Section 4.1. Hacks 5467: Introduction

4.1. Hacks 5467: Introduction

According to the Wikipedia, usability testing is "a means for measuring how well people can actually use something (such as a web page, a computer interface, a document, or a device) for its intended purpose."Testing generally measures how well a small group of subjects, recruited especially for the test, respond to four areas: time on task, accuracy, recall, and emotional response. Although web site measurement is not usability testing, it can often provide a great proxy for usability tests, allowing you to run simple usability tests on an ongoing basis over a much larger audience.

The essence of usability testing is to provide subjects a specific goal, watch them perform the task, and take notes along the way. One of the most powerful things you can do with usability tests is to gather developers and executives together (perhaps not at the same time) behind one-way glass and have them watch the test subjects in action. Regardless of your position in an organization, watching normal folks struggle with your beautiful creation can be heartbreaking.

Popularized by figures like Jakob Nielsen, Bruce Tognazzini, and Jared Spool, usability testing is a "must do"for any company building a new web site or web-based application. The problem with true usability testing is that it can be expensive and time consuming. Enter the relationship between usability testing and web measurement.

Because of the ongoing costs of true usability testing, most companies leverage their investment in web measurement applications in tandem with the continuous improvement process to run simple usability tests on very large audiences. Especially when run in conjunction with split-path testing, the measurement of multi-step processes, and the use of visitor segmentation to examine the behavior and success of different groups of visitors, exploring the usability of specific processes online can be very informative.

The biggest problem with using your web measurement tools to conduct faux usability tests is the inability to accurately determine the intent of the visitor. Without knowing intent, you can never really be sure if visitors are failing to complete a process because they are struggling or because they had no intention of completing the process in the first place. Especially in the shopping cart and checkout process so common in online retailing, often visitors are only exploring, daydreaming, or wishing as they add and remove products from the shopping cart or begin the checkout process. The fact that they never complete the process holds conversion rates down, but unless you know intent, it is impossible to cull those visitors out of the calculation.

Still, given that you probably already have a web measurement application that does some or all of the things described in this chapter, hopefully these hacks will give you a big push in the right direction.