Introduction
This lesson introduces usability testing.
Usability Testing
Why Do We Conduct Usability Testing?
Developers, designers, and other product stakeholders might get locked in certain types of thinking while working on a certain project. They might be unable to see issues on the interface or with the flow of the website. A developer’s view might also be more technical than your average user - performing technical tasks which might seem easy for a developer could be quite difficult for real users. There might be several issues we haven’t thought of that usability testing can reveal. Assessing real users and their interactions with your product is vital to the success of your product.
What Is Usability Testing?
Usability testing allows us to test how user-friendly a site is and whether users get lost or confused at any point. Good interaction design should help users achieve their goals. If there are aspects of the site which make it harder to achieve its goals, they must be fixed.
Usability testing can be performed at various stages of the process, from the paper prototype at the start of the project, to the website before launching. It can even take the form of continued testing down the line. At almost every point in a product life cycle, it is useful to understand how a user will interact with the product.
What are the advantages of Usability Testing?
One of the main advantages of usability testing over something like a survey is that while a survey might give you quantitative data about what a user says they would do, the reality of what they actually do might be very different. Usability testing lets you see a user in action to know what they really do. Sometimes users might tell an interviewer a white lie to make themselves seem more capable, but actually observing what users do often provide more quality data to improve your website.
Methods for Testing Users
There are two main decisions to make when determining how to test your users:
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Should the sessions be in-person or remote?
In-person testing allows you to get more details from the user. You can see their body language, ask them questions, and see things such as how they hold their mobile phone when working with your mobile site. This gives a deep level of information, but it is more time-consuming and expensive.
-Should we ask specific questions or leave the session open-ended?
This decision depends slightly on the stage of the process and also on what information you are aiming to gather. If you’re doing a broad test of whether the website has a good user experience, you might consider leaving things open-ended to allow the user to explore the site. However, if you have specific areas of the site you want to test, then guiding the user with questions such as “can you ‘favourite’ an item on the site?” might be a better choice.
Tools
Hotjar
Hotjar is a popular behaviour analytics tool which allows stakeholders to collect data on real users interacting on their website. This is an ideal tool for remote, open-ended sessions where we simply see user interactions on a site without guiding them to take specific actions.
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Heatmaps
Heatmaps allow you to see how popular certain areas of your site are, and it tracks clicks, taps and scrolling. This gives insight into which links are popular or how far down a page a user scrolls.
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Visitor Recordings
The other main functionality on Hotjar is the screen recordings where you can see actual users and their interactions as they move around the page. This gives you a very detailed view of how the user has interacted on the site, where their cursor goes, what they try to click etc. It is worthwhile noting that Hotjar are GDPR compliant.
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Video on Hotjar Watch the following video on Hotjar
Accessibility Testing
When considering the usability of our websites, we also need to think about how usable they are for all people, regardless of the user’s abilities.
To test that our site is easy for visually impaired users, we could install a screen reader to see how a user would interact on our page. Download NVDA for Windows and Voiceover for Mac. Then use your keyboard to navigate around the page. You can use the TAB key to move between links and ENTER to move to that page.
Browser Extensions
Adding an extension to your browser is an effective way of testing the accessibility of your website.
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For Chrome
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For Firefox
These extensions will flag potential issues such as images missing alt text, or unclear links, or contrast issues for users.
Google Analytics
Primarily a marketing tool, Google Analytics can be useful for interaction designers and developers.
Google Analytics tracks:
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how many users visit the site.
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how many pages they visit.
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how long they stay on the site.
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whether they complete their purchase or not.
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and many other insights.
Using Google Analytics exposes potential issues. It is a higher-level view than something like Hotjar, but it is still a useful part of analysing the effectiveness of a website.
Lesson Task
Brief
Add Hotjar to the website for your cross-course project. Send it to friends and family and ask them to use the website to help you collect data. The data we collect using Hotjar will be used in the Course Assignment for Interaction Design, so it’s important that you install it early to collect the data you need.
Level 1 Process
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Sign up for a free account on Hotjar
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Go to ‘Add new site’ and link to the website for your cross-course project.
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Take the tracking code given to you by Hotjar and install it on each of the pages on your site.
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Send friends, family, colleagues, and fellow students the link to your website and ask them to explore it.
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Note that data might take a while to come through but do check back on Hotjar to make sure data is coming through.