Tips for Usability Professionals in a Down Economy
Journal of Usability Studies, Volume 4, Issue 2, February 2009, pp. 60-69
Article Contents
Tip #2: Get More Data with Less Work
That may sound like an oxymoron, but it doesn't have to be. The key is collecting data from users online, via the Web. This data collection can take on many forms, including various kinds of online surveys, online card-sorting studies, and online usability tests. Using the following techniques it's possible to get data from hundreds of users in a matter of days.
- Online surveys have been around for quite a while. If you're not familiar with the tools for creating, administering, and analyzing online surveys, you should be. (You can find a list of some of the popular online survey tools at www.measuringux.com/OnlineSurveys.) Many of these tools provide a free version, although they usually limit the number of respondents. Many of the paid versions are still quite reasonable (e.g., 1,000 respondents per month for $19). What you can do with these tools is mainly limited by your creativity and ingenuity. Online surveys can be useful in just about any phase of the development of a new product. Early on, they can be used to get input from target users about desired features and functions, or what they find confusing about an existing application. During iterative design and prototyping, online surveys can be used to get quick feedback about design alternatives. And once an application or Website is deployed, you can provide a link to an online survey for feedback.
- Online card-sorting is one of my favorite techniques for getting input from users about how an application or Website should be organized. (A list of popular online card-sorting tools can be found at www.measuringux.com/CardSorting.) The basic idea is to present users with a set of virtual cards that contain brief descriptions of the functions or pages of a new Website or application. The users then sort the cards into what they perceive as the logical groups and then name those groups. Most of the online tools provide some analysis techniques, such as hierarchical cluster analysis, to help you get a better understanding of the groups that the users created. A variation on this technique involves presenting the users with the cards as well as the names of groups to sort them into. This is a great way to compare different candidate information architectures for a Website.
- Online usability testing has the potential to transform the way we do our work, at least for those of us involved in Web design. (See www.measuringux.com/OnlineTesting for a list of some of the tools for online usability testing.) Online testing is not that different from traditional lab testing, both involve representative users doing realistic tasks using a prototype or live site. The difference is that with the traditional test you're directly observing each participant, while with an online test you're indirectly observing via automated data-collection methods (task timing, clickstream recording, etc.). Automated data collection allows you to collect data from far more participants than you ever could in a lab setting. We routinely do online usability studies where we get data from over 1,000 participants in just two days. Why would you want data from these large numbers of participants? Mainly because it allows you to easily make comparisons between alternative designs. We just finished an online study comparing two subtly different designs for an online account-opening wizard. Participants were randomly assigned to one design or the other. With over 400 participants per condition, we were able to reliably detect that one design resulted in a 2.5% higher completion rate than the other. Even just a 2.5% improvement in the completion rate can have a major impact on the bottom line.
None of these online data collection techniques can completely replace working directly with users, as in a traditional focus group, interview, contextual observation sessions, or lab usability test. Some things can't be learned without directly interacting with users. But online data collection can help complement and even guide those sessions.