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.
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.
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?
One of the things that continues to surprise me when watching users test websites is how often users blame themselves when they can't find things. Without doing any analysis, my guess from watching hundreds, if not thousands, of users is that less than 10% blame the website when it is difficult to use.
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'!
We love trigger words because users love trigger words. Good trigger words improve the 'scent' of a link enormously.
We have recently conducted some user testing on of one of our client's websites on mobile devices. They sell investment products so it was largely an information site. It was a fascinating exercise in many ways, but what particularly surprised me was how different users' behaviours were when using their mobiles to browse the web.
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.
It is noticeable when observing user testing sessions, that some users are reluctant to enter text in search boxes if it already contains some text e.g. the word 'Search'. Our advice is that, like Google, the search box should be empty. However, we are often told by clients, with words in their search boxes, that they have been advised this is necessary to comply with accessibility guidelines.
