How to do usability testing on your web site

By David Alison

Like many web-centric companies our web site is our primary window into the world. It’s the first impression most people will ever get of SharedStatus and it serves a critical role in our business model. Though you can iterate over a design and show internal people, it’s not until you get it into the hands of outsiders that you start to see what works and what doesn’t.

Having a decent software analytics package like Clicky or Google Analytics installed gives you a sense of what people are doing when they visit your site; where they go, how long they spend on key pages, where they exit your site, etc. Use the analytics and perform basic A/B tests on pages and you can dramatically improve traffic flows on your site. The challenge is guessing where people are tripping up so you can design your A/B tests - this is where usability testing can help.

Usability Testing was hard
For many years I worked in technology companies that had usability labs to help validate product designs. In the early days this involved dedicated lab space, video cameras, recording equipment and extraordinary amounts of time to do correctly. We would set up our tests and then have to go out and recruit people to come in and walk through our products. Putting together the reports and editing the video into a single selection of feedback was incredibly time consuming.

Usability testing was clearly for large companies that had the resources to pull this off.

Usability Testing is easy
Not long after our launch I found UserTesting.com. They provided what appeared to be a very simple service: you define a script of tasks you want someone to run through and identify some high level demographics of the kind of person you would like to have look at your site. You pay a set price ($39 / test or $29 / test when buying 3 tests initially). I did the three test option and the experience was excellent.

It took me about 20 minutes to create the short script of what I wanted tested on SharedStatus.com. UserTesting.com provides some templates and helper text that was pretty useful. Early on a Saturday evening I submitted the scripts and ran off to dinner. About 30 minutes later I had three e-mails with links to the test results. I was not expecting this back so quickly and figured the quality would be suspect. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

There is something incredible about watching a complete stranger go through your web site, vocalizing what they are finding as they go through it. Though I have been through hundreds of usability tests over the last 20 years, that didn't stop me from saying out loud "Just click the Features link!!!". Seeing them trip on tasks you thought would be obvious or immediately understand something you thought would be complex is very powerful as a site designer.

Here is a subset of one of the 15 minute long videos I received from UserTesting.com, including our comments overlaid to help you understand what we were realizing as we viewed the video:

We identified areas where people tripped up and had a difficult time with our navigation. Some of the text we were using to describe our product was too vague and left the testers struggling to understand what our product did. We saw minor display errors on one of our pages because of IE compatibility. We found that users really struggled with certain parts of our application that were only exposed to new users.

Needless to say I was incredibly pleased with the results we received from UserTesting.com. The videos and feedback were of such high quality and came back so quickly that we feel we can test new ideas in real time moving forward. We just sat back and watched, pausing the videos to take down notes for changes we needed to implement to our site.

If the only people that give you feedback on your web site are in your personal network (friends, family, colleagues, etc) then you really need to give low cost usability testing a try. You'll likely find out a lot about your site that you probably didn't know.