Siolon

Economical Usability Testing

Usabil­ity test­ing is often over­looked to the peril of both the devel­oper and the con­sumer. I was con­victed read­ing Steve Krug’s book on usabil­ity to go ahead with test­ing even if it’s small and cheap. In doing this for the recent design of this site I wanted to share how I did usabil­ity test­ing for all of $60.

Feed­back Form

The first thing I did was cre­ate a form in Wufoo, a pow­er­ful form build­ing appli­ca­tion, to receive feed­back. I made it sim­ple and short (I had to keep it to 10 fields in the free ver­sion). I made an announce­ment on my per­sonal blog offer­ing a small gift cer­tifi­cate to Ama­zon for the most in-depth results. I got so many good ones that I decided to give out 4 $10 gift cer­tifi­cates instead of the two I men­tioned in the blog post. I got some great feed­back from age groups vary­ing from teenager to baby-boomer, male and female, and dif­fer­ent income fam­i­lies. I even had a scale from very tech­ni­cal to a casual user of the Inter­net. Here are some of the com­ments I received (a sam­ple of the results).

What is your impres­sion of the home page, and where do you want to go first?

• “It’s bright and I am hav­ing some trou­ble with the lack of contrast…”
• “The home page makes a strong impres­sion. The design itself is sim­ple, but effective.”
• “I went first to ser­vices to see if you could back up the claims in the home page text, then to port­fo­lio to check out your abilities.”
• “It’s very green. Prob­a­bly too green. In the least I would reverse the greens…”

Is the text easy to read?

• “Too small.…I like big­ger type and bolder.”
• “The white text in the menu with the dark green back­ground is dif­fi­cult to read.”
• “Change the text size in the browser win­dow, and it skews things…”

Final Com­ments

• “The ter­mi­nol­ogy is con­fus­ing because I am an accoun­tant and not a web programmer.”
• “When search­ing, I wasn’t sure if it would search page con­tent and arti­cles, or only articles.”
• “Pos­si­bly adding a snip­pet of the page in the search results (rather than just a link to the page) would make it more helpful.”
• “I don’t like how when I’m look­ing at more pages of arti­cles, I’m still at the home page. It seems like when I click on “Next” it should open up to some­thing bigger.”

Video Taped Usabil­ity Session

I also paid $20 to have some­one sit down and answer ques­tions related to the site. It came from a site called User Testing.com. I appre­ci­ated the results, and I thought I would share the results with you. You can also gauge the dif­fer­ences between the old and new versions.

Instead of embed­ding the media, please view the usabil­ity test results in a new window.

Changes Made 

It doesn’t mean much unless I actu­ally make changes as a result of this effort. Here are some changes I made in response.

• Removed the pag­i­na­tion on the front page to take the user to an archives page.
• Swapped the greens to make the softer one more prominent.
• Add excerpts to the search/archives page to describe arti­cle content.
• Made clear on the search page what was actu­ally search (both arti­cles and pages).
• Explained what the “*” meant on the con­tact page (which I mis­tak­enly thought was not needed).
• Changed the over­flow on the main page to scroll when text size was increased so as to not throw off the layout.
• Changed the ter­mi­nol­ogy from “Good­ies” to “Downloads”.
• Changed the color on input forms from a light gray to black for more contrast.
• Removed con­fus­ing “blog cat­e­gories” drop down from pages.
• Removed tech­ni­cal jar­gon from the “Ser­vices” page, and trimmed the “About” page (and I still need to do more).

Con­clu­sion

After going through this process I was grate­ful for the feed­back I received, and I’m happy with the changes I made. I didn’t have to make every sug­gested change, and I fil­tered that by whether I felt the user fit into the demo­graphic of peo­ple who would visit my site.

It is grat­i­fy­ing to make an appli­a­ca­tion this is usable, and it’s much eas­ier to receive the con­struc­tive crit­i­cism from real users and not an exec­u­tive telling me what my users want. I would highly sug­gest that a sim­i­lar approach be taken early and often in the devel­op­ment to ensure that your users are sat­is­fied with their experience.