Overview

User Centered Design practices

Usability Test?!!!

Planning your Usability Test

Final word on UT and Usability.

Usability in Context

If web development isn’t driven by an alignment of

sustainable technology, user driven content and

business driven goals, the corporate Web presence will

either fail to meet the organization’s business goals, be

troubled by expensive technology challenges or simply

ailienate core users!

- G.A Buccholz, Web Strategist

Usability must be complimented

by strategy

User centered

Design

A project based design approach that puts the intended users of a site at the centre of its design and development.

Know your

audience- Lenny Bruce,

Comedian

Typical UCD workflow

1. Define both the business’ and users’ goals & objectives

2. Research site for development, amass necessary content, plan wireframes and develop sitemap

3. Develop and (perform technical) testing of prototypes

4. Evaluating design alternatives

5. Test the site with users

6. Analyze usability problems

7. Propose and integrate solutions.

Experience Design

Web Design Tip

A design approach that focuses on the creation of experiences that produce desired perceptions, cognition, and behavior among their clients’ “users,” “customers,” “visitors,” or “audiences.”

The Designer’s view

Most good (front end) designers are not

hostile to idea of usability testing. In fact

they like the idea of providing sound design

to shoot down the ridiculous ideas from

clients (internal and external)

- David Jarvis, Sr Front End designer

the usability

“Did you knows?”

• 45% of users abandon Websites with poor navigability, slow

response times and confusing content

• 35% of users who experience on a particular site leave that site

for a competitor’s site.

• 52% of companies make no attempt to measure whether users

are successful in finding what they want.

• Conversion rates can be increased by 40% by improving user

experience on e-commerce sites

• Product development cycles can be reduced by 33-50% by

incorporating usability engineering methods

- stats courtesy Triangle Tech Journal

User research Methods

• Usability Testing

• Contextual Interviews

• Online Surveys

• Individual Interviews

• Focus Groups

• Card sorting

What is a Usability Test?

1. A means to measure how well people can use some human made object (e.g web page, a computer interface, a document or device) for its intended purpose

2. A to determine how well people can use a product.

What is Usability

Testing?

• It is an iterative test whereby real users personally interacting with the product

• It does not involve focus groups, surveys, market trials or even product (in this case, a site) release followed by feedback forms

• It is not based on collecting information on opinions but observing and documenting patterns

of behaviour user interaction.

• It’s a user centred design (UCD) practice

How does it work

A user is presented with a real scenario and he/she is asked to perform a variety of tasks.

Observers (including the project team) either viewing in a secondary location or at some latter point must

Record notes on what the user says or does.

Collect data on paths users take to complete tasks

Identify what problems and deadly errors user encountered

When and where, users/testers were confused

The information is collected and used during the site redesign/revision processes

Why conduct A

Usability Test?

Simply to understand the dynamics of your own website

To find out how the user interacts with your website (i.e. usage patterns)

To identify problems and difficulties users encounter when using their website

To identify what works or what needs to be reconfigured.

UT Project WorkFlow

Plan Develop your UT proposal, the guiding document for your UT project. Identify website(s) and/or back end application which will be the focus of the test. Define short term objectives and long term goals.

Analyse

Segment and Define your target audience, Develop personas, recruit participants.

Design

Design site, develop scenarios & tasks and post test questionnaire

Test and Refine

Test, collect data, prepare report and refine or redesign.

Required Resources

Human Resources Usability Test Lead/Organizer - this person will lead all planning activities. Communicates with the various groups within the project team. Involved in recruiting/screening activities. Works with the project team to plan scenarios. Briefs primary team ands observers on their respective roles.

Project Team - Department manager, Marketing Manager, web team, front end designer(s) (UI D or graphics artist), back end developer. All actively supporting organization activities.

UT Primary Test Team - UT Facilitator and A/V Tech

UT Assistant - will assist UT lead, (in some cases) interviews prospective recruits, confirms participation of recruits and invited observers, puts together packages for observers, preparing UT flash cards and initially greeting and introducing testers to facilitator.

Required Resources

Logistics and Tech RequirementsComputer lab/ or open room (eg. an office).

The room must have reliable internet access. If the room doesn’t have a computer, source a laptop. The room should be large enough to comfortably accommodate, tester, faciltator and

AV Support - Make arrangements to have the session tapped

A separate or adjoined conference room for observers.

It would be better if the footage was viewed in its entirety at some point time after testing. When all observers can all meet.

Other Resources

Funds

Set a Budget

Expense Item Cost* Recruiting Costs $0.00 - $250 US

Video Taping Cost $500 - $900 US

Gift or Monetary incentive(x 8 or x 5)

< $100US (x 5/x8)

Computer lab/Room Rental (x no of days required)

$?.00

Stipend for UT facilitator < $50US

Stationery (notepads, flash cards, etc)

$25.00 - $50 US

Define AND SEGMENT Your

Website’s Target Audience

Usual suspects

Prospective Students

Current Students

Current ALJ Faculty & Staff

Prospective ALJ Faculty & Staff

Alumni

Visitors

If we want to test the Arthur Lok Jack Graduate School of Business Website, our Target Audience consists of:

The often Overlooked suspects

Visitors - Visiting Guest Speakers, Local and

foreign Faculty, Professionals/Business persons, HR Managers, Goverment Agencies, foreign Research Students, Media

Greater UWI Staff - Faculty & Admin

Conduct a Task Analysis

After segmenting your site’s audience: Assemble your working project team - content developers and site developers to do a task analysis.

What is it? A Task analysis allows you to learn about your users' goals—what they want to do at your Web site-and your users' ways of working.

Task analysis can also mean figuring out what more specific tasks users must do to meet those goals and what steps they must take to accomplish those tasks.

Personas and Recruits

Based on size of test - recruit 5-8 participants.

A several studies on UTesting have shown that 5-8 users typically discover 80% of problems within a given interface*

Based on your target audience, Develop a user persona for each of your prospective testers (ut participants):

User Persona - A Profile which accurately fits the a type of user who commonly use the website

The User persona represents one of the main groups of users you have identified as being apart of your target audience.

User:

Ms. Diana Smith

Target Group

Prospective Post Grad MBA Student

Profession & Qualifications

Media Buying Assistant, Ogilvy Maher, Trinidad. B.A. UVI

Key Attributes

task oriented, focused on details, career driven

Internet Experience Level

Intermediate -IM’s and occasionally updates her facebook and LinkedIn pages but mostly emails, does work related research. Has DSL at work, Dial up at home. Seldom uses the internet at home.

Experience with UWI website

Limited exposure - visited UWI St. Augustine post grad website twice

Sample Persona for ALJ Graduate

school of Business website

“I want to find a

Masters (business)

programme either

here in the

Caribbean or

abroad which

bests suits my

chosen career

track.”

Recruiting Users

Finding users/testers: Recruit by placing notices on your website

or ads in the paper. Enlist the assistance of people you know in order to find prospective testers. But don’t recruit close family or friends.

Use a Screening Questionnaire: An important tool for

screening and recruiting qualified participants who will accurately fit your respective users’ persona.

For each recruit, recruit 2 alternatives.

In case, your 1st choice can not make the test and/or for the purpose of follow

up testing. Note: If you are testing a new site NEVER user the original testers

for a follow up UT.

Contracts & consent forms

Once you have chosen your UT testers - ask them to sign a special UWI approved Usability Test Contract of Services and/or Video Tape Release

Form - see folder for samples.

Recruiting Users

Don’t be lazy!!!! Recruit persons who are apart of your target audience and are or will be actual users of the site you want to test.

The most common result of not recruiting the right people - false results.

The members of your IT team/ or web team are most likely not going be the main users of your website so why would you use them for this type of test.

Once more, you are not developing for your needs but your target audiences’.

Organize Your testing Team

Primary Testing Team (team involved in administering test or

interacting with tester)

UT Facilitator, AV Technician, UT Test Assistant

Observation Team

Usability Test Observers include

Website development team - Web Design & Development Team and Marketing (website and content developers)

Local web administrators - persons within department responsible for managing and updating content.

Subject matter specialists - persons within department responsible for developing and providing web content

Managers - IT department, Marketing Department and the Department’s Management (eg ALJ Director, Marketing Officer)

orient your testing Team

Primary test Team Roles

The Facilitator

Greets and takes care of test participant. Makes the user feel comfortable.

Presents scenarios & tasks and asks post test questions

Encourages users to verbalise what they are doing (the process) as well as their frustrations and issues

Observes and listens carefully the participant

Patiently waits for user to complete task. Moves the tester to the next scenario if they become stuck for an extended period. Set a maximum time limit for each scenario.

A facilitator should never prompt a user, drop hints or rush the tester

Audio/Video Technician

Tape session (monitor recording equipment)

Note: Before the test, instruct the technician to keep the camera focused on the screen during the testing session, so you can capture what the user is doing.

Usability Measurements

Time on taskHow long it takes for the user(s) to complete basic tasks?

AccuracyHow many mistakes did the user(s) make?

RecallHow much does a person remember afterwards or after a period of non-use?

Emotional ResponseHow does the user feel about the tasks completed?

The information collected in these 4 areas (during your first test) should be used as a comparative baseline for further testing.

Tester

User:

Mr. Lisle Waldron

Target group

Staff Member

Profession

AV Tech, School of Education

Internet Experience Level

Expert

Planning Scenarios

Scenario: A scenario is a short story about a specific user with a specific goal at your site.

Scenario Planning Guidelines:

• Understanding (information) Consumer behaviour: Include general questions, in your screen questionnaire, to find out more about the user, their surfing behaviours and overall (consumer) interests. This information will be a boon during scenario planning.

• Tailor Scenarios!: When developing a scenario it should be designed to resonate with the user/tester, mirroring their own experiences and needs.

• Presenting a user with entirely alien scenarios will affect baseline results particularly recall and accuracy.

Presenting The Scenario

Avoid tester fatigue: During a single user testing session, present the user/tester a maximum of 3 scenarios

Or you can break a single scenario into three parts

Maximum Time given to complete a single task within a given scenario - 10 minutes.

Instruct facilitator, at the start of each testing session, to reset the first screen to a page that is offsite, eg search engine or a portal.(eg. Yahoo, MSN or Google). Most users have the home pages of theses websites set as their browser’s default home page.

Never start at the pages/site you want to test!

Setting the Tasks

Your task analysis is a key reference point when you are developing the scenario and related tasks for the different users/testers

Use Full-scale, task scenarios

The scenario presents a goal and steps are included to accomplish the task.

A full-scale scenario can either report all the steps that a specific user takes today to accomplish the task, or it can describe the steps you plan to set up for users in the new site. They lay out the steps from the user's point of view rather than from the Web site's point of view.

They explain how the site may support the goal-oriented scenarios that you started with.

Guidelines for UT Observers

Be Unbiased - don’t judge users or their methods of finding information. If biased observers should opt out.

Focus on what users are doing, their actions and the route they take to seek out the requested information.

Be quiet - if you are talking or making comments during a test you aren’t focusing on the user and what they are doing.

Take notes - all observers should take careful notes. Your notes will help the project team when they are compiling & evaluating the results. It may seem pointless but note everything that the user is doing. What others may miss, you may catch.

Post-Test Interview

Questions

You want to get testers’ impressions of the site after they have interacted with it. You can use:

• open-ended questions

• closed questions using radio buttons, check boxes, or a Likert scale (rating something on a numerical scale)

• a standardized satisfaction questionnaire

If you are going to ask open ended questions, ask questions which are not biased, or attempt to bias the user.

Example questions:

• What is your overall impression of the site?

• How would you describe finding what you were looking for on this site today?

• What is your impression of the search capability?

• What did you like best about the Web site?

• What did you like least about the Web site?

Collecting Qualitative data

For your report: You require two things qualitative notes and qualitative data

Data to be collected

• Success measures. Indicate in the report how you will determine "success" for each scenario.

• Time measures. Total time to complete the scenario? Separate time figures for navigating and for understanding [time spent on content pages]? Time to recover from an error?)

• Error measures. Measure errors and what you would count as an error.

• Number Pages. Count the number of clicks or pages visited before finding information.

• Pathway. Indentify users' paths through the Web site.

• Satisfaction Rating. Administer a satisfaction questionnaire to evaluate impressions and gage satisfaction levels.

TIPS for Testing

When collecting results of the test give more weight to the actual testing session than post test question interview session.

Conduct focused usability tests - i.e. a test which studies a single site or 1 website and directly related sites.

These smaller tests reduce your budget, require maximum of 5 users and yield better results. You will also be able to conduct followup tests after redesign

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.: Test. Revise. Test.

Gather your baseline results, incorporate design changes based on your observations and once revision or redesign is complete. Then Retest.

About Usability

• Mimicry without understanding is not usability.

• Usability is a coordinated effort

• Usability relies on a team effort

• If the vision and design goals of the front end designer (or f/e team)/webteam are not shared by back-end applications team, the site will ultimately not be very user friendly.

• If the plan for the interface is inhibited by limited by an inflexible back end, usability will not be achieved.

• If objectives are not communicated/or input not sought or adopted across the project team, the site will undoubtedly not be very user friendly.

• Usability requires real-time maintenance.

• Usability is always a work in progress.

• Consistent usability is key.

Usability in Context

Creating a positive user experience should not be taken

lightly. After all it’s about creating business value

through leveraging metrics, heuristics, usability testing,

copy-writing, information architecture, interface design,

information design, workflow and cross browser

compatibility.

In layman’s terms

Making our sites (or applications) useful, usable and user friendly

encourages our users to readily return to it and continue using it.

Consequently UWI will further be able to build long standing

relationships with our clients (end users) through our websites.