We love being able to say "we design award-winning websites." Here's another instance where one of the sites we helped our clients create won an award in their field for excellence in web design.
Morningside Ministries won the Website of the Year award from the Leading Age organization. Congratulations to the talented folks at Morningside Ministries, our genius visual designer Jessie Sebastian, our developer Julia Terno, and website technical producer Chris McDermott. Way to go, team!
When designing usability tests, our clients often think of them as Focus Groups, and want to use the opportunity to ask a whole series of exploratory questions.
I don't mind including some, but I save them for the end, and I edit them heavily. Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering has written a beautiful article, 3 Questions You Should Never Ask During User Research, that succinctly explains our approach. All kudos to Jared for his group's leadership in the usability/user experience space.
The reason we do user testing with designs and live sites is to see any user pain or struggling directly. It's hard to sit still and watch someone struggle, but it's essential to getting the information we need to make the site experience better.
Whether the project is a site redesign or a full process reengineering, we look at it this way. The user is the patient and the UX designer is the doctor. Patients are expert about his/her own pain, emotional state and relative happiness; no one else can know or measure that as accurately. Patients are NOT expert on diagnosis, or creating and implementing a treatment plan. The doctor does that.
Step 1: Self-diagnosis. "Doc, I think I have cancer!" says the patient.
Step 2: Explore for information. The doctor calmly responds, "Why do you think you have cancer?"
Step 3: Specific goals, needs and requirements. "My stomach hurts right here after I eat. And my mother's uncle died of stomach cancer!"
Step 4: Diagnosis and treatment. After delving into the specifics, the doctor recommends a course of action. "Take this acid preventer before each meal for 2 weeks - and let me know how you are feeling. You should feel relief by tomorrow at dinnertime. If you get to feeling worse at any point, or a specific, sharp, stabbing pain in this region, please call us back right away."
Step 5: Measure success, adjust treatment plan. After a course of treatment, either the patient's complaint is addressed, or the problem is still present. Either they're done, or both continue to work the problem.
So let's take that medical example and make it into a website marketing example.
Step 1: Self-diagnosis: The marketing director says, "We need to set up a CEO blog right away!"
Step 2: Explore for information. "Why do you want a company blog?" I respond.
Step 3: Specific goals, needs and requirements. "We need to be seen as cutting-edge. We need to be driving more traffic to the website. And XYZWidgets has a blog, and they're kicking our butts!"
Step 4: Diagnosis and treatment. Now we can explore options for solving the problem. I might say, "Let's identify some good, juicy content topics that you can make available to prospects in a variety of ways - website, email, social media. We can include an excerpt in the next eBlast campaign, post it on your Facebook page, and drive prospects directly to a landing page for the full article. Let's see what the response is to that before investing your CEO's time in a blog." We set specific goals at this step.
Step 5: Measure success, adjust treatment plan. This step is critical, and it's often overlooked or underperformed by busy marketers, and even more frequently by folks who are doing marketing part time, as one "hat" in addition to another primary role.
I highly recommend subscribing to Jared Spool's UIE Tips eNewsletter. They're usually good; today's was excellent!
Recently, we asked some of our coworking group and other friends if they'd be willing to participate in a usability test conducted by another user-centered design consultancy. That spurred a whole, interesting conversation about what a usability test is, what we can learn from one, and when a project warrants conducting a usability test.
There are a multitude of ways we user-centered designers gain insight into how people use websites. Mature, experienced designers should be open to finding out they don't have all the answers - but that users DO. These usability activities are the special magic behind great web design. Some of our favorite usability tools are:
Here's what a usability test looks like. We're seeing the participant from the control room through one-way glass; we can see her but she sees a mirror. We are able to guide her and answer questions. Commonly, a usability specialist sits with the participant.
In web design projects, it's very helpful to watch people try to complete specific tasks using a prototype of a proposed design. A screen that the designer feels is perfectly clear in its layout and labeling can be baffling to a user, and there's no better way to help the designer understand that than for her or him to watch users attempt to perform the task.
For example, when I'm designing an airline ticketing system, I analyze the users' needs and the business requirements, then mock up what I think is a great set of screens to allow users to order tickets. I probably did a great job. But I can't fix problems I'm unable to anticipate, and that's where a usability test comes in. Here's the drill:
Full usability tests are time consuming to plan, conduct, and report on, and in order for the results to be valid, require the services of a usability expert. The specialist who conducts the test (usually sitting beside the participant) has to be a special kind of person, one who can patiently wait through user frustration, withhold information with a poker face, and not lead the participant in any way.
If you're getting the idea that usability tests are expensive and time-consuming, you're right. At Firecat Studio, we only recommend a formal usability test when the alternative methods can't tell us what we need to know, and when we do not have the luxury of trial and error.
In many cases, we can conduct informal usability tests using paper prototypes or quick mockups and uncover the majority of usability problems with much less time and expense.
A perfectly valid approach is to "ship, then test" - put the site out there, measure users' actual success with tasks, and make adjustments to the interface after launch. Websites aren't like books - they're meant to be reworked, to evolve and grow as you learn more.
Sometimes skimping on usability is penny-wise and pound-foolish, though. A full usability test is in order when:
