Why we started testing usability
Our web developers are often tasked with meeting complicated needs in simple ways. While that’s often a challenge, it usually can be done. And because our developers are no ordinary users of the internet, they want to make sure what they make is a simple solution for everyone! That’s where usability testing comes in.
UsabilityHub.com is a great tool for designers and developers, and one we just started using. In a nutshell, it lets you (for free or a nominal charge) run a few different kinds of tests in order to gain feedback on how intuitively your site works! With UsabilityHub, there are three different kinds of testing options:
- The Five-Second Test: Helps you fine tune your landing pages and calls to action by analyzing the most prominent elements of your design.
- The Click Test: Tweak your interfaces by finding out exactly where your users click when interacting with them.
- The NavFlow Test: Helps you improve your conversion rates by analyzing how people navigate around your websites and applications.
Just last week, we had a project for a great company with a wide network of independent sales reps covering different territories. The client wanted an easy, useful solution for locating these reps, so their customers could find a rep and his/her contact information via location, industry, or both.
We started with this design:
And decided we wanted to run it through the Click Test. It would record where our test subjects were intuitively likely to click, given very little context. We presented users with a simple scenario (“Imagine you are looking for a mining equipment dealer in Ohio”) and started the test.
Test 1 Results
A short few hours later, we had 50 results, and this is what it looked like:
Neverminding all the people who clicked on the “Find a Sales Rep” button in the navbar, since we were on that page already (our mistake for including that in the test — we shouldn’t assume that the test-takers would know that already.), we noticed that people were clicking the “Locations” dropdown, but not really the “All” dropdown, which sorted by industry. Our goal was to have an equal amount of clickers on each of those options.
Why was this? After staring at it for a while, we realized we needed to change the wording. Since our users just saw “All” as an option, they had no idea what the “All” was for! All reps? All locations? All pants sizes? We had to add a bit of context so users realized this is where we’d ask them to sort by machine types or industry served by the rep.
After a quick change from “All” to “All machine and industry,” we tried the test again.
Test Two Results
After a short wait, we got our results back:
It worked great! There was still a majority of clicks on the By Location tab, but these results were much closer to what we were trying to accomplish, demonstrating that the interface was much easier to interpret and more user-friendly.
Amazing what change minor word edit can make. We are usability test believers now.
Have you run usability tests on your web projects? Did it help?
Posted November 21, 2011 at 2:40 pm by Andy Welfle