Have you ever heard of usability testing? It’s a concept popularized in the early 1990’s by Jacob Nielsen, a researcher at Sun Microsystems. The technique focuses on measuring a product’s capacity to meet its intended purpose. In other words, is the product, in this case a website, easy to use?
Now, you may be asking yourself, why is this important? Well, with the growth of web technology, people have come to expect an ever improving user experience. Provide a poorly designed experience and your users are more likely to leave for a competitor. This is crucial to understand when building your online business as first impressions are everything.
To help guide your design efforts and build a successful online business, we’ll cover the testing process and how usability testing improves conversion rates.
Testing Process
The usability testing process is relatively simple and only requires preparation, testing, and reporting. However, the level of detail for each will vary depending on the desired level of results. For example, you may run a formal testing environment with cameras and real customers or simply grab a colleague in the hallway for a quick test. The level of formality is up to you, the important thing is to test and to test often.
1. Define Your Goals
The first step in conducting a successful usability test is to define your goals. Well defined goals help you develop tasks and questions that lead to accurate data. Goals may include questions such as:
Which homepage design leads to increased purchases?
Which checkout process is most intuitive?
Now remember, usability testing is specific. It’s better to run multiple tests with a defined purpose than try and push everything into one testing session. I recommend testing and improving all the critical elements of your website first and then moving onto more subtle improvements.
2. Define User Tasks
With goals clearly defined, it’s time to create a list of user tasks. User tasks are what you’ll be asking of your participants and they come in two different forms.
Closed: A closed tasks offers little room for interpretation – the question results in success or failure. An example would be, “Subscribe to the newsletter”.
Open: An open task is more qualitative in nature and asks a more open ended request. An example would be, “Find more information about product offerings”. Although less of a targeted request, this can lead to many interesting and unexpected findings.
It’s important to include a number of open and closed tasks to produce well-rounded results. It’s also important to consider verbiage used when creating tasks to avoid bias. For example, if your task stated, “Search for a new pair of shoes”, the word “search” may persuade them to use the search bar instead of navigation.
3. Write a Research Plan
The research plan is a concise, one page document, that outlines all the necessary testing details. This gives a quick reference to others involved and keeps you organized throughout the process. A few things you may find in a research plan include:
- Background: Write a brief paragraph describing the reasons for the test and events leading up to desired research.
- Goals: Define specific goals for the usability test and what you hope to accomplish. For example, “Discover which homepage design improves conversion rates with the goal of increasing revenue and improving the user experience.”
- Questions: List out questions you’d like the study to answer. Be specific!
- Tactics: Describe when, where, and how the test will be conducted.
- Participants: Describe the type of participants you will be testing. This would be considered your target market.
- Timeline: Include a timeline of recruiting, testing, and analyzation of results.
- Test Script: Include the test script you will follow when testing
Check out Smashing Magazine to view a simple research plan.
4. Testing
With your goals, tasks, research plan, and targeted participants in place, it’s time to finally start testing! Now, depending on your budget and time constraints, there are two ways to conduct testing:
Unmoderated: Unmoderated tests are cheaper, faster, and easier to schedule. The lack of moderation removes the influence of any bias and puts the user in a more natural state of being. However, this option does not allow for follow up questions or support if the participant has any issues. Usertesting.com is great for unmoderated testing.
Moderated: Moderated tests include a usability testing script and guidance with given tasks. It’s extremely important not to “lead” the participant in any particular direction. Doing this will minimize bias and yield better results. For example, here’s a common question and good answer/question in return:
Participant: “Should I click here?”
Moderator: “Where do you think you should click?”
While conducting your usability testing, it’s important to follow these best practices:
Environment: Keep your users comfortable and alleviate any stress by affirming that testing is related to the product itself and not their capabilities.
Interference: To avoid bias, interfere as little as possible. Simply give the task and observe as they perform while taking note of any issues.
Communication: While performing the usability test, ask the participant to say aloud their thinking process during the entire test. This will provide better insight into any hangups that would otherwise be left unknown.
Recording: If possible, record the usability test using software such as Silverback (for Mac) or Morae. Many times, this will record the screen, users face, and audio so you can reference and interpret results at a later time.
If interested, watch this usability test example to see how a moderated test is performed.
5. Reporting
The usability report allows you to share results and offer solutions to any issues found. Results will be concluded from two forms of questioning, qualitative and quantitative.
Quantitative Data: Quantitative data will provide specific, numbered results. This would include measurements such as success rates, task time, error rates, and satisfaction ratings.
Qualitative Data: Qualitative data is more open ended and observational in nature. For example, you could report on findings such as problems experienced, comments/recommendations, observations about pathways the user took, etc.
When reporting, it’s also important to keep priority in mind. If an error is discovered that’s critical to business success, it should be marked as such and solved as quickly as possible.
How Usability Testing Improves Conversion Rates
Now that you understand how usability testing works, you may be wondering how this would improve conversion rates and overall business success. Well, the purpose of usability testing is to discover any problems with website usability. If your customers become confused or grow frustrated with your website, they’re more likely to leave for a competitor. Over time, this can add up to a substantial sum of lost revenue.
With today’s technology, people have grown to expect a great user experience. Providing a clean, simple, functional, and pleasant user experience will not only solidify user trust, but maximize potential profits.
Have you run a usability test on your website? Leave any comments/questions below!
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