User Testing

The application (app) market is booming. The advent of the iPhone and its application concept just three years ago generated new ground for online revenues. Thanks to this development of the smartphone market and the emergence of app marketplaces such as Ovi (Nokia) and Android Market, the app business is at the exciting beginning of its story. Read more…

A recent project to redesign an online form and create a version for mobiles reminded me, once again, of the importance of user testing.

According to Caroline Jarrett in her (very user-friendly) book Forms That Work, ‘Slot-in answers such as name, address, and date of birth are so well known to us that it is much easier and more natural to type them in directly rather than selecting from the list.’  For instance, she notes that it is difficult to scan options in a ‘Year’ dropdown because they look very similar.

I always find date of birth dropdowns annoying and would be able to type in my date of birth much more quickly, so I completely agreed with Jarrett. Therefore, I made the date of birth fields text fields in the first iteration of the prototype (desktop version), expecting that this would make it easier for participants to provide their date of birth. (Note: I know dropdowns prevent Americans from getting confused with the UK date format, but this form would only be used by UK residents.)

Well, half of the participants agreed with me. However, the other half made formatting errors during the testing session (e.g. D instead of DD). What I, a touch typist, had forgotten was that many people must look down at the keyboard to type and therefore may misinterpret or forget the field labels (YY instead of YYYY) or not notice that they have accidentally tabbed to the next field. These participants, who were less proficient at typing, welcomed dropdowns because they reduced the amount of typing they had to do.

I replaced the text fields with conventional date of birth dropdowns in the second iteration of the prototype (see below) and, surprise surprise, participants didn’t make any errors.

Despite this, for the mobile version of the prototype I had participants try entering date of birth using both text fields and dropdowns because I thought dropdowns might be more fiddly on a mobile device.

I got the same result: all participants preferred using date of birth dropdowns on their devices (smartphones with either touchscreen or QWERTY keypads) because it was much quicker and more accurate for them to select dropdown options than numbers (especially on QWERTY keypads).

So, reading books (and getting a UX person to create the prototype) is no substitute for user testing. And sometimes conventions are there for a reason. Even if they are annoying.

CA Calls for European Businesses to Wake Up to ‘Web Stress’ or Risk Losing Customers and Sales

• World’s first* neurological experiment into poor online customer experience proves existence of ‘web stress’
• Brain wave analysis indicates that consumers need to concentrate 50% more than normal when using a badly performing website
• Two most stressful points of the online sales cycle are search and checkout

* Based on extensive desk research in February 2010. Read more…

To explore ‘web stress’, CA partnered with Foviance to see if application performance had an impact on buying habits and consumer behaviour online.

Using an EEG (Electroencephalography) cap and sophisticated neurological and physiological testing equipment, volunteers were wired up during the study and had their brain wave activity monitored. Everyday tasks online such as finding and buying items were tested by the volunteers.

The results revealed that search and checkout were the two most stressful points of everyday processes carried out online, resulting in the volunteers exhibiting a heightened level of ‘web stress’. This type of stress results in more than three quarters of customers abandoning websites before they have completed the task that drove them to the site in the first place. To download the whitepaper a valid e-mail address is required, however Foviance will not contact you unless you specifically request it.

Is there a direct correlation between your customer experience and your revenue? Can we talk about the ROI of customer experience with any hard evidence that will back up our perceptions and justify business expenditure on customer experience work?

Rather than treating your customer research investment in isolation, identifying where your business has to pay for research, analysis and testing, it’s possible to view your investment from the opposite angle – if your business chooses not to work on customer experience, what problems will you experience, what dropouts will you see on your website, and what value is being lost as a result of you not conducting any research?
Read more…

A few weeks ago, Foviance was commissioned by a major UK retail bank to conduct user testing sessions on online application processes. The main objective of the research was to compare the newly designed process with the current one. And from there, stemmed a finding that challenges one of the most profound customer experience beliefs: the simplest way is not always the best. Read more…

You might well have come across multivariate testing techniques before in your explorations into customer experience measurement, but for the uninitiated, here is a brief definition that puts the methodology into context.

Multivariate testing, or MVT, is an experimentation process by which a series of possible design variables are tested at once to see what effect, if any, they have on website performance. It’s a complex form of split, or A/B testing, employing algorithm-based software and constant monitoring of web analytics data. Small changes are made to single variables (such as the position of a menu, the colour of a background) and the impact of each change is measured. From series of changes, optimum design configurations can be narrowed down as a result of measurable evidence. With MVT it is also possible to experiment with structural, business rule and database driven elements, as well as cosmetic changes. We can even employ advanced rule-based targeting capabilities, including targeting by geographic location, traffic source (such as search engine versus email campaigns), cookies, and more.

Read more…

Clients who think that their online forms are too long may consider putting 2 or more fields (e.g. text fields, dropdown menus) next to each other in one line. Is this a good idea? Read more…