Usability

You’d like to know if an email bounces (marketing jargon for undeliverable), right? Services like Hotmail or Gmail will send you a notification. To give you a better user experience, Debitoor now does the same.

Emails can bounce for a number of reasons, but it is often caused simply by a small spelling mistake in the email address.

With the new notification feature, you will know right away if one of your quotes or invoices hasn’t reached its intended recipient. You can then check if you spelled the email address correctly and possibly contact the customer via phone, if the problem seems to lie elsewhere.

The layout of your Debitoor view depends on the device you're using it on. Chances are, if you've been using Debitoor on a tablet all this time you have not even noticed the recent layout changes of the desktop version.

With the recent layout and navigational changes for Debitoor - the biggest design change in the history of Debitoor - we rearranged the menu items in a way which meant that some of you couldn't find your quotes.

And this type of feedback is super valuable to us.

So we'll release some updates to the design this week which should make it easier for you to get to your quotes. Note that Sales is still your gateway to Invoices, Quotes and Products:

The Debitoor iPhone app Version 1.2 is here with a couple of visual changes plus a new time-saving feature.

Last week, Danish online IT magazine Version 2 published an article on the challenges of creating great user experiences for users of online accounting software who basically hate accounting.

Read a translated abstract of the article in the following...

Last week, we ran an exciting user testing session in Copenhagen. The participants, who had volunteered to help us out, were freelancers and project managers who were not already familiar with accounting as such, nor with Debitoor.

And like our recent user testing session in Berlin, observing and listening to users engage with the software was a bit of an eye opener to us.

Keeping a low profile ourselves during the actual tasks (Mette in black, Mads in yellow, Inger behind the camera), we learn valuable lessons from just observing.

When I recently joined the Nielsen Norman Group Usability Week in London, I had the pleasure of sitting in on the highly esteemed usability guru Jakob Nielsen's Keynote Speech with the promising title: 'Making Usability Happen'.

His session covered nothing less than the development of web usability over the past last 20 years. From the first, simple websites accessed on rare, heavy and expensive 'computer work stations' in the mid 90s, over texting, messaging and laptop use in the early years of 2000 to the gigantic multi-platform approach of today's web usability.

And that's when I realised that I belong to the typical group which Jakob Nielsen referred to as 'iPad potatos'. The kind of audience who'll slouch into a comfortable position with their iPads, preferring everything the easy way around.

And a super important user group for anyone dealing with the art of creating content for multi-device users.

While we're focusing greatly on user feedback and observing and analyzing user behaviour intensely here at Debitoor at the moment, let me just share some of the feedback we gathered in the most recent user test which we ran in Berlin a couple of weeks ago.

To me, there's nothing more exciting than observing how someone uses a product. Particularly a product that I've designed or been involved with somehow.

And the core concept of Debitoor is that it's defined by its users. User experiences, input and feedback are all we want right now. So the creative designers and usability experts behind the Debitoor invoice software met in Berlin last week for a couple of intense user testing sessions.

Test results and user statements will follow here on the blog shortly, but allow me to define what a good user experience means to me.