USER EXPERIENCE TESTING

When it comes time to evaluate the experience that users have on your website, there are two major areas of emphasis that we focus on.  The first area is functionality. Does the website work not only as intended but also in a manner in which users expect it to?  The second area is that of effectiveness. Is the site and its features designed in such a way as to maximize the micro conversions that the business desires to obtain?

User experience testing is about creating a feedback loop between a business and its users. Without it sometimes a business becomes too close to their product and that creates challenges for how a business prioritizes and manages its technical and functional priorities.

There are usually three steps that we want to apply to user experience testing.  The scope and challenge related to each step is purely based on the specific business requirements involved, however the process remains similar regardless of the site.

The first step is a functional evaluation with an analytics review.  Do all of the existing site elements work?  Are there errors being delivered to users based on major functionality failures?  What is the size of the edge case bucket?

Once we have what we believe to be a site functioning in a satisfactory manner we then work with the business to reach out to existing users to query them and gather feedback on what functionality they believe may need improvement. If the site is new and doesn’t have a substantial enough user base, we have relationships with third party agencies that can create focus groups for us to use.

If there is a consensus that some functionality could use improvement, we make recommendations and allow the business to measure the value of the changes against the value of the other projects that they may be performing. During this stage we also often receive a lot of requests for additional functionality that doesn’t currently exist on the site. We package up as much of this data as we can as well and present it to the company for future consideration.

After the site has been adjusted, we like to work with businesses to see what can be done to improve existing products.  We can help businesses perform multi-variant testing, focus groups, and design assessments.  Sometimes something as simple as changing a color or moving a button can have significant effects on the performance of a site.  Our goal is to help you locate those adjustments and successfully implement them.