What is involved in conducting a usability test?
Step 1: Briefing session to determine the customer needs and requirements, project objectives, methodology, target population, sample size and sampling method, location, level of analysis, required reports, and additional equipment.
Step 2: planning involves defining task scenarios, recruiting participants, and conducting a pilot study.
Step 3: Usability study is either lab or field-based, and involves using usability methods, either alone or in combination, user testing or expert assessment.
- Eye tracking is used to record and analyse in real-time, giving an insight into areas of interest, difficulty and cognitive processes and strategies of use.
- Video observation involves recording and analysing user behaviour, including facial expressions, movements, and verbal protocols, which give us rich information about the users’ experience.
- Usability rating questionnaires are used to gather information about the users’ own assessment of the system and give the interface a usability “score”.
- pre and post-attitude questionnaires comprise a series of questions designed to test the users’ attitude before using the interactive technology, and to measure whether these have changed after use. In field studies, attitude questionnaires can be used to explore attitudes, expectations and acceptance after actual use of the system.
- Interviews allow us to explore further the users’ experience and address further any problems encountered.
- Expert review and accessibility audit we used our 150 point checklist to assess the site for compliance with accessibility and usability guidelines and standards. Our checklist incorporates Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Guidelines (priorities 1 & 2) and a range of usability guidelines.
- Focus groups identify users’ experiences and attitudes related to a product or product idea.
Step 4: Analysis we have entry level to more detailed analysis:
- Task completion times
- Number of URLs visited in completing the task
- Click through rates - the number of clicks to completion and their sequence.
- Accuracy of task completion and error rate
- percentage of time that a user follows an optimal navigation path
- Number of times a user has to backtrack
- First fixation location (i.e. what is the first thing the user looks at)
- percentage of time spent on specific areas of interest.
- Logging critical incidents, capturing errors and problems in real-time, from the captured screen and verbal protocol.
- Video highlights of critical incidents
- Video replay of interaction showing eye movement (AVI format)
- User satisfaction rating - to determine the usefulness, ease of use, satisfaction and learnability of the interface.
- Accessibility Health Check
- Browser Compatibility
- Competitive Analysis
Step 5: Report findings and recommendations The report formats we provide are based on Common Industry Format (CIF) developed by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). We can provide you with:
- Summary report in pDF format
- Detailed report with full statistical analysis
- Video highlights
- Full 90 minute presentation of results at your premises
- Ease and effectiveness workshop to help you plan usability improvement
We have a number of “off the shelf “ packages that may suit your needs. Otherwise we can tailor a package to your specific requirements. We are always happy to put together bespoke research plans.