We have been getting a lot of questions about website usability testing recently from our clients, so I thought it would be good to explain how we use it and why it is so useful. In a nutshell, what usability testing refers to is sitting a user down in front of a computer and asking them to think outloud as they try to complete tasks on that website. Web design is no different than any other industry in one very basic respect: we fail to pay enough attention to how real human beings use our products. It is a lot more fun to sit around and come up with fun ideas that you or your client love than to deal with actual user feedback on how well your product works.
There are several different methodologies that are used in usability testing. The one that we prefer is a hybrid of techniques recommended by Jakob Nielsen (www.useit.com), the self-appointed guardian of usability on the web, and Mark Hurst, the head of the influential usability company Creative Good (www.creativegood.com). The idea is to get unbiased users who match the different audience segments on your website and observe them while they “think” outloud. Both the user’s face and their mouse movements are recorded on a single video feed, giving us a powerful bit of evidence about how well the website we are testing works.
Usability testing can be useful in several different ways. First, it can uncover obvious problems with your website that can greatly improve its usability and therefore its overall conversion rate (making or saving you more money!). Usually these problems can be fixed for a nominal cost, but they were “hidden” from both your website design company and yourself because you are too close to the product to see it as a new user will. Second, usability testing can help you to find large, strategic issues with your website. Often these take the form of, “oh, users don’t understand that our company does X.” Or, “our users don’t understand that the point of page A is for them to contact us for a quote.” As we repeatedly emphasize, you can never make something too easy on the web. Lastly, usability testing can help to depersonalize the design, copy-writing and development components of your website. While most people are rarely short on opinions about how something should be done, there is nothing quite as useful as real user feedback to get everyone thinking again about what the customer wants.
I’ll leave you with some sample quotes from some of our usability tests. These are often the most effective way to summarize the findings of a series of usability tests:
“I don’t know my flight number, I’m filling this out because I need help finding [a flight]. I’m confused!â€??
“At times I thought it was too messy. I couldn’t find things on the homepage. I like sites that are simple and clear. Everything was so flashy that nothing grabbed my attention. I clicked on a tab to get away from the homepage.”
“Text is very small – with a lot of text to sift through, it may be challenging for older eyes. I know I struggled. Link colors are also a little light.”
“Website is messy at times…too many things happening at one time. Homepage had many things happening. I looked for something to grab my attention, and nothing really did on the homepage.”