Web Usability Blog

With thousands of apps on the market, users are overwhelmed with choice. To ensure an app is successful users need to be able to find it, think that it's relevant to them and find it easy to use.

SEO and usability are specialist areas and often treated as separate web management activities - SEO focusing on improving search engine rankings, and usability focusing on the user experience within a site. But there's no point in having great SEO performance and being high in search rankings and then throwing users into a site they can't use; or in having a great site that can't easily be found. Rather than being separate silos, SEO and usability should really be viewed as a continuum to increase website effectiveness: "Search engine optimizers and usability professionals focus on different aspects of usability. By applying a holistic approach and merging the skills and widening the focus of [both] you can increase traffic, leads, sales and happy customers" (Thurow and Musica 2009)

With over 1 million  apps in the Apps store, it's hard to make your app stand out. Our testers tell us that they sometimes use downtime to browse the app store but most often they are scanning quickly for an app to fulfill a particular need. They are in 'fast flick' mode. So what catches their attention? Names they know and icons which give strong scent about what the app can do for them.

Background

It has been argued (e.g. Penzo, 2005) that eye-tracking can augment standard usability testing methodologies by providing quantitative as well as qualitative data, and by providing insight into micro-behaviours on a site. Standard think-aloud usability testing provides qualitative information about what testers are looking at and how they feel about a web page, but eye tracking can provide a wealth of other information such as:

When we undertake usability testing we will usually ask users what they think they can do on a site. We would argue that on an effective web site users can answer this question reasonably accurately within a second or two. Unfortunately, in many cases users struggle to answer this simple question or get it 'wrong'.Recently, we did some work for a company that rents out holiday homes. On the home page was a picture of a rather nice Golden Retriever. Nice of course if you like dogs - and if it had been relevant to the holiday home offer. Unfortunately some of our testers got the wrong end of the stick and initially thought the site might be for a boarding kennels. Another of our testers clearly didn't like dogs - 'it's a slobbering dog' - and was clearly put off. The dog was simply the wrong image, there was no other context. If it had been shown being walked by people having a nice time by their holiday home it might have been fine, but on his own he was a 'bad dog'!

Most intranets don't deliver what their users need: they may contain a lot of content, but most of this doesn't address users' priority goals. We see this on clients' intranets, which were originally set up 7 or 8 years ago because it seemed like the 'right thing to do', but have since been allowed to grow organically with no focus and direction such that users can't find what really matters to them. Why is it that we hear users say, for example "Oh, it's easier to ring up HR about that query because it's too difficult to find it on the intranet"?

Having recently acquired a shiny new (and very expensive) eyetracker we were keen to understand how best to use it. So we sent one of our staff off on a suitable training course. Our chap came back with lots of good new approaches and techniques but what surprised me was that no mention had been made of what I see as the single biggest benefit.