User experience design is a relatively new field in the web industry and it’s all about a person’s perceptions and responses that result from the use of a system. The main goal of good user experience is to design the system that a person of average experience will be able to use for its intended purpose without getting frustrated. Although hiring a user experience designer might be expensive there are some methods you can use to test your own project.
User experience design is a relatively new field in the web industry and it’s all about a person’s perceptions and responses that result from the use of a system. The main goal of good user experience is to design the system that a person of average experience will be able to use for its intended purpose without getting frustrated. Although hiring a user experience designer might be expensive there are some methods you can use to test your own project.
Why you need user research and testing.
It decreases support costs. If you start testing your project as soon as possible you will save on development and redesign efforts. It reduces the risk of the product failing. Usability studies are proven to increase user satisfaction to achieve a success you need to make sure that your product is usable. It increases the likelihood of usage. When your product is properly designed there is a high likelihood that a person will use your product on a daily basis. Users are better able to reach their goals. Your product has to be self-evident or at least self-explanatory. If you make a user think too much he will quickly get frustrated and find another product which is easier to use.
Effective user testing methods.
Paper prototyping your friend or co-worker Paper prototyping is an interactive experiment that is used to gather information. It’s widely used method in the user-centered design process. Paper prototyping is made by hand with simple materials. It will cost nothing if you test your friend, family or co-worker. While paper prototyping is simple, it can provide a great deal of useful feedback which will result in the design of better product. What is more, you can do this without a computer. All you need is a pen and paper, and don’t worry, you don’t need any drawing skills.
How to do paper prototyping?
When you’ve already found three or more victims hand them out the home page and ask them to interact with elements. If it is an e-commerce site you can request to find a particular product on website and then give them the page that corresponds to that element. Ask your friends to share every feeling or thought they had during completing the task. Every feedback is worth its weight in gold. While you are testing, always try to make notes. For example, your friend says: “ I can’t find the contact form” – it means that there are some weak spots in your project you should work on.
Card sorting
Another great way to test your project with minimum effort is card sorting. Card sorting has the same low-tech approach as paper prototyping. It is a usability methodology that can help you create information architecture for your website. It allows the researchers to determine an optimal layout for the website. This time you will need at least five people (but remember that little testing is better than none. Unless you find five people, test as much as you are able to). How to do card sorting? Once again all you need is a piece of paper and somebody eager to help you. Firstly, create a list of content topics and show participants the set of shuffled topics then ask each user to sort them accordingly to its importance. Remember to encourage users to think out loud while working. It will allow you to get more feedbacks and notes. The time of this testing depends on the number of cards and complexity of topics but it mostly takes about 20-30 minutes. If you don’t want to do it in old-fashioned way with pen and paper you can always download a free application such as Xcard which will simulate a table with cards.
Testing tools.
fivesecondtest
FiveSecondTest will help you test people’s first impression of your project. Five seconds to improve a website seems like short time but actually is more than enough for a visitor to determine if your site has enough quality. Firstly you upload design to test it then testers have 5 seconds to view your image and answer the questions you set. FiveSecondTest collect all the responses and present the data with graphs.
crazyegg
Crazy Egg is a useful tool which works like X-Ray vision for your website. It will show you where people clicked on your website so you can track their behaviour. Crazy eggs offer four tools: heatmap (it identify the most popular areas on your website), scrollmap (It shows how much far down the page users are scrolling), overlay (you find out how many clicks there were on each element of your page), confetti (this tool distinguish clicks at you website and segment them).
filesq
Filesq has to main advantages. It allows you to create interactive prototypes and share your designs so you can save time on iterations. as well as collect comments on your project from other users.
optimizely
Optimazely offer a simplified A/B testing. You can test changes to your page against the current design and determine which ones produce positive results. It saves a lot of time and a ton of useless coding.
conceptfeedback
Concept Feedback lets you get free feedback from the community (You can pay to have experts review your website for 99$). All you need to do is post your website then you get expert feedback from experienced experts.
xsortapp
Xsort is an application that allows you sort cards. Thanks to this app you can simulate a table with cards and have full control over the exercise (sorting type, cards placement, etc.). Unfortunately it works only on Mac OS X.
speedzinemedia
This tool allows you to record mouse activity on web pages and then replay them in real time or as a static layer. This mouse tracking system works in every modern browser and not interfere with other scripts on the website.
If you want to learn more you should check out our user experience course.
