UCD - Usability Testing

Usability testing involves measuring the ease with which users can complete common tasks on your website. The results of the analysis are a huge eye-opener and their implementation often leads to:

• Increased sales and task completion and a high rate of return site visitors
• A greatly improved understanding of your customers' needs
• A significant reduction in call centre workload
• A much more user-focused in-house development team

Deliverables from the usability testing

Implementation brainstorm workshop

Before writing up the report, we'll spend half a day with you discussing potential recommendations for website issues, brainstorming solutions together. The workshop will take place immediately after we perform our expert analysis of the issues that arose from the usability testing.

The workshop can be very effective because:

• Potential changes that can't be made due to technical or organisational constraints can be identified and won't be explored
• Sometimes there can be more than one way of solving a problem so the workshop is a great environment to come up with the best (and most innovative) solutions for your website
• It's a great way of getting buy-in into proposed changes

(To reduce documentation, and indeed costs, the implementation workshop could take the form of the final deliverable. We would therefore not write up a report so you'd need to take thorough notes during the workshop.)

Written report & presentation of usability testing findings

The usability testing report is very much recommendation-led and highlights the problem areas of the site from the usability testing. For each highlighted problem, clear recommendations are provided for how to remedy it and improve the site's usability. Recommendations are defined as critical, important, and nice-to-haves, as appropriate.

The usability testing report also highlights the positive usability aspects of the site, in order to ensure you don't remove these! It's written in layman's terms with all relevant issues explained thoroughly and appropriate illustrative screenshots included. You can download a brief extract from a sample report²

Once the usability testing report is completed, Abstract Technology will make a short presentation of the main findings from the usability testing. We'll shows video clips during the presentation to highlight some of the main points.

DVDs of usability testing

We'll provide you with a DVD featuring all of the usability testing videos, as well as a DVD showing some of the main highlights from the usability testing. The highlights DVD is a great way to quickly show the usability testing to colleagues who were unable to watch the testing live.

During the usability testing

During the usability testing participants are instructed to think aloud at all times. If they ever fall silent for more than a few seconds they're encouraged to keep talking. Our usability testers are expertly trained to ask questions and elicit thoughts in a non-biased and neutral manner. Throughout the sessions an experienced Abstract Technology moderator will sit with each participant and prompt for feedback.

At the beginning of the usability testing users are shown your website, asked some general questions about it and allowed to freely roam around it, always talking about what they're doing and why they're doing it. Following this, they're then assigned specific tasks to carry out and their ability to complete these tasks is monitored. After the testing is carried out we conduct a brief interview with each user.

Before the usability testing

Before the usability testing is carried out we work closely with you to identify your exact needs and goals for the website and the usability testing. Together, we identify the different demographic groups your site visitors fall into (sometimes there's only one demographic group) and source a number of individuals from each group for testing.

We can additionally offer accessibility testing⁵ with a variety of users with special needs, such as visually impaired users utilising screen readers and screen magnifiers.

We then design and prepare a list of tasks for participants so that users will be completing realistic journeys on your site. The activities will be based on the most common tasks your site visitors regularly undertake. As standard, we run a pilot testing session before launching into the full usability testing.

International usability testing capabilities

Abstract Technology has partnered with a number of usability companies across Europe, to be able to offer a truly global usability testing solution. The testing is fully coordinated by Abstract Technology (you'll only deal with us) and you'll receive one cohesive report covering all the usability testing.

If the usability testing is conducted in a foreign language an interpreter will translate everything that's being said. As such, you're able to watch and listen to the usability testing live, from the viewing room. You'll also receive a DVD showing all the usability testing, with the English translation on top of what the participant is saying.

Interested in how it can work for you? Please contact [email protected] for more information.