Foviance is sponsoring and conducting the usability testing for the shortlisted entries, in the ‘Business’ and the ‘Best use of Web’ categories, with Catriona Campbell, founder of Foviance, judging at the event.

Have you ever wondered what it might be like to browse a website with a visual impairment? Or wondered how your website is perceived by a person with a vision disorder?

There are many different types of vision disorders that can affect a user’s ability to view web pages and way too many to cover off here. However, to give you an idea, I have simulated how the Foviance website homepage might look to someone with cataracts, macular degeneration, glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy. These are four of the most common types of vision disorders. Cataracts is the leading cause of blindness worldwide and in the UK, 2 million people are visually impaired with macular degeneration (40%), glaucoma (13%) and diabetic retinopathy (8%) being the three most common causes.

If the text size on your website is not big, flexible or clear enough, your visitors may encounter difficulties using it. You will hopefully understand from the following images and descriptions why it’s so important that web pages contain text of a decent size and is strongly contrasted against the background colour.

Cataracts can form at any age, but it mostly develops as people get older. It is one of the most common types of vision disorders and according to recent studies, more than half of Americans will have developed cataracts by the time they reach 80. A cataract is a clouding of the eye lens, resulting in blurred and faded vision. Its affect can be a bit like looking at everything through frosted glass and it makes it difficult to read small or poorly contrasted text.

Macular degeneration is the most common cause of vision loss for people over the age of 60. This condition causes a gradual blurring and loss of the central vision. This affects the person’s central area of sight, making it difficult to see objects that are looked at directly. Text on websites can appear fuzzy and small text is particularly difficult to read.

Glaucoma can affect people of any age, although it mostly affects people over the age of 40. Glaucoma is caused by an increase in pressure inside the eye, which damages the optic nerve. The end result is often the opposite of macular degeneration with the loss of peripheral vision and a blurring of the central vision. Having glaucoma can be a bit like looking at everything through a straw and makes reading difficult because text seems faded as well as blurry.

Diabetic retinopathy affects the network of blood vessels lying within the retina causing them to bleed and form scar tissue. The scarring pulls and distorts the retina, causing dark patches in the field of vision. Text appears blurred or distorted in these regions, making web content difficult to read.

So, how do you think your website would look to someone with vision impairment? Do you think your content can be read without significant difficulty? To be sure, you should always include users with vision impairments in the design and development process of your websites, and seek to gather their opinions and feedback on the quality of the designs.

With the impending UK General Election, BBC News developed a separate content area as part of its main site. There was an internal discussion to decide whether this should follow the index approach of the main BBC News website, or whether it should be a micro-site with additional, user-driven functionality. The team wanted to deliver a great election experience to two very different types of target users – Novices and Super Users – by including additional features, while ensuring the Election micro-site was as accessible and usable as the main News site.

Download full BBC News case study (945 KB)

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When the graphs are going up and to the right, people are generally happy. Life feels fine when there’s good growth in the right kind of metrics and despite the tough economic trading conditions over the past 18 months, the digital economy has generally been doing OK. Here in the UK spending on online advertising grew by just under 5% in 2009 compared to 2008 with spend on Search up by just under 10%. Whilst that isn’t the kind of stellar growth seen in previous years, the indicators are positive. Business confidence amongst advertisers is higher than it’s been previously and we’re continuing to see growth in the active online audience (up 10% vs. a year ago), some of that being driven by the growth in population of social networking sites such as Facebook.

But is “good” good enough? We all know that graphs that go down and to the right are generally bad news, when is good news really good news? Trends in looked in isolation are useful (after all “a trend is a friend”) but they’re much more useful when you have some context to compare them against. Most of us operate in a competitive environment and so it’s useful to know how we compare against our competitors, so we can put that trend into context. Whilst we generally have relatively easy access to our own data, getting data on competitors can be a bit tougher. The availability of that data is also very dependent on the type of industry you are in, the market that you are in, the size of your own digital property and the size of your competitors. So it can be difficult to generalise about how to get competitive benchmarking data but here potentially are a few avenues worth exploring.

Commercial services
There are a number of commercial services available in most markets around the world that provide data on the traffic and customer profile of different websites. Companies such as ComScore and Nielsen NetRatings create panels of users and monitor their internet behaviour. Their reports provide detailed information on a site’s traffic patterns and visitor profiles so it’s possible for example to compare say the reach and frequency of visitors to your site against those of your competitors. Some companies, such as Compete and Quantcast, use hybrid methods to collect their data and estimate a site’s traffic. Hitwise aggregates data from ISPs to build up a profile of the market and can use that data to provide raking reports on traffic to different websites in your category.

The commercial model varies from each provider of these services. However the good news is that in some cases you can get access to some limited data for free. However, there are also a number of other free services which may be useful.

Free services
Data on the internet is being aggregated all the time, all over the place and in some cases you can hands on it for free. Tools such as Google Trends for Websites, Google AdPlanner, Alexa and others all enable you access reports on website traffic and visitor profiles on your competitors and compare them to yours. The way that the data is collected varies from service to service and it’s worth taking the time out to understand (as much as you can) how the data is collected and how the reports are created. You need to be aware of the potential limitations of these types of services particularly if you are dealing with websites with relatively low traffic volumes. Caveat Emptor! – even if it’s free.

In some cases you may be also get some benchmarking data as part of the service offered by your web analytics vendor. In this cases you won’t be able to see your competitors data in detail but you will be able to compare your own performance against a group of similar websites to your own.

Do it yourself
In the examples above the data that you can get is mainly looking at traffic volumes, visitor profiles, search behaviour and the like. You can also go out and collect your own information on your competitors. You can use additional research techniques such as surveys, focus groups and usability testing to find out how you compare against your competitors in different ways. It won’t be the quantitative data that we’ve already looked at but it will be customers’ opinions about how you compare and can be enormously insightful in helping you to evaluate your competitive position. Again this type of research needn’t cost the earth. You can get benchmarking data from customer surveys like 4Q and low cost remote testing methodologies are being developed all the time.

As we come out of the recession and the market begins to accelerate, it’s always good to ask yourself whether good is good enough. You can do that by keeping an eye on what’s going on around you. How you do that will depend on your circumstance but hopefully there’s a few ideas here.

lowcostholidays.com’s successful relationship with Customer Experience consultancy Foviance, led them to engage in their services again. Foviance replicated test setup for lowcostholidays.com’s website and used the previous findings as a basis for a new usability evaluation. This proved to be a perfect example of the benefits of interactive testing.

Download full lowcostholidays.com case study (389 KB)

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The core task of the testing required the participants to simulate a loan application process. They were asked to apply for a £25k loan in order to finance the purchase of a car. The feedback from the task revealed that the current process was found text-heavy, long-winded and of moderate length, whereas the new process was deemed more user-friendly, shorter and quicker. But surprisingly, more than half of the participants commented that they preferred the current process. The principal reason highlighted, was that going for a £25k loan was a big financial commitment that should slowly mature in the users’ mind, as they go along the application process. Participants did not expect/want to be able to take out a loan online as easily as they would pay bills or transfer money.

This shows that, even if some fundamental usability principles should always be respected, the best way to achieve a goal is not always the easiest.

This post was originally posted by Xavier Klingenfus

There is a distinct difference between ‘accessibility compliance’ and ‘an accessible experience’.

Accessibility compliance is all about meeting the requirements of the WCAG – that’s the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines which are internationally considered the de facto standards for web accessibility.
Meeting the requirements of these guidelines is a key aspect of web accessibility, but it doesn’t always mean that people with disabilities will be able to use your website successfully.

The goal is to make websites work for everyone. Good standards are important, but what really matters is the user experience.

Here’s an example: If a website uses images for navigation and there’s no alternative text (alt text), the site is clearly not accessible and fails accessibility compliance. If the same website uses frustratingly verbose alt text for the images (such as ‘This image is a green oblong containing white text. If you click on it, it will take you to the Contact Us page for this Company website’ ) instead of just ‘Contact Us’, then you could say that the website is technically accessible because there is alt text; however, the alt text is so bad that the usability of the site is awful for anyone who relies on alt text.

Websites should be quick, easy and enjoyable for everyone to use, so it is important that things don’t just stop at the guidelines. To create great web experiences for users with disabilities you need to involve them in your projects, to help identify and eliminate key areas of confusion and difficulty.

Turner Broadcasting, Cartoon Network’s parent company, chose Foviance following a 3 way pitch. After completing the UK based research, the findings were fed into the Polish and Spain phases.

Linda El-Ali, Digital Media Research Director said: “Foviance brought tremendous insight to this project during the development stage and helped put into place a set of essential usability guidelines. Their approach to the evaluation sessions was well thought out, professional and allowed for our audience to engage and comment on the site while it was being developed.”

Mark Rose, Senior Business Consultant, Foviance, said: “Turner Broadcasting have delivered a solution that not only provides a more engaging experience for children to socially interact on the Cartoon Network site, but ensures their safety by giving parents governance through email notification and acceptance. The international testing carried out by us, enabled the provision of insight from three key European markets, by focusing on the overall user experience of the site.”

About Turner Broadcasting
Turner Broadcasting delivers some of the world’s most successful and well-known news and entertainment brands including CNN, Cartoon Network, Boomerang, Cartoonito, CN Too, TCM (Turner Classic Movies), and Adult Swim. The company now broadcasts 21 entertainment channels in 17 languages across approximately 100 countries in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Alongside its TV channels Turner Broadcasting is at the forefront of developing its brands via the web, VOD, DVD, gaming, mobile, merchandising, publishing and every other available platform. Turner Broadcasting is a Time Warner Company.

Press Coverage:

Sourcewire.com: Turner Broadcasting appoints Foviance to carry out European usability project
By Foviance, 30 July, 2009

Responsesource.com: Turner Broadcasting appoints Foviance to carry out European usability project
By Foviance, 30 July, 2009

Rapid wireframing was used to meet the needs of Clearlybusiness as they were looking to deliver some quick wins in a very short space of time, from the first day of discussing requirements to the delivery of wireframes within 6 days. The final deliverables included a set of 11 wireframes that formed the basis of the developed site.

Conrad Ford, Head of Existing Businesses, was extremely pleased with the designs produced.

Download full 55KB .pdf case study

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The past few weeks I have been looking at the need for organisations to focus more heavily on the user experience and to more rigouroulsy understand what their customers want online and how best to deliver that to them. Good customer insight is core to that process and insight comes from a range of systems, methodologies and techniques. Last time  I looked at the use of quantitative approaches to customer insight and this week I want to look at some of the more qualitative approaches.

For years in “offline” marketing quantitative and qualitative approaches have been used side by side to understand consumers’ preferences and behaviours. It is only relatively recently that in the online channel that businesses are pulling these disparate sources of insight together to get a fuller picture into what is happening in the online channel and why. Part of the problem has been technological – it’s been hard to integrate data – but another part of the problem has been organisational with different functional silos focussed on different aspects of the customer journey or the customer experience. Certainly here in the UK and I’m sure it’s the same in the US and some of the other more sophisticated digital economies that we are beginning to see roles and job titles such as “Director of Customer Experience”. Something we didn’t see a couple of years ago. With functional integration we are beginning to see more data integration as joined up thinking requires joined up data. Part of that integration involves the “blending” of hard quantitative based data with softer qualitative data collected using a variety of predominantly observational techniques.

Website usability testing has been around for ages (in digital marketing terms) and has been a core tool in the website development process for many organisations. But I am still constantly amazed by how many organisations don’t do any usability testing either during or after the product development process and still spend large amounts of time and money on developing sites or functionality without testing to see whether typical users can actually do what they wanted or expected to do. Simple usability testing can tell you a lot about why things don’t work that you would never get from staring a bunch of web analytics reports and given that often the respondent will be talking about their experience at the same time, you not only get to see why things may not be working, you get to hear it from the horse’s mouth as well. Usability testing techniques are evolving all the time and methodologies like eye tracking are becoming standard features of most tests rather than expensive optional extras. Eye tracking shows where the user is looking and combined with other data such as a click map from a web analytics system is really useful for page level optimisation requirements such as merchandising and promotional work.

One of the criticisms about usability testing is that labs can be an artificial environment in which to observe the user experience. As a result we have seen more use of “ethnographic” style research in which customers are observed interacting with websites in their “natural habitat” such as their home or their work place. For one piece of research we conducted for a retailer we went out into the homes of customers to see how they managed to use the website in their own environment. Pictures fed back to the client showed users balancing laptops on their knees on the sofa or standing in the kitchen with the laptop on a worktop. We might think that customers are focused on the site but the reality is that they could be in an environment which is full of noise and distractions and it certainly puts a different perspective on the kind of experience they may be having.

Some of the newer and more innovative qualitative approaches to understanding the user experience include techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG) to try and measure emotional engagement. This approach uses brain scanning techniques to monitor subconscious responses in the brain when users are subjected to different stimuli on a website. How do they emotional react, for example, to different types of messaging, images or layouts? It’s like eye-tracking on steroids.

With all these innovative developments though the fundamentals remain the same and that’s the recognition that good user experiences cannot be built in a vacuum and without a deep insight into, and empathy with, the goals, aspirations and expectations of our customers. The data, the tools and the techniques just help us to get there.