‘User Testing’ your website designs
Until last week user testing was something completely new to me. Of course I knew what it was, but I had never been involved in the process, or had any idea how it worked. I guess it leads on from last weeks article about accessible text. You have to remember that a website isn’t for us the designers, its for the end user. So with that in mind its a good idea to let people test your site and give you feedback, which as I realised can be very valuable indeed.
What is user testing?
Lets start by looking at exactly what user testing is.
User testing is the process whereby a person (preferentially of the demographic likely to visit the site in the first place) sits down and navigates your website, or looks at the design concept and tells you their thoughts.
You as the designer should craft a set of questions specifically created for the projects objectives to find out whether the tester has fully understood certain features of the site.
The tester might conclude that your site is tricky to navigate, or they might miss the whole point of the website altogether! The majority of the time its hard for us designers to look at a website from every angle. We naturally tend to focus on visual elements, and sometimes overlook things like functionality and the whole user experience in general. Thats why In my mind user testing can prove to be extremely valuable.
Who should you get to test your site?
Its often best to get a few people from different backgrounds to carry out the testing. For example a particularly web savvy tester might have a completely different view of your site than a tester who only really uses their PC for reading their email. The same could be said of a user in their twenties, versus a user in their sixties. Its best to get people to test the site who are of your target market / audience.
When to deploy user testing
Lets face it, its probably not necessary to user test every single website you design and build. Although in an ideal world it would be. The fact that carrying out user testing actually costs money (you need to offer testers an incentive to devote their time to you) and that it takes time out of your day, might be two reasons why you don’t carry it out.
However, if your working on the design of a site thats selling a product and conversions are important, or a site thats trying to communicate a unique message, or selling point, it might be a good idea for you to look at getting other peoples opinions. After all it would be pointless creating a great looking site that takes over 5 clicks for the visitor to find out any information about what their buying.
If you get a project like this I would advise that you pass the idea by the client and explain to them the benefits of running a few testing sessions. Then you can budget accordingly. In the long run carrying out this kind of research could save them lots of money and you lots of headaches!
Why user test?
The chances are your tester is going to discover something that you missed or maybe didn’t even consider - thats the beauty of the whole process. It might be that a certain call to action doesn’t really catch their eye as the most important element on that page, or that it takes too many clicks for them to get to the information they want to read.
If you can carry out some user testing at an early stage of the project - probably after an initial concept has been designed, and then again once the site has been built - you’re much more likely to have built a site thats going to be a success and really serve its purpose.
What do you think?
Have you ever carried out user testing on any of the sites you’ve built? Let us know in the comments below. I think Im a convert now. After taking part in a session I could really see the benefits of it. Its amazing how you miss things as the designer, and how people interpret websites differently.
Theres much more to web design than meets the eye…
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November 21st, 2007 at 3:37 pm
Very nice clean blog design. This post just caught my attention because just last night I implemented a poll feature to my blog to get user feed back.
This article drove the point home further.
November 26th, 2007 at 7:56 pm
I’ve been heavily involved in UI testing and I’ve tried many different ways to effectively test the website we’ve made.
The problem with UI testing is that you can’t build a site then decide your going to do UI testing it needs to be decided before a single line of code is written and before anyone touches photoshop.
UI testing is not separate from web design, its not something which is optional, it is web design.
I won’t go into any detail on this because there’s so many ways to do UI testing but i’ll explain my personal favorite.
Before any code is written or any photoshop drafts the people who are involved in the design of the site should sit down with paper and pencils and sketch out how they want the site to look (taking into account the goal of the website) rubbing out and redoing parts if necessary until they’re pleased with the overall layout.
Then someone should go away and make rough Visio drafts of the pages which must take into account how wide your having the site that way you can quickly decide how big your graphics can be.
I find Visio to be alot better for layouts than Photoshop because too many times have i seen Designers go straight into Photoshop making graphics and pretty things which end up being to big to fit in the layout.
Also when Designers start making pretty graphics they get emotionally attached to them (its true don’t laugh) and they start designing the site around they’re graphic rather than the graphics around the site.
Okay so you have some Visio layouts which you’ve obviously printed off, this is where the first stage of UI testing comes into play.
You find someone who is your target audience and you give them the homepage on a sheet of paper and tell them to navigate the site as if they were on the computer and trying to solve they’re problem the site is going to be trying to solve. Get them to touch buttons with they’re finger as if they were using a mouse (i’m serious) and then you give them the page they would of navigated to on a piece of paper and you ask them “whats important on this page?” “what do you want to click on?” “what would you expect to happen once you’ve click on it?”
At this stage once you’ve amended the Visio layouts to take into account the feedback you’ve had you can open up photoshop and start to design the look and feel of the site and you’ll be better at it because at this stage you’ve already decided on the layout and all you’ll have to worry about and stress about it making stuff look pretty (until ofcourse IE decides to align a div totally the wrong way and you end up spending 2 days tearing your hair out and in the end give up and make a separate CSS file for IE)
But yes UI testing should always be done no matter what your deadline is or what stage of development you are at.
If you want to do UI testing but you’ve already made your site and you wanna see how successful your design is you can use this;
http://www.clickdensity.com/
Its also helpful in proving to people that a particular bit of navigation doesn’t work because you can show them it doesn’t work and nothing shuts up stubborn know it all designers more than a heatmap where they’re precious ‘took 2 hours to make in photoshop’ button doesn’t get any clicks.
Back to the article. It scares me (looking at the amount of sites you’ve made/been involved in making) to hear you’ve never done any UI testing. Seriously next time you go into work you should verbally kick someones ass because UI testing is one of the pillars of web design which you should be learning/getting involved in from the word go.
I mean it… tell your Senior Web designer/developer (what ever they like to be called) that they’re not doing they’re job properly because this guy on your blog told you so.
James.
November 27th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
Thanks Glen! :D. I checked out your site too. You’ve got some great looking posts.
@ James - Wow! Thanks for the longest and most detailed comment on Evoart! Seriously though, that comment has given me some more insight and im sure has others too. Its a fantastic addition to my article.
It would be interesting to conduct a poll and see how many designers have actually conducted User Testing. Or ask the question ‘For every 10 sites you’ve designed / developed, how many have been user tested?’ I think the results would be interesting, possibly shocking - who knows…
November 28th, 2007 at 11:59 am
Go for it, Will. I’d love to see the results of such a post. On the topic of blogs though (seeing as it has been commented here and there), I really need to toss out my portfolio bloggyness soon. I just can’t be arsed to sit down and design it after a long day at work. Odd isn’t it?