January 29, 2009
Usability 101
You’re in the throes of planning a new web site. Your primary goals – make it as easy as possible for a site visitor to navigate through your site, find what they seek and execute a task. For example, you may want visitors to complete a Contact Us form or purchase a product. How do you ensure your efforts will meet the needs of your online customers? Test it!
Best practices suggest every marketing budget should include a line item for usability testing. But what exactly is usability testing? When do you employ it? And how and where do you start?
What is Usability Testing?
The goal of usability testing is to measure your product’s ability to complete or accomplish its intended function or purpose – basically, to affirm whether or not you are truly building your product with your end-user in mind. A few usability goals when building a web site may include:
- Understanding how different visitor types look for information
- Collecting feedback on the types of services/solutions/products your customers might look for
- Getting responses on the tone and amount of information you supply
- Identifying preferred information architecture, terminology and design for your target audience(s)
When Should You Use Usability Testing?
Usability testing is best employed early on in your effort, preferably at the wireframing phase, or at minimum to test initial design prototypes. Many marketers who use testing in their build process do so to validate their efforts after the effort is already completed. There are several challenges with this approach. What if the feedback you receive shows you may need to consider major design, navigation or content rework? Do you still have the time, or the budget, to execute such changes?
With usability testing, you hear straight from the user the problems they’re encountering with your product, helping you identify problems and devise solutions before you introduce your product to your valued customer. This saves you and your customer from a potentially very big headache.
How does Usability Testing Work?
Usability measures four core areas1– performance, accuracy, recall and emotional response. Let’s consider a session focused on reviewing a new web site.
- Performance: How much time, and how many steps, did it take your site visitor to finish a task? To find a product or sign up for a newsletter?
- Accuracy: How many mistakes did the user make? And were they able to get back on track with the right direction? Or does the error require changes to your site?
- Recall: How much did the person remember after the testing?
- Emotional response: Was your test subject confident in their abilities to complete the task at the end of the session? Were they stressed? How did they feel about their experience with your site?
To conduct a usability test, first, a scenario is created. Perhaps you identify trouble or problem areas you’d like greater insight into. Then, a series of tasks to complete the scenario is created that move users through the site to identify if those problem areas are, in fact, issues and to what degree. Throughout the session, users are prompted to provide their feedback on potential solutions.
By the end of the session, you should know more about whether or not the naming conventions used on the site, the navigation structure and the site design will meet your user’s needs, or if it needs revisiting. You can also glean feedback on the user’s expectations of your site and if it did or did not meet them.
How and Where do I Start?
Sometimes the hardest part of usability is determining how and where to start. There are a variety of methods – from one on one interviews to focus groups, to individual sessions to surveys – that you can employ. And while many companies try to take on the task of usability themselves, they are not always experts in the user experience arena. Determining what you need and how to best attain the results you seek can be a daunting task.
There are experts in this field that can make usability a turnkey operation for you and direct you down the shortest (and most affordable) path to getting there. One expert in the field, User Insight, is both a partner and client of Twelve Horses. Their collective experience of over 20 years of user experience testing makes them one of the top 3 usability firms in the U.S., as rated by Forrester. They offer a variety of services that can help you ensure that your product or site development effort is on the right track, or to determine next steps for your existing efforts.
1 Nielsen, J. (1994). Usability Engineering, Academic Press Inc.
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