Web User Experience Blog

The survey to gather external user input for the VeriSign homepage redesign has ended. Thank you to everyone who participated and provided their feedback. This is very helpful to us in learning what works, what doesn't work, and what you would like to see on the VeriSign homepage.

We have parsed through the survey data and here are some of the top findings.

What You Like:

• There is love for the VeriSign brand


• Homepage is easy to use and user-friendly


• It has a clean design

What You Want:

• A little less content


• Streamlined animation elements


• Make it even cleaner and simpler

We are strong advocates of what's good for the user is good for VeriSign and are working to incorporate your feedback. We have gathered and analyzed a lot of additional data and are moving into the wire-framing step. Thanks everyone and if there is any other feedback, please chime in! Will keep you posted.

Posted by Reshma Kumar at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Internet continues to grow! There were 24 million new domain names registered in 2008 and 10.1 million new names in the fourth quarter of '08 across the all top level domains (TLDs). This brings the total number of domain name registrations across all TLDs to 177 million for 2008 - a 16 percent increase over the previous year and a 2 percent increase over the third quarter of '08. The five largest TLDs in terms of base size were .com, .cn (China), .de (Germany), .net, and .org.

The number of .com and .net domain names continues to climb as well. The overall base of .com and .net domain names grew to 90.4 million in 2008 - a 12 percent increase from 2007 and a 1 percent increase from the third quarter. Country Code Top Level Domain Names (ccTLDs) reached 71.1 million domain names - a 22 percent increase YOY and a 3 percent increase from the third quarter of 2008.

New domain name registrations across all TLDs have been growing at a decreasing rate compared to 2007 due to slower growth in both gTLDs and ccTLDs.

Domain Name Industry Brief (pdf).

Posted by Reshma Kumar at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Imagine trying to purchase something on a Website and getting a message that the secure connection has failed and the site is using an invalid certificate. Would you think twice about proceeding or even abandon your purchase? Probably, yes. That is what happens when a site has an invalid SSL certificate. It may be that the cert has expired or just wasn't setup correctly.

And what does this do to the user experience on these sites? Well, not a lot of good. It doesn't instill much confidence in the user; not to mention, it can inhibit the user's ability to access your site altogether. It also presents a security threat as the user's information may be vulnerable and prone to hacking and phishing scams which can become a liability for the company. It can also result in downtime for the site. In the end, both the company and customer loses. So, to prevent this from happening to your site, keep those SSL certs current.

Posted by Reshma Kumar at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Text: OMG! R U Serious?! Wht a Gr8 Yr 4 Mobl Msging!

Translation: Oh my God! Are you serious?! What a great year for mobile messaging!

And, it sure was a record year. More than 224 billion mobile messages were delivered in 2008 - a 134 percent increase from 2007. The increase is attributed to the continued worldwide growth of text messaging and its usage for social purposes including P2P (peer-to-peer) and A2P (application-to-person) messaging services.

And Valentine's Day also promises to not break any hearts. VeriSign expects a record breaking 1.7 billion inter-carrier and a total of 3.5 billion SMS messages to be sent in North America on February 14 which is typically a very high-volume day for texting love notes.

Get the full story.

Posted by Reshma Kumar at 4:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You may have noticed that we redesigned the utility navigation on the verisign.com site back in the latter half of 2008. This is the navigation which appears at the top right of the content area of pages.

The previous iteration of the utility nav was comprised of the standard 'print' and 'email' functionalities and the related icons were a flat gray. In the redesign, we added 'bookmarking' - but not your traditional Web 1.0, browser bookmarking functionality where users can save pages to their favorites; we opted to add social bookmarking or otherwise referred to as bookmarking 2.0 functionality. This allows users to not only add pages to their browser favorites; but, to also add and share on social bookmarking sites like Google, Yahoo, Digg, and Delicious. This way, users are able to save pages for their own personal use or share with others on the Internet.

We also updated the look and feel of the icons making them more 3-D and blue - which is a trend and is in keeping with the standard Web convention of blue clickable links, giving them a subtle and more actionable effect.

Posted by Reshma Kumar at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you haven't seen this before, this is a funny video. It's from an '08 VeriSign campaign featuring a self-proclaimed 'Cart Whisperer' who goes out rescuing abandoned shopping carts and then setting them free. The underlying message is that online shoppers fill up their shopping carts and abandon them before hitting the 'Buy' button because they don't feel the site they are buying from is secure...maybe because they don't see a trust mark like the VeriSign Secured Seal or evidence of SSL encryption :). Enjoy!

Posted by Reshma Kumar at 1:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We are redesigning the VeriSign homepage domestically and internationally and as part of that process, would like to get your feedback! The goal of the redesign is to have the homepage better meet your needs - our customers. We are also looking at updating the look and feel, surface more relevant content, and make the page more navigable to help you get to what you need - easier and faster.

We have put together an anonymous survey so you can let us know what you think of the current homepage. Your input is valuable to us as we strive to continually make improvements aimed at better serving you. We encourage you to participate and provide your feedback as soon as possible to ensure your voice is heard. Please take a few minutes to complete the survey by February 19, 2009. Take the Survey!

Posted by Reshma Kumar at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)