After months of development and testing, your website or application has gone through UAT and all the boxes have been ticked. It’s full of features and does what the functional specification says it should. Let’s go live!
But how will real people interact with the site? Most organisations won’t be able to answer that question as they have never observed their site actually being used by their visitors. Those that do could be surprised at the results from some simple user testing observations.
What are the benefits?
In our experience, development teams gain more from observing a few user tests than from weeks of design meetings, training and evaluation. Nothing beats watching a real person try to use your product for teaching you what is and isn’t usable.
What does user testing look like?
Take our recent online car insurance benchmarking report as an example. One of our recommendations was to keep the number of screens to a minimum, i.e. get out of the user’s way during the quote process. Why? Site visitors are goal driven, they’re not surfing for fun. In this case, they’re looking for a price, quickly. Our observations during a user test back this up, with this participant completely neglecting to read the terms and conditions page in their quest to get a quick quote. Yet, most car insurance websites insist on displaying a screen full of terms and conditions. Here the organisation’s goals here are in conflict with the users’. For optimum results they need to be aligned.
The following image shows the sample output from a user test, with a video recording of the screen interactions with a “Picture in Picture” of the participant, recording their actions, expressions and reactions to the website they are using.
