Web Usability Blog

There are now lots of ways to gain insight into the user experience:

How many times have you tried using a website that just makes you want to give up? Either they just don't work, you can't find what you're looking for or the the company in question does not meet your expectation of share your values.

We know budgets can be tight and often stretching to a fully-fledged usability project is just not achievable. For anyone in that boat, here are our top tips for running your own usability session on the cheap...

Organisational change is like steering a big ship – hard work and slow to turn.

Booking airline tickets, getting a mortgage, designing trainers or reading favourite news, chatbots are being used by customers for all sorts of things. But how might your organisation use one and where should you start?

Most current chatbots are not very good. This makes it very easy for people to be sceptical about them and ignore the whole approach. However, this is often because the user’s needs were not fully understood or because they have not been adequately tested with users.

You have probably heard the buzz about chat interfaces and artificial intelligence and how this is the next big thing. In this blog we try and explain what they are and why they probably do matter.

How people interact with your organisation is likely to change radically over the next few years. The maturing of some key technologies, most notably machine learning and conversational interfaces, means your users may no longer be using your website.

Over the years we have undertaken usability testing on several University websites. I have blogged before about why so many University sites are so unusable, and concluded that the problems are primarily organisational not technical. Our recent experience seems to confirm that this is still the case.

One of the problems of usability testing websites is trying to get testers to behave as they would in the real world. It is a very ‘unnatural’ process. We recruit people into the lab, pay them money and ask lots of questions about the site and why they have done what they have done. Testers focus on the task they have been given, think about what they are doing, try and give rational explanations for their behaviour, and are not distracted by the kids or their phone. This is not what happens in real life where users click through most of the time not thinking very hard about what they are doing. To use Daniel Kahneman terms, in the lab users do more ‘slow’ thinking whereas in real life they are doing a lot of ‘fast’ thinking.