What is Digg?36 Comments
- ExRe, on 12/01/2008, -1/+40How about using the majority of the page for the article you want to display and not split it up into 5 pages for start?
Usability FAIL. - wildest, on 11/30/2008, -6/+19good guide, great topic
- farfromhere, on 12/01/2008, -3/+15Best way to test your website:
Submit it to Digg. - noxcovenant, on 12/01/2008, -0/+6Exactly. That site could use some of it's own tips. It's suffocating as hell and there's too much ***** going on (Especially the 'Related news, Related reviews, and Related links' sidebar, redundancy FTL) Poor color scheme too.
- Yarnage, on 12/01/2008, -1/+6No that's the best way to test your web sever
- RonaldLovegood, on 12/01/2008, -0/+5I really dislike it when articles are split into a gazillion parts for no real reason.
- JoeLeo, on 12/01/2008, -0/+4Click the Print link - that too requires printing the article in five pages - jeez.
- haydesigner, on 12/01/2008, -0/+3Gee, how can I get paid to write fluffy and meaningly comments on Digg too?
- JKAL, on 12/01/2008, -0/+3Bury this *****, they should take their own advice,
What the users want: ONE PAGE is what ALL users want.
FTA: Usability testing asks: "How can I make it easy for customers once they're here?"
A: Make it ONE page per article. - noxcovenant, on 12/01/2008, -3/+5Am I the only one who wants to smack onux's face with a rubber glove?
- RadiatedAnt, on 12/01/2008, -0/+2nahh... ***** it! turn the lights off!
- inactive, on 12/01/2008, -0/+1Don't make ***** up "studies show it's 100 times cheaper to fix problems during design than after launch.".
Of course its cheaper, but the '100 times' but is made up *****. - Craftybegonia, on 12/01/2008, -0/+1Very interesting stuff. Thanks!
- Zaeyde, on 12/01/2008, -0/+1Even better:
Submit to Digg with the title, "I bet you can't crash this website." - dacheetah, on 12/01/2008, -0/+1I'd prefer to use the steel gauntlet, but yeah...
- JKAL, on 12/01/2008, -0/+1actually HERE is the original article in ONE page, stolen word for word.
http://www.camerafoto.com/news/in-depth-the-ultima ... - franksands, on 12/01/2008, -0/+1I'm a traditionalist, I prefer to smack with a dead chicken, using a fullplate armor.
- HonoredMule, on 12/01/2008, -0/+1It's time for a website-cropping extension for Firefox. Draw a box around the actual content and have everything else disappear and the remains rendered to the whole screen.
- Cennydd, on 02/04/2009, -0/+0Hi reformation, I wrote this article and I can tell you that this isn't made up. The source for the 1:10:100 ratio (which is fairly widely known in software engineering and web development) is "Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach.", Pressman R. (McGraw Hill, 6th Edition). http://www.rspa.com/about/sepa.html
As for the other commenters complaining about the usability of this article, I agree. I wrote it for a printed magazine which has syndicated it on to other sites. I have no control over how it's displayed on these sites and yeah, there's some pretty epic usability fail on some of them… - chadu, on 12/01/2008, -1/+1not a bad newbie guide to usability testing. I also recommend using a logging app like Silverback on the Mac.
- domness, on 11/30/2008, -6/+6Pretty interesting guide there. It's a shame about how many pages it's set over :(
- valkyries, on 12/01/2008, -1/+1if your running large scale sites, i hope your not in the need of articles like this one.
- inactive, on 12/01/2008, -1/+1logged in just to digg this, and comment of course :)
- inactive, on 12/01/2008, -1/+1It's a great article, and I've seen it (or extremely similar information) in one of my usability manuals. Unfortunately, I can't think of very many websites (professional or amateur) that would pass the test extremely well.
- JKAL, on 12/01/2008, -1/+1The ultimate guide to testing your website
How to conduct 'guerilla testing' to perfect usability
Peer-written design journal Boxes and Arrows is a great resource to keep up with the latest thinking on usability testing and user experience in general
ZoomZoom
After so many shoddy sites, pop-up windows and forced registrations, the truth is that if people don't find your website easy to use, they won't come back. Worse, they'll tell their friends just how clueless you are.
The answer is, of course, to design everything around the needs of your users. We've known this for years, but there's still resistance to even the most basic usability testing.
Excuses, excuses
"The site makes sense to me," designers will say. "I don't need to test it with other people." Ah, but you're very different to your users, which means it's dangerous to assume they'll use a website in the same way as you – particularly if you've just spent months building it and learning all its quirks.
Another excuse people use for not testing is: "We can just use focus groups/market research." But we're talking about two very different things here. Market research is really about "How can I attract customers?". It focuses on people's reactions to a particular marketing or brand approach.
Usability testing asks: "How can I make it easy for customers once they're here?" This touches upon people's emotional responses, but it's more about seeing whether people can use something than whether they like it.
"But surely, usability is just common sense," you might go on to argue. This attitude is understandable to an extent – well-designed systems often do look very simple and it's tempting to conclude that making things easy is, well, easy. Unfortunately, the hard part is everything leading up to the simple solution. Try just one usability test and you'll be amazed at how a site that seemed sensible to you can cause problems for others.
One final line of argument we often encounter against testing is: "It's just too expensive!" Thankfully, nowadays, this is only the case for large, formal usability testing. Sometimes multiple rounds of testing and teams of experts are entirely appropriate, but more and more people are turning to 'guerrilla' usability testing for a quick, cheap insight into how to make their websites better. Here's how to do it.
Planning your tests
First you need to consider at what stage of development you want your site tested.
Running a usability test on an existing site can give you an excellent overview of how well it works and how it can be improved. This is what's known as a summative test.
However, usability testing is for life, not just for Christmas, so it's often worth testing sites as you're making them, too – studies show it's 100 times cheaper to fix problems during design than after launch.
This is called formative testing because it helps you refine your ideas as you go. It's an increasingly common approach and fits in particularly well with the Agile philosophy.
If you're testing an unfinished site you need to choose what bits to test – usually stuff you've just developed, or perhaps a prototype.
Lo-fi paper prototypes are great ways to test early drafts of your site. Either take wireframes, if you have any, or sketch and cut out the relevant sections. You can then rearrange them on a large A3 sheet and ask your participant to interact with it as if it were a real site: using a finger to represent clicks, speaking keyboard input out loud and so on. Although this approach requires a certain suspension of disbelief, participants are usually happy to adapt to this unusual form of test.
Paper prototypes are best suited to sites early in development. As you get closer to a solution, you'll want to test either what you've already coded or more substantial prototypes. For higher-fidelity prototypes, you can use specialist prototyping software such as Axure and iRise, or get stuck in with HTML.
At Clearleft we prototype in HTML, CSS and some jQuery, creating 'mid-fi' prototypes – good enough to be usable but rough enough to be quick and easy to create.
Quantitative or qualitative?
Quantitative tests measure numerical things such as task completion percentages. For these tests you need quite a few users, but the resultant statistics can help put a financial value on usability improvements.
Qualitative testing is more concerned with watching people use the system and learning how well they understand it. As such, it's suited to the guerrilla approach and formative testing, and it's what we're focusing on here.
Of course, these two extremes aren't mutually exclusive, and a well-designed test can have both quantitative and qualitative elements.
Once you've chosen what to test, you should write some scenarios for the test. Examples for, say, a car classified site might be:
"You're looking to buy a used estate car for the family and have £2,000 to spend."
"You want to read some user reviews of the Peugeot 307." "You want to know how much your J-reg Mercedes 190E is worth."
Make sure the scenarios reflect the user's overarching goals, not how they should do it. Although you know the 'right' way to answer these scenarios on the site, you want to see whether it's obvious to users. Your scenarios should also involve the most important functionality you have: there's no point testing the subtleties of a photo cropping interface if the user can't log in.
The complexity of your scenarios will dictate how many you can fit in a single test, but five or so is common. To check you're covering the right number, estimate how long your scenarios will take to walk through. As a rule of thumb, double the time it takes you to walk through them all, then double it again to cover admin and briefing time. If this comes to between 30 minutes and an hour, you've got it about right.
How many users should you test your site on? Even one user is better than none, but it's worth getting a few people in to eliminate freak results and catch all of the common problems. For a single round of testing, five users will find the majority of errors.
For a quantitative test, you may need 20. Pace yourself – usability testing is surprisingly hard work and you'll struggle to cope with more than four or five tests in a day. For guerrilla tests, try three in an afternoon or even just one over a lunch break.
It's important that you find test subjects similar to your intended user base. If you've created personas for your site, these should be your guide. If not, give some thought to your target audience, but don't just focus on demographics; it's actually more important to find people who have similar needs. For example, a taxi driver and a high-flying stockbroker might both need to check their bank balances on the move.
Finding the right people
You can find participants through friends, family, Twitter, Facebook and so on. Get the word out and include some basic screener questions to filter out those who don't meet your criteria.
Recruitment can take a while: you'll need to find people, assess their suitability, schedule mutually acceptable times and agree payment, so allow a couple of hours per user. Alternatively, you can use a specialist recruiter – prices vary but you can expect to pay £30-£50 per participant.
If you do lots of testing, it might be useful to set up your own pool of users you can pick from. However, try to cast your net widely. It's not ideal to have one person testing the same site twice; they may remember things from the first test and skew your results.
Few people will give up their time for free, so you'll also need to consider incentives. Anything below £20 per hour is a bit miserly. You'll need a lot more to attract people from a particularly rare niche (GPs, mustachioed Canadian cat owners); it's probably worth using a specialist recruiter for these guys. It's up to you whether you offer cash, vouchers or any other incentive. If you're in a larger organisation, ask your finance team what's easiest.
Once you get started, you'll be too busy watching to takes notes by hand, so it's useful to record the screen. A video camera might suffice, but the quality won't be great and you won't be able to see the user's face. A better approach is to use screen recording software: see 'Usability testing software' (right). If you can't work out a way to record the session, try to find someone to take notes for you.
Also think about what kind of venue you want the testing to take place in. The most obvious choice is a spare room in your office, but they can be unfamiliar and intimidating places for the public. The guerrilla alternative is to get your laptop out and scoot round to a more amenable venue.
The ideal environment is as close to the user's natural habitat as possible, so you get the chance to see other things about their set-up. Do they have passwords scribbled on Post-it notes? Do they have to ask their son to help install software? These can have important implications for your designs.
Of course, it can be very hard to arrange tests on the user's home turf, so a quiet coffee shop can be a good neutral venue – but scout around first. It'll be hard to focus if baristas are shouting espresso orders within earshot.
The day of the test
Set up early and check you've brought the right cables (including a charger) and have all your paperwork ready. Once the user arrives, greet them, offer them a drink and generally make them feel at home. People might be nervous, so it's part of your job to make sure they relax.
A good way to start is to explain that you're not testing them, just the website, so they can't do anything wrong. It's often best to pay their incentive in advance too, so they don't feel like they have to do well to earn their cash.
While you're doing this, you'll probably want to go through some housekeeping. If you have a non-disclosure agreement, ask them to sign it. You should also ask permission if you're recording, and explain that they can opt out of the test at any point, and omit anything with which they feel uncomfortable.
Finally, explain what's known as 'thinkaloud'. This simply means that you ask your participant to talk you through what they're thinking during the test. This is a really useful way of learning how they believe the site works and behaves – what's known as a 'mental model' of the site. Then turn on your recording software, open the site in a browser (of the user's choice, ideally), give them their scenario and go!
As people familiarise themselves with the site, they'll often go quiet. That's fine, but you might wish to prompt them occasionally to explain what they're thinking. Good questions are "So what's going through your head right now?", "What do you think this page does?" or "What are your reactions?".
Try to avoid subjective or leading questions such as "Do you like this?" or "Does this button need to be bigger?". It's almost always better to ask open, probing questions starting with 'why', what' or 'how'. These are harder to answer in subjective terms and give users the chance to express how they've understood the system.
Dealing with questions
Sometimes, your participant will ask you a question. It's natural to want to help, but this can confuse your findings, so you need to encourage them to find their own solutions.
One approach is to ask the question back. If they say, "What does this button do?", reply with "What do you think it does?". If they're persistently asking questions, politely explain that you're interested in seeing how they solve these problems themselves, but you'll be happy to answer any outstanding questions at the end of the session.
Similarly, there will undoubtedly be moments where your user gets completely stuck. Sometimes you can learn a lot by how people try to rescue seemingly lost causes, so don't intervene straight away, but don't leave them struggling for too long either. Ask their opinions if they've sunk deep into thought, and if they're still nowhere near the right path, make a note and then step in and help them.
Running your first test can be quite an experience. Your instinct will be to yell out in frustration when the user overlooks your beautifully crafted navigation and goes in completely the wrong direction. Resist this urge.
Just as fitness instructors will tell you that pain is weakness leaving the body, so usability experts will remind you that you're finding out how to make your website better. It can be a painful process, but testing will make a big difference to the people who use the site.
Some participants will be more 'useful' than most, uncovering dozens of issues, while others will breeze effortlessly through the test. Some you'll barely be able to get a word out of; others you won't be able to shut up. This is one reason why you generally want to test with a few people, but even the quietest participants will teach you something – probably hidden somewhere in the recordings.
After the test
You've got your users to come in, the tests went well – now what? Analysis is the most important phase of testing. Having the most well-executed tests with the most interesting and insightful users won't matter if you can't turn them into sensible findings and recommendations.
First, write down everything you remember from the tests while it's still fresh in your mind. I - Tigerdaz, on 12/01/2008, -0/+0It might have been a good article for once............. BUT as soon as i clicked the link and saw "TECH RADAR" i closed it immediately. Maybe this should be a lesson that if they didn't post so many ***** time wasting useless articles people would possibly give more credit and time to the site.
Instead they just get buried as another CRAP 2 paragraphs per page spread over 15 pages and BURIED and not even read.
This what happens when you cry wolf too many times no body gives a flying ***** what happens to you when you really have something to say, they just wont give a ***** and wont listen. - inactive, on 12/01/2008, -3/+2
Is this for large scale sites? - nathan42100, on 12/01/2008, -2/+1Best way to test your website:
Make it good.
Make it well.
Put it on digg. - ragingflamerboy, on 12/01/2008, -2/+1It didn't say definitive. :)
- survivordean, on 11/30/2008, -7/+5sounds interesting
- jlford30, on 11/30/2008, -8/+4Nice article
- onux16, on 12/01/2008, -4/+1If you're not into web design, don't bother reading this article; it's pretty well detailed and may be over your head. And don't bother making a comment about TFA even more so.
Thank you. - axelgrease, on 12/01/2008, -7/+2The title was catching, def gonna read through it
- valkyries, on 12/01/2008, -6/+1You post a link to your website on digg, and read all the bad reviews people on digg give you.
http://netblues.org/tim - inactive, on 11/30/2008, -8/+1WOW!
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