User testing

Participant numbers

You don’t necessarily need big numbers of testers each time. Norman Neilson says that testing with a minimum of 5 participants is enough to highlight the big issues

It is always best to do 1-1 sessions with testers rather than trying to test something by focus group or committee. The exception to this would be automated testing for Information Architecture where your tool will capture success.

You can test about 5 participants in 1 hour depending on how in-depth your testing is.

Testing in this way can throw up some unusual things.

Test early

It’s important that users get to see and ‘interact’ with your new/revised product as early on as possible. The user stories that you created earlier should be used to test the usability of your product. If users can’t achieve their goal first time you need to do some more work!

There are a number of things that can be tested:

• Information Architecture: organizing, structuring, and labelling content in an effective and sustainable way. The goal is to help users find information and complete tasks
• Content: it’s important that users can find the information they need to complete a task but they need to understand it too
• User Interface (UI) and functionality: it’s important that we understand how the user interacts with the product – do they click on the button, do they use search or try and navigate, do they know to scroll

Test effectiveness

How successful the user is in achieving their goals

• whether or not a task was completed
• how many times participants asked for/required assistance during a task

If they can’t achieve their goal they may phone us or take their business elsewhere

Test efficiency

How much time/effort is required to achieve these goals

• The time taken to complete each task
• Number of clicks taken – if they are meaningful clicks towards the end goal we’re not worried about them
• Number of searches run
• Participant and moderator opinion – was the time taken acceptable?

If it takes too long and it’s complicated to achieve their goal they may abandon part way through and/or give us negative feedback and/or tell others about their poor experience and/or call.

Satisfaction

User attitudes after using the site to achieve these goals

• Good
• Average
• Poor