this week’s #FollowFriday blog post/list of mine I’d like to turn the spotlight to some of the top usability experts out there.

As often is the case with these lists that I put together, the below one shouldn’t be read as any kind of ranking, but just as a compilation of useful Twitter accounts to follow on the topic.

1. UX Magazine – A leading, Webby-nominated, online user experience publication.
2. Garth Von Buchholz — Author, educator and certified usability analyst.
3. Measuring Usability — A quantitative usability and research firm providing consulting in statistical analysis, usability testing and survey design and analysis
4. Nick Finck — User experience director at Blink Interactive. Former editor in chief of Digital Web Magazine and founder of Blue Flavor.
5. Joshua Porter — Co-founder of @Performable and co-creator of @ABTests
6. UX Design — User experience design and web development stream. Operated by kind robots – for this special human touch please check out @ux.
7. Craig Tomlin — Marketing, SEO and user experience consultant
8. Jane Pyle — User Experience designer focused on iPhone and iPad app design. Interests: emotional design, game design, gestural interfaces.
9. UXmatters — Web magazine about user experience matters, providing insights and inspiration for the user experience community.
10. Interaction Design Association — Official global Twitter feed of the organization.

If I have missed your favorite usability expert or a must-follow account that is actively tweeting on this topic, please do post about them below.

Every week I read dozens of articles published online. Naturally, the vast majority of them are directly related to online marketing in general, and affiliate marketing in particular. The abundance of excellent content published online is so great that I never have enough time to incorporate what I learn into my own writing, and my today’s blog post aims at fixing this to at least to a degree.  Today I’d like to bring to your attention the 10 most interesting, in my opinion, posts and articles that have appeared online in the course of the past week. Most of them are very practical, and chock-full of invaluable advice that marketers can take and apply right away… A few of them are news (or other data) that I have found to be either of interest, or even of inspiration.

Here is my list (the order in which the below posts appear is random, and in no way reflective of any preference, or importance):

– 1 –

5 Great Ways to Waste Money in Google Adwords
Whether you are a merchant or an affiliate just starting with paid search, this article is a must read for you.

– 2 –

30+ Principles to a Better Landing Page Design
Successful web page design rests on four pillars: (i) research, (ii) design, (iii) copy, (iv) testing and improving. More in this article.

– 3 –

Multivariate Testing, 1 2 3 …
Good article on what and how to test. If you’re not yet into testing and analytics, hop aboard!

– 4 –

Give Your Affiliate Campaigns the Psychological Edge and Boost Conversions
Invaluable collection of links on how to employ psychological principles to improve conversions, or motivate people to buy.

– 5 –

What Super Bowl Advertising Can Teach Your Small Business
While I do not share point #2, the rest of this article is very useful for all kinds of marketers.

– 6 –

What Your Form Design Reveals About You
How to improve form design (thereby showing you care about your visitors) to increase your conversion rates.

– 7 –

9 Tricks I Used to Triple My AdSense Earnings in 30 Days
Hundreds of thousands of webmasters are using Google AdSense to monetize their websites. Must read article on what to improve to start earning more.

– 8 –

100 Top Entrepreneurs Who Succeeded Without a College Degree
An interesting list of 100 entrepreneurs who have achieved the pinnacle of success – some even without an elementary school degree.

– 9 –

Confirmed: Google Acquires Social Search Engine Aardvark
Big news: Vark.com acquired by Google for some $50 million. Official post here.

– 10 –

comScore Reports U.S. E-Commerce Spending in Q4 2009 Reached $39 Billion
December 15 ranked as heaviest U.S. online spending day in history at $913M. More in this post.

Over the past few months my wife and myself have become huge fans of Darrell Bush’s art, and shortly after falling in love with his paintings we were happy to find out that Buffalo Games produces jigsaw puzzles based on his artwork. We bought our first one some two months ago, and when my wife finished putting it together, we were simply stunned by how vivid and realistic the minor details of the painting become when they are composed of puzzle pieces. Every log and the roof of the log house, pier boat and leaves on the trees just came to life! So we decided to frame that puzzle:

I think it turned out to into a pretty impressive item wall decor for our basement. We weren’t expecting it to turn out this way, and it was both a pleasant surprise, and a start of a hobby… Since then we bought and put together another one, and it also turned out gorgeous. We looked over the Buffalo Games selection again, and decided to purchase our last one (“Winter Bliss”), but couldn’t find it anywhere in local stores, and I turned to the Internet.

I’ve found the new puzzle at several online stores, but as I was going through the checkout process with each (ended up testing four: PuzzleWarehouse.com, PuzzlesAndBeyond.com, PuzzBuffs.com, and SeriousPuzzles.com) to find out how much shipping would cost me, I’ve bumped into something that I believe to sometimes pose a real problem that negatively affects some merchants’ conversion rates. I am referring to disclosure of full shipping and handling costs conveniently for the user. And by “conveniently” I mean by not demanding that the shopper opens an account first, entering their detailed personal information (including email, full name, full address, and making the phone number information as mandatory). This is exactly the method used by PuzzleWarehouse.com and PuzzlesAndBeyond.com.

PuzzBuffs.com (I’m giving them and the next merchant backlinks here, as they have really deserved it), on the other hand, has a convenient “Estimate Shipping” option, while SeriousPuzzles.com allow you to calculate your shipping options right within your shopping cart. Interestingly enough, in my particular situation, the merchants that did require me to open an account with them first, ended up displaying shipping costs 50% or even 100%+ higher than those that didn’t have the compulsory registration in place. Guess which two merchants I ended up choosing from…

Whatever you sell, do some competitive intelligence, and make sure you do not end up being less attractive to your customers: neither in the usability of your website, nor in the competitiveness of your offer (the first two merchants in my above example failed on both fronts). And if you are selling something that requires shipping, do not decrease your own conversion rates by demanding compulsory registration before the customer sees and agrees to the shipping cost. That contact information you will receive from them won’t be worth anything unless it is contact info of a satisfied customer.

I couldn’t find any statistics on the exact impact of non-disclosed shipping cost on the conversion rate (even though I’m positive it does affect it negatively). So if you know of any, I would certainly appreciate you sharing it in the comments area below.

Over the past few months my wife and myself have become huge fans of Darrell Bush’s art, and shortly after falling in love with his paintings we were happy to find out that Buffalo Games produces jigsaw puzzles based on his artwork. We bought our first one some two months ago, and when my wife finished putting it together, we were simply stunned by how vivid and realistic the minor details of the painting become when they are composed of puzzle pieces. Every log and the roof of the log house, pier boat and leaves on the trees just came to life! So we decided to frame that puzzle:

I think it turned out to into a pretty impressive item wall decor for our basement. We weren’t expecting it to turn out this way, and it was both a pleasant surprise, and a start of a hobby… Since then we bought and put together another one, and it also turned out gorgeous. We looked over the Buffalo Games selection again, and decided to purchase our last one (“Winter Bliss”), but couldn’t find it anywhere in local stores, and I turned to the Internet.

I’ve found the new puzzle at several online stores, but as I was going through the checkout process with each (ended up testing four: PuzzleWarehouse.com, PuzzlesAndBeyond.com, PuzzBuffs.com, and SeriousPuzzles.com) to find out how much shipping would cost me, I’ve bumped into something that I believe to sometimes pose a real problem that negatively affects some merchants’ conversion rates. I am referring to disclosure of full shipping and handling costs conveniently for the user. And by “conveniently” I mean by not demanding that the shopper opens an account first, entering their detailed personal information (including email, full name, full address, and making the phone number information as mandatory). This is exactly the method used by PuzzleWarehouse.com and PuzzlesAndBeyond.com.

PuzzBuffs.com (I’m giving them and the next merchant backlinks here, as they have really deserved it), on the other hand, has a convenient “Estimate Shipping” option, while SeriousPuzzles.com allow you to calculate your shipping options right within your shopping cart. Interestingly enough, in my particular situation, the merchants that did require me to open an account with them first, ended up displaying shipping costs 50% or even 100%+ higher than those that didn’t have the compulsory registration in place. Guess which two merchants I ended up choosing from…

Whatever you sell, do some competitive intelligence, and make sure you do not end up being less attractive to your customers: neither in the usability of your website, nor in the competitiveness of your offer (the first two merchants in my above example failed on both fronts). And if you are selling something that requires shipping, do not decrease your own conversion rates by demanding compulsory registration before the customer sees and agrees to the shipping cost. That contact information you will receive from them won’t be worth anything unless it is contact info of a satisfied customer.

I couldn’t find any statistics on the exact impact of non-disclosed shipping cost on the conversion rate (even though I’m positive it does affect it negatively). So if you know of any, I would certainly appreciate you sharing it in the comments area below.

Bank of America’s Online Banking has had a long history of awards, and at the time of this writing it has over “one million of active mobile banking customers” [source]. The bank  holds the “Webby Award and Webby People’s Choice Award in the online banking/bill pay category” for the year 2006 (and 2007 as well), and the “Global Finance magazine named bankofamerica.com the best consumer online banking site in the U.S.” too [source]. The 2008 Bank Monitor Awards (by Corporate Insight) also crowned the Bank of America with a number of award for their “variety of ‘well-cultivated tools’” and other advantages of their online banking system [source]. However, they too have room for improvement.

Yesterday I was trying to wire money from a business account to an outside-the-bank account (something that I have previously done from my personal account with them), and you can see what it all turned out into from my video below:

There is no excluse for an online service to kick you out of their system when an action is impossible. Just imagine Amazon.com (or any other online store) doing this during the checkout process! At best, it makes the end user think that something is wrong on his/her part, and they retry it again. I lasted 5 trials (at different times during the day), and only when I caught one of their “online assistants” on the line, I was told that this is not something that you can currently do from a business account. That is fine, but the customer doesn’t have to keep on trying for 5 times (or even 2, to be fair), and then call — to find out about this. The beauty of e-Commerce (and I certainly include online banking in it) is precisely in the automation of things. In the above case, the bank can make two things to improve the current state of things:

1. Make it impossible to proceed with the transfer information as soon as the end user chooses a business account as one that the wire is originating from
2. Display a message explaining why the transfer cannot be completed [less preferable option, because it will still make the customer loose time on entering all information before they find out that it's not working]

Logging the customer out (without any explanation provided) when he/she is requesting a service you seem to offer is equivalent to kicking him/her in the a** out of a physical branch’s door (again: without any explanation provided).