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 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.

“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.

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”.

We have recently taken delivery of a Microsoft Surface tablet and a couple of touch screen monitors. For Peter, our director, it was like Christmas had come early. Delivery day saw him happily ripping opening packaging and focusing completely on his new toys. We could have asked him for 100% pay-rises and a week off work and he would have agreed.

I am a recent addition to the World of Web Usability and quickly getting to grips with the complexities of UX research. One of the first projects I worked on required us to user test a complex financial site aimed at personal investors. As a recent graduate, with a small mountain of debt and minimal income this is, unsurprisingly, an area I have little knowledge of.

Glad to see that Jakob Nielsen has recently restated his position about how many users you need to test with in usability studies - the answer being 5.