Editorial Articles

User testing is a key part of ensuring your website is as easy to use as possible, to help keep visitors on your site and convert them into customers if required. The testing involves watching typical site visitors attempt to complete realistic tasks on your website, and measuring the ease with which they do so. The results of the analysis are a huge eye-opener and their implementation often leads to, among other things, increased sales and task completion, as well as a high rate of return site visitors. But what are the key issues when it comes to planning user testing for your website?

Preparing for user testing requires a surprisingly large amount of planning. It’s important to invest the time upfront to ensure that the testing will thoroughly evaluate a website’s user experience and that everything will run according to plan. Here are the 6 steps we go through to get ready.

1. Create a test plan
Identify what aspects of your website you want to evaluate and create a list of approximately 6 tasks. For each task you should include the following:

• A scenario - This is the task instruction you ask participants to read. It should include a goal and an imagined circumstance, something which will make the scenario feel realistic. This helps participants get into the right mindset for a task. For example, “It's your friend's birthday next week. You want to buy him a present and you know he likes action movies. Please buy him the latest Batman DVD.”
• Stopping criteria – This is the page or point in the website participants should reach to complete each task. With this we can objectively determine whether a task is achieved.
• Correct paths –Note down the correct path(s) participants need to take to complete the task. If the moderator is ill on the testing day their colleague will still be able run the sessions and they’ll be able to familiarise themselves with the website more quickly.
• Possible issues - There might be a dozen things you want to evaluate on a page. To make sure you cover all of them, list all the possible issues for each task and we refer to this during the sessions.

Finally, share the test plan with clients to check everything they were hoping to cover in the user testing is covered. This might include the key stakeholders or project sponsors. Give clients a few days to gather feedback and, if you subsequently make changes to the plan, send them an updated version. 

2. Recruit your participants
Recruitment is one of the most important things to get right. If the participants aren't representative of the client’s target audiences then you won't be able to trust findings of the testing, so make sure you find the right people.

Create a detailed recruitment profile for the types of people clients want to take part in the user testing. Then pass this on to trusted specialist recruiters. Use experts to make sure you get the right people to take part.

3. Know the website and freezing development
Get completely familiar with the website or prototype that is being put through user testing. You need to know exactly what you want to explore of an any given webpage and what’s going to happen when a participant clicks on a link or button. By knowing the website well the sessions go smoother.

Try to book the testing sessions to start 3 or 4 days after the website is scheduled to be ready, if the client’s schedule permits it. Design and development work can sometimes overrun and have knock-on effects on your user testing.

Ask clients to put a freeze on the development of the website while user testing is taking place. You don't want the website to unexpectedly change while it’s being tested or, worse still, to go offline due to a technical issue. Where possible, try to have a local copy of the website on the PC you’ll be using just in case something goes wrong.

4. Arrange the facilities
Book out user testing facilities well in advance to make sure they'll be available and set up the equipment the day before and do a dry run.

Encourage your clients to watch the testing from the adjoining room through a one-way mirror. People find watching user testing very interesting and it helps them to build empathy with their websites' users. It's a great way to get people to buy into the idea of investing in usability so encourage clients to bring along any usability skeptics.

If you don't have suitable facilities you can hire them from companies that conduct user testing or market research.

5. Create a crib sheet
There are quite a few important things that should be said to participants at the start of a session. For example, the list might include reminding participants that you’re making a video recording, you want them to think aloud and you’re evaluating the website not their own performance. We add all such things to our crib sheet and refer to that at the start of each session.

There are other things that you should do at the start or end of a session, such as start and end the video recording, and delete the browser history (so that a participant won't see the previous participant's visited links). Add these to our crib sheet too.

6. Run a pilot test
This is one of the most important things to do in terms of preparing for user testing. Make sure you run a pilot test with an extra participant or a colleague. Do this in the actual room where you'll be conducting the user testing to check that everything works.

Check that all of the technology is working. This includes checking that an audio and video stream is sent from the testing room to the adjacent viewing room, and checking that the video recording facility is working properly.

The consultant goes through everything in their test plan to make sure that the scenarios they’ve written will make sense to someone else and can be completed within the amount of time we’ll have with each participant. (This is typically 1 hour due to average concentration spans)

When you’re conducting user testing you must make sure that nothing will go wrong and that clients and all of their stakeholders will be satisfied with what you’ve done. Going through these 6 steps to plan user testing will help make sure that things run smoothly and clients are satisfied with the results of the user testing.

Abid Warsi
Senior Consultant
Webcredible
www.webcredible.co.uk/blog
www.twitter.com/webcredible