Web Usability Blog

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 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.

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

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”.

It was recently estimated in the US that Google receives 182 million unique views a month, 9 million hits above its closest competitor Yahoo!, And 20 million views ahead of bronze medallist, bing*. So why is Google the world’s most popular search engine? Firstly, it gets us the results they want. Secondly, as we all know, it is extremely easy to use. On the Google homepage the search box is smack bang in the middle of the page while Yahoo! has squashed it well out the way up the top and thrown the kitchen sink at the homepage.