Usability Research, What’s It All About? And How Can It Make You Money?

So by now you’ve probably heard of usability research and all the wonderful things it can do for you. But what is it really all about? And how do you translate all of the data from the research into more money for your business?

What Is Usability Research?

Usability research can be conducted on almost anything but in in the web world it is most often used for websites, software, or apps. Conducting usability testing ensures that the end product provides the customer with a satisfying and positive experience. Usability research is an important step in bridging the gap between you and your customers. 

       “A bad web site is like a grumpy salesperson.”

                – Jakob Nielsen, Web Usability Guru

There are four main steps involved in conducting usability research

• Competitive Analysis
  
• Heuristics
  
• Card Sorting
  
• Usability Testing

Each step plays an important part in gather and implementing vital information to make your product more effective.

Competitive Analysis

A competitive analysis is conducted to review other websites or products that are similar to your own. This is done to see what is already out there in the market and to evaluate the positives and negatives of the organization and design of these sites or products.

Overviewing other sites or products can help you avoid costly pitfalls and help to ensure you have the best site in the business.

Heuristics

If the client has an existing site heuristics analysis involves an overview of the working components of the site such as error control and handling. An overview of the site is conducted to test each component a customer may interact with. This helps to catch places where opportunities are being lost or where customers may be getting frustrated and annoyed. As you can imagine an annoyed customer soon turns an ex-customer. It is important for a site to be easy to use and understand.

Card Sorting

Card sorting helps us to better organize the pages of the site and how they connect. It involves evaluating the current site structure and creating a new and more effective structure. 

Site page names are either written on cards or entered into a card sorting software and users are asked to group the pages together under headings that they create. This process allowed us to better understand the user’s point of view when it comes to organization and navigation.

Usability Testing

And finally, usability testing, which involves getting real live people to use and test the site and give their feedback. Participants are gathered and asked to complete various tasks on the website while using the 'think aloud protocol.' The 'think aloud protocol' encourages participants to explain their feelings and through processes out loud while they are attempting to complete the given task. This is helps the tester more fully understand any issues the participant may have while testing the site.

So How Does Usability Research Make My Company Money?

Usability research can positively impact your company’s revenue by ensuring your customers are happy and satisfied. Giving extra attention to the needs and preferences of the customer will strengthen the relationship and create positive results. 

      “For each dollar a company invests in developing the usability
       of a product, the company receives $10-$100 in benefits and
       wins customer satisfaction and continued business.
       Furthermore, industry data shows that for each dollar spent
       to fix a problem during product design, $10 are spent to fix
       the same problem in product development, and $100 or more are
       spent to fix the same problem after product release.”

                 – Claire Marie Karat, “A business case approach
                   to usability cost justification.” In, R. Bias
                   and D. Mayhew, Eds. Cost-Justifying Usability,
                   Academic Press, NY, 1994.

I don’t know about you but saving and making money sure sounds good to me! Conducting usability research is a great way to strengthen your product and positive relationships with your customers. A happy customer is a good customer!

Participating in a Usability Study!

This week I participated in a usability study for a local company in downtown Seattle. I’m not going to write the specifics of the company or of the product I tested because I’m not sure what the legal president is here, but I do want to write a little about my experience as a first time usability test subject in the real world.

I have participated in a usability study done by my peers, and ran my own study for the same class, but those experiences were all in the confines of the classroom. It was exciting and informative to be part of a usability test run by a company that is fine tuning their products. The people involved in the test were myself, the woman running the test, and a videographer who took care of the video and sound. We were all crammed into a very tiny cozy room with the woman and myself seated at a desk and the videographer off to the side so he could get a good shot of me using the computer and later the phone. I got to test the product on a desktop and an app version and I actually ended up liking the app version better which is kind of a surprise because I don’t really use apps all that much.

One thing that really stands out to me about usability testing is the delicate line the tester has to walk when interacting with the participant in order to gather data on a specific element. You don’t want to ask leading questions or give away the answers but at the same time you won’t be able to gather data if the participant is unable to find/do something that you are testing. There was one particular action in this test that I just couldn’t figure out how to do and the tester ended up having me try to accomplish the task by guiding me to several different starting points. In the end I never figured out how to accomplish the task and even though this is great feedback for the test I still felt a little dumb. But then again that is the whole point of usability testing; to see how your users are actually going to use, or fail to use, the product.

A nice part about actually sitting in a room with the person who is testing your product is getting to use the think aloud protocol. The think aloud protocol is pretty much what it sounds like, you have the participant explain their thought process and feelings out loud as they are attempting to complete tasks. This is especially helpful if the process is going to be videotaped, then both the participant and the tester can focus on the task at hand and not have to worry as much about remembering details for later.

I find that I often have helpful insights while in the moment, but when looking back on an experience later I will lose all but one or two. After the fact written feedback from me would not be as useful as just letting me ramble as I’m trying to accomplish a task. Very often I find that I have ideas that are completely unrelated to the subject at hand but that are ultimately useful when considering the product as a whole. In fact, I ended up giving more feedback about things that were not present in the app than the elements that were.

I quite enjoyed my first experience participating in a usability test and I am looking forward to being able to participate in more. Hopefully someday soon I’ll be able have a job running my own tests!

Web Design Trends

Last week in my Web130 class our teacher asked us to do some research and come up with a list of web design or development trends that we find interesting. We then presented our list to the class and gave an overview of each trend we found. It was fun and instructive to see the breadth of topics and opinions shared by a 15ish person class. Here is the original compiled class list.

My 5 Top Web Design Trends

     Microinteractions

This one is definitely my favorite of the five, probably because I am kind of obsessed with UX (user eXperience) and UI (user interface design) principals and ideas right now. Microinteractions are subtle/subtlish visual feedback that help guide the user without being unobtrusive or overly distracting. An example of a microinteraction would be when a button changes color when you hover the mouse over it. This site has some helpful examples of microinteractions that are pretty fun to play with. Now, as much as I like this for of user feedback, there are some things to consider in the technical realm. What if you are using a tablet, how does the hover function work then? Uh-oh, when I’m on a tablet using a touch screen it’s impossible to hover! In this case it would be better to use an interaction that gives feedback when clicked instead of relying on the hover.

      Websites With Slides

This trend takes the home page of a website and replaces it with PowerPoint like functionality. Instead of having one landing page that links to the other pages there is a slide show of several different topics which you can click on to read more about them. This site utilizes the slide show format to display Facebook's year in review. Each slide is a picture of the topic and has a link to a blurb about the topic. My problem with this design is one of navigation, since there is no main page to go back to it can be confusing to navigate this site. I kept thinking “Is this it? I feel like I’m missing something!” But no, the site is small and simple, the navigation structure is just not what I’m used to.

Long Scroll

Oh long scroll, how I love and hate you. Long scroll sites have several pages worth of information and/or navigation items organized vertically in one long front page, so you have to scroll, and scroll, and scroll, and scroll, well you get the idea. From a purely visual point of view long scroll sites can be beautiful and fun, and I’m sure they are a delight to do the visual designs for, but from a practical standpoint they are boorish and excessive. Having a sticky nav at the top of the page that will follow you down as you scroll helps alleviate some of the frustration involved with using a long scroll site but only a little. To be perfectly honest I find most long scroll sites to be a bit masturbatory, they are beautiful feats of design and coding, but are they really necessary?

Here is a super silly example of a long scroll site, how far can you scroll??

http://www.onemilescroll.com/

Interactive Scrolling

Interactive scrolling can be seen as the next evolutionary step of the long scroll, or perhaps the younger brother of the long scroll. Interactive scrolling utilizes the same continuous scrolling elements of the long scroll to display information and visuals, but it adds a movement element. The visuals in a basic long scroll site are static whereas with interactive scrolling react and move based on your scrolling through the site. I feel pretty much the same way about Interactive scrolling as I do about the long scroll….meh. It is pretty cool, but I don’t really want to use it on a regular basis. Call me lazy, but I don’t want to have to scroll for 3 minutes to basically watch a cartoon advertisement for your business, actually it’s a .org so is it a business? Who knows! I certainly don’t, and do you want to know why I don’t? Because I got tired of scrolling and left the site before they could sum up what they do for me.

     Material Design

Material Design is a specific design language that Google developed and released upon the world in 2014. It is based on the idea of having a comprehensive visual language that everyone can understand and use. Do you use Gmail? Google+? Google Hangouts? Google in general? Then you have encountered Material Design. The manifesto babel on their site breaks it down as a synthesis “between classic principles of good design with the innovation and possibility of technology and science.” That’s cool, what does it mean? (This translation is thanks in part to my art degree and art history minor, turns out art babble and google design babble are very similar languages). Well, as far as I could tell the idea is to take a visual language we already are comfortable with, i.e. paper materials in the real world, and utilize those properties to create a web/app based language that is easier for users to intrinsically understand. While the explanation of what Material Design is can be hard to slog through and wrap your head around, the actual implementation of it is quite lovely.