In our December blog Making your website user-friendly: DIY requirements identification for companies we introduced a check list for companies on how to identify user requirements, including 1) Persona definition 2) Scenarios and story-boarding and 3) Requirements definition. The aim of these two blogs is to advice business owners, sales and marketing managers and IT managers on how to create user-friendly websites that generate business using techniques that are not resource-intensive. Today we have a closer look at usability testing.
Usability testing
After you implement functions and solutions that address requirements discovered during the first stage, it’s time to test if the requirements have been correctly understood and implemented and truly improve your website’s usability.
There are a number of techniques that can be used to see if your website is user-friendly and responds to user requirements. We recommend a think-aloud protocol technique, which gives you very detailed insights, but is time consuming and is usually carried out with a smaller sample of users who are happy to provide you with feedback. This can be combined with collecting data on a larger sample of users without interacting with them at all using analytical behavior-tracking tools. The advantage of the first technique lies in the opportunity to reveal the rationale behind user’s behavior, helping you answer the question “Why users behave in this way?” while the second technique enables you to collect data from a large number of users easily, helping you answer the question “How many users behave this way?”
- Think-aloud protocol: this technique consists of three main stages: creating a scenario, carrying out usability testing, and analyzing the results. In the first stage create tasks that your usability participants are asked to fulfill. You can develop a scenario around your task, e.g. “Imagine you are planning on going skiing and need to buy a hat. You were recommended a website www.yourwinterhat.com by your friend and you would like to purchase one. What would be your first step?” or “You have made up your mind and that you would like to purchase an Elk style skiing hat. Add it to your basket and proceed to checkout.” While carrying out usability testing, ask the participant to say aloud everything that is on his/her mind and ask them to explain their behavior. Ideally you should be with the participant in the same room and observe what he/she is doing or watch a screen he/she is sharing over an online call. Users can often struggle while searching for a product on a website or while going through the checkout process, but they do not admit it. Think aloud protocol can give you a great insight into this. Finally, after you have carried out testing with a number of participants, it’s time to analyze the results. Use coding and colorful markers to highlight different themes that came up. You will often see that users encounter the same issues. For each issue or recommendation you discover, note how many participants experienced it, how serious the issue was and how difficult it is to fix. This will help you prioritize the changes that should be made in order to improve your website’s usability. We recommend adding a short follow-up questionnaire (e.g. using Likert Scales) at the end of the testing session, e.g. “On a scale of 1-10, how easy do you find our website to navigate around? 1 = very easy and intuitive, 10 = extremely difficult and counter-intuitive.”
- Analytical behavior-tracking tools: are great to complement the insights you gathered from your participants. Analytical tools such as Clicky, KISSmetrics or Google Analytics will provide you with information such as average visit time, average number of pages viewed per visit, top visited pages, bounce rate, landing pages and pages from which visitors leave. Tools such as CrazyEgg create heat maps that allow you to see where visitors click on particular pages of your website and how many visitors scroll down the page to view the whole content.
If you are committed to creating a better user experience for your customers, prospects, partners and employees, read our 15 tips for a user-friendly website in Europe!
