Usability Testing

17 Usability, Card Sorting, A/B and Multivariate Testing Tools from Sandra Niehaus
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Supplement your analytics with some cool visuals from online heatmap tracking tools

When I was at my Google Analytics training in Montreal this past December, there was only one thing our Google Analytics coach thought could really be improved in terms of the website analytics package. This is the site-overlay feature. … Continue Reading »

Mobile usability tests encourage distractions and an unstable environment. Like any website you’ll ever build, there is a need for usability testing. Building a site for mobile users is like shooting in the dark unless you know what they’re looking at and what they’re viewing it on. … Continue Reading »

Identifying and prioritizing your usability lab results is the most interesting and valuable part

Once you conduct your usability lab, it will become very obvious to you very quickly, which areas need improvement. More often than not, there will be more than one user who will experience frustration with certain tasks on your website. … Continue Reading »

The difference between heuristic and cognitive usability studies, and how to conduct both.

When conducting a usability study with real users (as opposed to an expert review), your main duty to the test is to pay attention to the user. But above all, remember that you are scoring the website, not the user. … Continue Reading »

Paper Prototyping

If you are only testing usability AFTER your site has been developed, you are only looking for validation, not actual usability. But how can you test a website that has not even been written in a line of code so far? … Continue Reading »

This test is especially helpful if you have a lot of categories or sections and you want to know how users expect to see those organized. As the name implies, a card sort requires the test participant to sort cards, each with a word or statement printed on it, according to the user’s mental model of the relationships between the words or statements. The test facilitator then records the sort in a spreadsheet or in one of the online sorting tools. A cluster analysis of the results from several test participants gives designers an excellent view into what is important to the user and how they refer to it in their own language. … Continue Reading »

A great affordance test is to print off web pages in grayscale, give a test user a yellow highlighter and ask them to highlight anything on which they think they could click. The first thing you will notice is that anything that is underlined will get highlighted. Those words that may or may not be colored but which are not underlined will most likely not look like links to your test user. … Continue Reading »

A heuristic evaluation is one of the more popular methods of usability testing and takes place with a functional website, likely in the last stages of development or right before a redesign. This is the type of lab setting that we showed you in Monday’s tip How to Conduct a Usability Lab, and requires a computer with a webcam and usability software like Morae, a moderator, and a user. … Continue Reading »

How to prepare a usability lab for several different types of studies. Usability testing is a controlled experiment that tests the architecture and user-friendliness of your website. Reasons why businesses conduct usability tests are often to provide feedback to information architects and designers. … Continue Reading »

How to keep smart shoppers happy and provide them with a thorough, yet user-friendly online shopping experience. Normally, we don’t recommend shopping carts to our users, because we see the highest conversion rate on sales letter landing pages. However, we realize that many publishers have too large of an inventory and feel that shopping carts work for them. That’s why today we’re talking about shopping cart optimization. … Continue Reading »

Websurfers are not getting any more patient.

More people are installing broadband connections in their homes, and more than 80 percent of all active Internet users in the US now access the net with broadband, according to Website Optimization’s March 2007 Bandwidth Report. The pokey 56K connection is becoming too slow to satisfy. … Continue Reading »

Looking back on an expert’s claim that website usability testing proved promotional language imposes a cognitive burden

It’s nearly a decade now since website usability expert Dr. Jakob Nielsen proclaimed that “that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word.”

“Users detested ‘marketese’—the promotional writing style with boastful subjective claims,” said Dr. Nielsen in 1997. … Continue Reading »

Experts on Website Design and Website Usability Testing Can Disagree

“Never redesign your website,” says one of my esteemed mentors and colleagues.

Disturbing words, especially because, as a website design expert and information architect, I spend 50+ hours a week explaining to clients why and how they must redesign their websites. … Continue Reading »

Earlier this week, I got my annual physical (the doc says I’m in good shape for an old guy). My new MD looks to be about 35 making me about 15 years his senior—me having just turned 50 last December.

While waiting in various states of dress and undress, I found myself trying to read Time and U.S. News. I say “trying” because the type size in both print magazines was too small for me to read comfortably—even with my reading glasses in a well-lit room. My guess is that both magazines are running some variation of a 9 to 10 point serif typeface with some degree of compression. … Continue Reading »

Having just conducted a mini-usability test this week with a very confused customer, I have website usability on the brain. We have some tests scheduled for the end of September that I just cannot wait another second for!

As many of you know, website usability is a hot issue in Web development, most likely because, over the past decade, so many websites were launched without any user testing at all, leaving the Web littered with confusing and unusable interfaces. … Continue Reading »

Perhaps you’re confident of the words you must use on your website but not how they should be organized. Our usability expert, Roxanne O’Connell, likes to make that a job for a Card Sort Test. This test is especially helpful if you have a lot of categories or sections and you want to know how users expect to see those organized.

As the name implies, a Card Sort requires the test participant to sort cards, each with a word or statement printed on it, according to the user’s mental model of the relationships between the words or statements. The test facilitator then records the sort in a spreadsheet. … Continue Reading »

As our usability guru, Roxanne O’Connell is fond of saying, the cardinal rule when deciding on which words to use to describe the various departments, sections and categories on your website is to ask, “What would a user call this?”

Not “What do the business people call this?” or “What does the boss call this?” …or worse “What made-up marketing term can we call this?”

The only words that count at the end of the day are those that your intended users associate with what they are trying to find at your site. And there are a couple of ways you can find these words. … Continue Reading »

Getting the design of your website right often proves to be a daunting task. The development costs alone for creating a website with a unique value proposition can be staggering. Our inside joke on that is, “How do you create a $10 million Web business? Start with $38 million and work your way down.”

Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to guess what your customers expect? The good news is YOU CAN—and without writing a single line of HTML code. If you have paper, pencils and some simple office supplies, you and your team of designers and developers can ask users to test your website before you even build your first page. … Continue Reading »

While humans are humans, age is a major consideration in designing usable websites that will allow the targeted users to have an efficient and fulfilling user experience. … Continue Reading »

Ever wonder if the color of your order button impacts click-through rates and conversion rates? The short answer: order button color does matter. Discover which color order button lifted response for one publisher by 27 percent! … Continue Reading »

Webpage path analysis for a large advertising-driven consumer website revealed that there was a problem with website usability. Users were bypassing the “browse by category” website navigation in 85 percent of user sessions. Website usability testing revealed that the users were using search to look for reports and articles, instead of using the left column website navigation. … Continue Reading »

For a newspaper with only a third of the circulation of The New York Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution does an excellent job of keeping their website easily searchable and user-friendly. The New York Times’ nytimes.com and The Washington Post’s washingtonpost.com tied for a close second, while The Philadelphia Inquirer’s philly.com came in last place. … Continue Reading »