Web Usability Blog

Have you come across Daniel Kahneman’s ideas about ‘Fast’ (System 1) and ‘Slow’ (System 2) thinking? The idea is that ‘Fast’ thinking, which controls most of what we do, is intuitive, automatic, experience-based, and relatively unconscious, while ‘Slow’ thinking is conscious, considered and hard work! It is argued that many market research methods (e.g. depth interviews, surveys, focus groups) only get at ‘Slow thinking’ and so are not a good way to get insights into much of what we do that is controlled by our ‘Fast thinking’.

I don’t know about you but I found the Brexit vote quite a shock, I did not believe for a moment that the UK would vote to leave. On reflection, one of reasons for this is that I move in circles where most people were remainers. I know few leavers, or people who will admit to it, and this clearly coloured my view of the likely outcome. I noticed a similar problem recently when undertaking some user testing for a grocery client looking at some wine pages: I was surprised to see that 4 out of 6 testers had no idea what a magnum was. They all thought it was part of the name of the wine. How could anyone not know what a magnum was? Both examples are a timely reminders that our own experiences are not a good guide to how others think or behave. Because we tend to mix with ‘people like us’ we see a very narrow slice of the totality of human attitudes. Relying on our own experiences to draw conclusions about how others will behave can, as these examples show, mean we are very wrong. Undertaking research with users means you are much less likely to make these sorts of mistakes.

I was reading an article in the Sunday papers about middle aged men drinking too much. This was accompanied by pieces by people who drank more than 50 units per week. These were not raving alcoholics but people with good jobs and happy family lives that you might meet in the course of your professional life. They saw their drinking as quite normal and they did not feel it was excessive. I was quite shocked that someone drinking this much might think this ‘normal’ behaviour because it is a long way from my experience.

We have just completed an interesting bit of user research for a client looking at a financial service. The client was building a new site and wanted to check out the competition to see what learning they could gain.

I recently attended one of e-consultancy's roundtable meetings, where a dozen or so corporate members share knowledge: the topic of this one was 'User Experience'. It was an interesting couple of hours with some useful insights provided by the participants, who included benchmarking, analytics, survey and usability agencies like Web Usability. What struck me during the discussion was that most of the participants' activities focused on understanding the user experience rather than helping the clients do something useful with the insights gained from their work.

Glad to see that Jakob Nielsen has recently restated his position about how many users you need to test with in usability studies - the answer being 5.

We were testing a site the other day for a major retailer that didn't have many of the features that are now considered pretty standard for ecommerce sites. It was not clear what they sold, it had busy cluttered pages, you had to register, there was no persistent basket and much else.

Responsive design seems like a brilliant solution for coping with the rise in mobile users but what are its pros and cons, and what has to be considered to make it effective?

Web Usability  has recently been working with digital agency Front Page doing early stage prototype testing on some designs Front Page is developing for one of their travel industry clients. We tested flat images linked together with simple hotspots to create a browsing experience. A number of issues - both strategic and tactical - emerged which will inform the continuing development of the site. By testing at this early stage the client saved money because no coding had been done and avoided the problem of 'invested effort' where designers and clients had become so attached to the designs that there was resistance to change. And the changes will improve the user experience and increase conversion. So win-win all round!