Web Usability Blog

We have recently completed a number of usability testing projects for clients with large information sites i.e. non-transactional sites. These have included organisations as diverse as a major UK charity, a manufacturer of precision measuring equipment, and an EU institution.

We estimate over 60% of UK, studio-based, qualitative market research takes place in London (*), most of which will use London-based respondents. Londoners accounts for 13% of the UK population and a key question is how representative is this 13% of the whole UK population?

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.

We always recruit our own testers. By doing it ourselves we get more appropriate testers and we can weed out the ones who try to make a career out of being a respondent.

You may have noticed we have been a bit schizophrenic about what we call ourselves. We started life more than 13 years ago as ‘Web Usability Partnership’, became ‘WUP’ about 9 years ago and reverted to ‘Web Usability’ last year. The change back to Web Usability was driven by various factors, including that nobody ever knew how to say ‘WUP’: versions we have heard included ‘woop’, ‘wuup’ and the letters W-U-P. It didn’t help that we weren’t clear about it either…

“Can I watch the testing remotely?” is a question we keep getting asked. In the past, while possible, this was complicated, unreliable and expensive.

As a mum to young teenage boys (writes Sarah Clark) you may think I’d say that conversation is severely lacking in our household…except it’s not! Just so long as I’m not expecting them to be face-to-face, I do have regular meaningful conversations with both my sons. And actually I‘d say these long distance communications tend to be more informative, honest and unguarded than when we’re face-to-face. Less foot staring and fidgeting with more focus on the questions actually posed.

Most web developers and digital professionals tend to be, for obvious reasons, quite tech-savvy people. This can present a problem when developing products for the ‘normal’ user (if such a thing exists), as things that are obvious to the expert are often far from obvious to the end user.

Recently, we tested a new, information-provider web site for a well-known brand (the identity of which shall be kept anonymous for reasons that will soon become clear) and were fairly surprised to find the site navigation trailing down the left hand side of the page, rather than sitting horizontally at the top, where we have become increasingly accustomed to seeing it.

We’ve just done some user testing on the prototype of a new website for a very large brand in the travel sector. The site was full of really useful widgets to help users achieve tasks – but also full of wordy content, outside and inside the widget boxes, none of which the testers looked at (as we could see on Liveviewer through our Tobii eyetracker). “Woah” we said “let’s try to cut out some of these words and de-clutter the site”. To which our client replied “we pay a lot of money to an agency to write this stuff, to help our SEO”.