User Testing & Research

The best people to tell you how to improve your website are your users. Usability testing and user research reveal how they use your website, and crucially where they fail to succeed in using it. By understanding your users goals and motivations better you can provide them with a better experience they really want to use.

The effects of applying the conclusions of usability testing and research are in most circumstances measurable in concrete metrics such as sales, conversions, time spent per visit to your website, intranet or mobile app.

An E-consultancy report from 2010 estimates that the return on investment (ROI) of investing in usability is that for every £1 you spend you get £6 back. The informed industry view is that is it not a case of whether you can afford usability testing, rather that you cannot afford not to test.

Some of the benefits of usability testing are:

Increased sales/conversions per user visit
Customer satisfaction and retention
Reputational and competitive advantage
Better word-of-mouth advertising
Improved search rankings
Decrease in user support costs
Decrease in design and development time and costs

Usability testing and research services:

Usability testing: 1:1 testing of real users in a usability lab is used to evaluate prototypes through to final products. Particularly important in the successful designing of interactions. We test across multiple platforms, browsers and devices to ensure your customers can access your services however they want. We can conduct testing in additional languages including German, French, Spanish, and Polish, and can even arrange testing in Cantonese and Mandarin. Please enquire for other languages.
Expert usability reviews: Many common usability issues can be quickly diagnosed utilising practitioner experience and applying established usability heuristics. This is a quick and economic way of benefiting from UX design, and a good way to evaluate if UX design is what you want for your business. Naturally we think it is.
Field research and ethnography: Using methods of participant observation and contextual enquiry is a much more deep approach to user research than mere focus groups, and aims to reveal unarticulated user needs. The results can be used as part of persona creation.
Field research and ethnography: Using methods participant observation, shadowing, and contextual enquiry deep knowledge of users needs and desires, including fundamental requirements that are unarticulated and cannot be accessed using methods such as focus groups can be accessed. Field research yields the type of insights that drive innovation. Knowledge gained provides material for richer business intelligence that can be used in the creation of personas and scenarios.
Personas: Personas are created archetypes representing the target audience. These are used to interrogate the requirements in the early project stages and assist in conceptualising and then testing user journey's and task flows. They are employed at all project stages to assure a continuing user centred approach.
Accessibility audits: Accessibility is a much misunderstood area of web design, and often conflated with usability, or seem as a hindrance to usable design. In truth it differs in from usability in being much more science than art. The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) 1 standard at level AA is recognised as the minimum legal standard for public websites, also and any website presenting a company with more than 5 employees. Conforming to this standard can be objectively measured by an expert practitioner. WAI 2 extends the standard into the Web 2.0 age, but has not yet reached universal acceptance. We advise provide reports using both standards. Accessibility is essential for the best performing Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and is a vital constituent of the highest level UX design.
Multi-variant (A/B) testing: Multi variant testing means running two, or more, alternate design solutions in a live environment. It has the advantage that it tests behaviour on users who are unaware that they are being tested, and provides hard evidence on what really works for users. We can co-ordinate and manages A/B tests. These are particularly valuable for assessing solutions for e-Commerce sites, where turning visits into transactions is the bottom line.
UX design, research and testing for international markets: We have international partners, and can arrange for Usability testing in many European countries. Please ask us for details.