What Makes Them Click

I have a friend who volunteers to be on an advisory board for a land trust conservancy organization. They have been designing a web site for the land trust. But they are all volunteers, and the organization doesn’t have a budget for web site design. They have a programmer donating her time to put together the website.

Can you get user feedback when the site doesn’t even exist yet? – My friend’s background is in usability, and she was concerned that the web site that the programmer was putting together had usability problems. But the group has virtually no budget to do user centered design or get user feedback on the prototype. And all she had were some pictures of a draft of some of the pages. For example, here’s what she had for the home page:

The menus didn’t “work” because it was just a picture, so she put together this page showing what would be in the drop downs if you did click on the main navigation on the home page:

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I’m amazed by the continual “bloopers” I find on websites. Maybe my expectations are too high, but I expect major companies and organizations to fix issues they have with their websites.  Here are a few of my favorites:

This blooper from Hertz has been going on for months – look at the calendar, it’s wrong… it’s got the wrong day of the week for these dates. Maybe they are using a Mayan calendar or something?

Picture of calendar at Hertz web site

Don’t know English? Then read what to do – in English! — I first saw this content from the state of California Courts website on being a juror several years ago… it’s still there (the highlighting is mine) – “If you cannot unerstand English, follow the instructions on the summons…” all written, of course, in English!:

And Verizon hasn’t tested what their website looks like — It’s looked like this for several months. There is some kind of problem here, probably a browser issue, but I guess Verizon hasn’t tested with Safari.

Do you have favorite bloopers? Send me a URL and description.

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Do you want a quick and easy way to make any web page easier to use and more intuitive? If you want people to realize that two things “belong” together, then put them near each other (close proximity), and put other things a little further away. Sounds simple, right?  Many usability and user experience principles are complicated and may take significant time and energy to accomplish. This is one of the easier ones!

Let’s take a look at some web sites for examples:

In the image below of the Crutchfield page, there is a gray arrow that ends up being very close to the text on the left that says, “connect with a true audiovideo specialist”. Because that arrow is so close to the text (and actually appears to “point” to the text), the text and pictures “belong” together and become connected (as they should).

At the Global Giving website, the amount of space between text and pictures that are supposed to “go together” is about the same as the amount of space between items. This makes it less clear what text goes with what picture.

In the MSNBC website the spacing between headers and photos are all even. It is not clear at a glance what headline goes with what photo.

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For the last year or so there has been a heated debate about “the fold”. The fold is the idea that there is a place on a web page that is the bottom edge of what people will see when they look at the page in a browser, and that in order to see anything below that line, the visitor has to scroll down the page. This concept comes from newspapers — there is content on a newspaper page (especially the front page) that is below where the paper folds. In the newspaper world there has been interest for decades and maybe even centuries, at this point, about what to print right above the fold, right below the fold, and right on the fold. This concept bled over to websites in terms of what shows on the screen without scrolling.

What’s the big deal about the fold? — For many years a guiding principle of web and content design has been: If it’s important make sure it’s above the fold, because visitors may not scroll and see more. But lately marketing people, user experience professionals, and others have been questioning this principle. Certainly there is often a lot of material that is below the fold, and people seem to be clicking on it.

Want to see a visual example? — At iampaddy.com there is an interesting visual example. Here is a short video I made from the iampaddy blog that makes the point that maybe people really will scroll:

So do we worry about the fold or not? — I believe it still holds true that the most important content should be above the fold, and that if it is above the fold then it is most likely that people will see it. BUT, if it’s below the fold that doesn’t mean people WON’T see it. Ok, not a definitive answer I know, but the best we can do right now with the data we have (stay tuned… I plan to do some research of my own on this topic).

What do you think? How concerned should we be about whether information and links fall below the fold?

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In my last blog post I reported on a study I recently conducted about differences between men and women in what they planned to purchase online for Valentine’s Day. (see Who is the Most Romantic). I used UserTesting.com (affiliate) to collect the data, and I had an interesting insight about running user tests while I was doing the study.

Brief description of the service I used – In case you don’t know Usertesting.com, it’s a service that lets you run what is called an un-moderated user test. Un-moderated means you are not there to moderate or facilitate the test session. You set up the test scenario and specify the web site and tasks you want the user to do by entering this information into a form at the Usertesting.com site. Then the Usertesting.com people recruit the users you have specified (meaning they post it to their database of already screened people), they provide the scenario and tasks to each user, and record the interactions each user has with the web site or sites. You get a notification that your test results are available, and then you can watch the video and the audio of each user session.

It’s very easy to set up and run user tests this way. If you are skilled at writing scenarios and tasks, it takes literally a minute to set up and run a test. It usually takes about 2-5 minutes for users to see the test post and start the test, and I have found that within 20-30 minutes videos are ready for you to watch.  Nice, right?

Running my first pilot for the study — When you fill out the form to set up the test you get to pick how many people you want to run the test. The first time I set up the test, I decided to just run one person. I wanted to make sure I had the wording right in my scenario and tasks. In other words, I was doing what is called a pilot test – I was running a test where I would throw away the data, just to see if my scenario and instructions were clear and would result in getting me the type of data I needed.

Why run a pilot anyway? — Running a pilot is always recommended when you are doing user testing, but I ‘ve seen lots of people skip this step. When you are doing “regular” moderated user testing (i.e.,  you are there in person, you’re renting a facility, you are paying money to recruit users, and you are paying money to the users as incentives), it’s expensive to run a pilot test. You should still do it, but I would say that less than 50% of the people I know even run a pilot test.

But with the Usertesting.com system it’s easy and fast and not very expensive to run a pilot. The entire cost is $39 per user – for everything, so why not run a pilot?

How I came to run multiple pilots – In my test last week I ran a pilot, and found that certain wording in my task instructions was causing people to go off in a direction that was not useful in terms of the data I was interested in. I changed the wording of the instructions and ran the pilot again. Still not quite right, so I modified a little more. I  ran 4 pilots before I was convinced that the wording was clear and would result in the test testing what I actually wanted to test. Then I used that wording to run the real test.

How about running un-moderated pilots before a moderated study? – Now I was sure that the data I had coming would be useful and valid, and not just a reflection of some wording or instructional error I had in my tasks. By spending an hour or two to run the pilots I could be sure that the actual test results would be effective. It dawned on me that this ability to run multiple, iterative pilots was really powerful. I usually run one pilot, but I’d never been able to run iterative, multiple pilots. In fact, I’ve decided this is so powerful, that in the future, even when I am conducting  “regular” moderated user testing, I plan to first run a series of pilots with Usertesting.com to test out my scenario and task instructions.

Contest to give away a free test session — I have a special idea to encourage comments for this blog: I have a special promotional code that the Usertesting.com folks have given to me. You can use the code to run one free test for one user at usertesting.com. I’m going to run a little contest here, and give the promotional code away to the person who writes the best comment to this blog (I get to decide which is the “best” comment). So, what do you think? Do you do user testing? Do you run pilot tests when you do? Have you used Usertesting.com in this way?

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Recently I was talking to someone who is relatively new to the field of usability and user experience. He has developed a web application and wanted some ideas for getting feedback from users. He commented that he was planning on sending out a survey to users to see what they think about the web application. That was his plan for user testing. I’m so entrenched in the concept of usability and user testing that I have to stop sometimes and remember that not everyone else is.

“Well, you do have other choices besides doing a survey, you know”, I said.

“Oh, really?” he asked, “like what?”.

“I’ll send you some ideas,” I replied, and then I thought, “That would make a good blog post”, and, here we are.

1. “Traditional” moderated usability test – Let’s start with the most well-known and most used method of getting feedback from users. In a moderated usability test the user sits down in front of the software, web site web application, or other product that you are testing and uses the product, site or item to get one or more tasks done. The tester designs the test with real-life scenarios and asks the user to use the product or tool or site to go through and actually do the scenarios. The user is asked to talk out loud while they are completing the scenarios, so that the tester can understand what they are thinking and experiencing as they complete the activities they have been asked to do.  It’s called moderated because there is a facilitator to moderate the testing.

It’s important in a moderated usability test that:

• Users must be representative of the actual user. It doesn’t work to use you or friend in the next cubicle, or your sister. The idea is to have a representative user try to use the site or product to get real tasks done.
• Although you may be collecting other data, such as time to complete the task or number or types of errors made, the main data comes from the comments users make while they are working (called the “think aloud” technique).
• Tests are done one-on-one. This isn’t a focus group.
• Some facilitators “probe” with questions during the test, but this is tricky to do. You don’t want your questions to influence the user. Some facilitators wait until the tasks are completed before asking questions (called “de-briefing”).

Pros: Gives you lots of great data on what the usability issues are

Cons: Fairly expensive to conduct. You do these one at a time, so if you are testing 10 users that’s a lot of your time to be at the sessions, plan them,  analyze and report on data, etc. You may also need to pay for recruiting users and you need to give them an “incentive” (pay them in some way with cash, gift certificates etc). read more »

It’s that time of year — so here is my list of the 10 best posts from my blog in 2009. I chose the 10 that I believe have had the greatest impact/most thought provoking/most interest from my readers.

#1: Dopamine Makes You Addicted to Seeking Information — I thought this was an interesting post when I wrote it, but it surprised me how quickly it took off virally; more than any other post I’ve written!

#2: Eyetracking — 7 Traps to Avoid — Another surprise to me how popular this post was.

#3: 7 Steps to Successful Web Site Redesign — I think Jacek Utko has an important view of the world.

#4: Your Attention is Riveted By Pictures of People — If people knew how important this is I think they’d change the pictures they put at their web site.

#5: Web Site User Experience Anatomy — Not one of my posts, but a guest post by Craig Tomlin, and an interesting way to think about web sites. read more »

WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO READ IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IS COMMONLY BELIEVED, BUT NOT TRUE – You read by recognizing the shapes of words and groups of words. Words that are in all capital letters all have the same shape: a rectangle of a certain size. This makes words displayed in all uppercase harder to read than upper and lower case (known as “mixed case”).  Mixed case words are easier to read because they make unique shapes, as demonstrated by the picture below.

OK, NOW THE TRUE STUFF STARTS — When I started this article the topic was supposed to be why all capital letters are harder to read. Like most people with a usability background or a cognitive psychology background, I can describe the research — just what I wrote in the first paragraph above. I decided to look up and cite the actual research rather than just passing on the general knowledge and belief.

The research doesn’t exist, or “It’s complicated” — Something happened when I went to find the research on the shape of words and how that is related to all capital letters being harder to read. There isn’t research showing that exactly. It’s more complicated, and ultimately, more controversial. In July of 2004 Kevin Larson wrote an article that is posted at the Microsoft website that explains in depth all the research on this topic. I’ve picked out several ideas from that article and am presenting them here. A link to Kevin’s article, plus some of his research citations are at the end of this blog for those of you who want more detail. read more »

Jacek Utko

Jacek Utko is a newspaper designer. He has designed/redesigned many newspapers in Central and Eastern Europe and won world awards. He believes strongly in “giving power to the designers” and that designers should embed their personal vision into the work they do, even at the expense of being a team player.

Utko’s words and work are compelling, and I especially like his 7 Steps to Success. He is talking about 7 steps to success if you are redesigning a newspaper, but when I first read the 7 steps I thought they were a good jumping off point on 7 Steps to Successful Web Site Design. So I’ve taken his 7 steps and modified them to fit the design of websites:

7 Steps To Successful Web Site Design or Redesign (concepts borrowed from Jacek Utko and modified)

1. Web Site Strategy: What is the goal? Where and how can you reach new visitors to your website? Pick one measure of success (sales, conversions registrations), pick your most important measure and ask: “How can we increase that one measure of success?”

2. Content: What content do you have that will attract new visitors and advertisers. What content should you change or add to reach and serve them better? read more »

Guest Blogger Craig Tomlin

GUEST POST: This is a guest post by Craig Tomlin

Just like human anatomy, the anatomy of a web site is composed of different user experience parts that must all work together seamlessly.  Optimizing the user experience of each part however is problematic: Where do you start?  How much user experience testing and adjusting should you do on each of your page types?  What’s critical, important or just a nice to have in terms of spending your limited user experience testing resources?

Over the past 13 or so years I’ve conduct user experience testing and optimization on hundreds of large and small web sites.  During this time, I’ve noted a pattern to the user experience of typical web site pages.  There seems to me to be what I call a “user experience page weight” and a resulting “user experience testing weight” that are fairly consistent across web sites.

In my opinion, these user experience anatomy points of a web site can be weighted, and that weighting used to help a web site owner determine what user experience importance to place on each page type.  This weighting can also help determine how much user experience testing resources should be applied to each page.

Following is my overview of an average web site user experience page weight, and user experience testing needs.

Of course, no two web sites are exactly the same, thus your web site may or may not have the same weightings as I’m indicating here.  But you can use my criteria and weights as a starting point, and adjust your web site user experience weighting to fit your site.  This provides you the benefit of having a better comprehension of the user experience needs by page type, and how much resources to spend testing and optimizing each page type.

A Few Definitions first:

User Experience Page Weight – I define this as a percentage of your total web site experience cognitive load.  Total web site experience is the average amount of cognitive load your web site visitor will typically expend on your web site during typical critical tasks.

Some pages, for example the home page and products pages, may typically experience a higher cognitive load than other pages, as your web site visitors try to determine if your site should be trusted, and if you provide the products or services the visitor is trying to find.

Many years of usability testing on large and small sites have enabled me to average a “typical” UX Page Weight, which I’ll define specifically for each page type below.  However, your web site may not have the same UX Page Weight as I am providing here – your own usability testing on your own site should be your guide.

User Experience Testing – I define this as a percentage of the resources you should expend in conducting usability testing and related user experience research (clicktrack analysis, eye-tracking, etc.) when evaluating optimizations of the user experience for that page.

It’s a rare firm that has enough UX resources to continually test and optimize all web site pages at the same time, most of us have to spread limited resources around.  This metric is my average for each page gained from years of usability testing observations of multiple kinds of web sites.  Your web site might have different UX testing weights.

User experience anatomy of a typical web site, with UX page and testing weights.

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