Web Usability Blog

Web Usability has recently invested in a state of the art mobile testing rig and eye tracker. This allows us to observe exactly what users are looking at when using a smartphone or tablet.

Over the last month or so Web Usability has been getting to grips with user testing apps. The number of these is growing exponentially and, while many are great, there are even more that aren't very useful or aren't very usable, so there is clearly a need to test these with users to ensure they work properly.

If Gordon Brown wants to save some money in the public sector I have a suggestion for him. We have been working for public sector organisations for over 10 years and what is very obvious is they have very little organisational memory. I don't know how long the average web manager stays in their post, but I would be very surprised if it is more than 5 years. And when they leave, very little of what they have learnt from user research stays in the organisation. A particularly bad example of this was when a client, for whom we had done a lot of work, asked us to undertake a project and I had to point out we had done the exact same piece of work 3 years earlier and simply sent them the report again.

Last night I was trying to book a hotel room from one of the UK's leading budget chains for my daughter going off to look at universities. I wanted to pay for the room in advance as she does not have a credit card. So I found the right hotel and then went through the check out process and got to the card payment stage and then thought 'but you pay on arrival not when you book with this hotel chain so can I pay in advance?' I finally found an FAQ link, (small, grey and not where I expected it, and it takes you out of the booking process - not a good idea!) which said I could pay in advance (but "only on some occasions", what does that mean?), but nowhere could I see how to do this. I, therefore, left the site and booked a room with a competitor where I could obviously pay for the room in advance.

To make a webpage accessible to all, it is necessary that users can 'tab' through the different elements of the page. We have recently added a couple of flash videos to our new website. As part of our aim, we wanted to make this flash video accessible. Once the flash element is active, you can use the keyboard to control everything - volume bar, seek bar, turn on/off subtitles, make it full screen etc. We had no problem accessing the video on IE browsers. But we got stuck when using other browsers like Firefox, Safari and Chrome and trying to access the flash video by tabbing on the page.

Most organisations now have web sites; however, judging by our experience, a lot of organisations don't have clarity about why they have the site and how they can tell if it's successful. For many, the focus is on what the organisation wants to communicate rather than on what the user wants to do on the site. This paper discusses why clarity about strategy and success will result in a more effective website.

WUP has just launched a new rapid prototyping service to help clients develop usable website prototypes quickly and cost effectively. Developing new website prototypes often takes many months; this service reduces this to a few days. It is relevant for clients who wish to redevelop parts, or all, of their web site. It works as follows:

We have recently been looking at testing websites on mobile devices. While most sites are still in Jakob Nielsen's 3 classes of mobile user experience i.e.  horrible, bad or impoverished, where site owners have taken the trouble to develop mobile sites they can be quite good (e.g. BBC, Facebook, Google Maps, etc.) However, to have an effective mobile website, usability is only half (albeit an important half) of the story.

Really interesting set of stats about the growth in web access from mobile devices in the USA from comScore, a market intelligence company. Key facts were:

This month's UX (user experience) magazine (published by the Usability Professionals' Association) contains some interesting articles on remote user testing and its advantages over lab based testing. One of the principal advantages is the ability to get large numbers of users to test a site, often several hundred, for similar costs to much smaller lab based research. What was particularly striking to me was that much of the feedback obtained using these approaches is based on users' attitudes e.g. Was this task: very difficult'[5 point scale]'very easy?