We were testing a site the other day for a major retailer that didn’t have many of the features that are now considered pretty standard for ecommerce sites. It was not clear what they sold, it had busy cluttered pages, you had to register, there was no persistent basket and much else.

However, by and large, our testers used the site without major difficulty. There were problems, but nothing that would have stopped them completing a purchase. When asked to give their overall impressions at the end of the session they broadly said it was fine and they would use it again.

So what’s going on? How can there be such a mismatch between our expert assessment of the site and the testers’ feedback?

I think there are a number of factors.

We have learnt how to use poorly designed sites. Everything we do on a website is learnt behaviour. There is nothing intuitive about how to use a web site. The concept of a link and what it looks like is learnt. Where we expect to see navigation is learnt. That adverts can be ignored is learnt (even for useful things that look like adverts but aren’t). Also if we use the web a lot we have learnt how to use badly designed sites. Think of the number of times you look for something on a page and it’s not where you expect. You then hunt around in various places and, if lucky, find it. Think of the meaningless error messaging you often get when filling in a form. Often it doesn’t tell you what the problem is or where it is – bad usability – but you know what to do: you check every field, you try taking out the space in the postcode or telephone number, you add numbers or symbols to your password because you know some sites insist on it but haven’t told you. If you can’t find something because there is too much text on the page or it’s badly laid out you hit ctrl F and search for it. You have learnt coping strategies for bad websites.

As increasingly the people we use to test sites are very experienced, they get round these usability issues, often they don’t even know they are doing these things so when we ask them what they think they say “it was fine”. It was, but that does not mean it’s a well designed web site.

Another factor is the test environment. We bring people into the lab, pay them money and ask them to use a website. It can, in spite of the best efforts of the facilitator, feel like a test of the user, not the website. Most testers want to please, we are British, we don’t want to complain, we tend to blame ourselves. All of these factors lead the tester to say nice things about the site

So does this mean usability testing is a waste of time and money? Well no, if you focus on the right things. What matters in these circumstances is what users do, their behaviours. When observing you can see the coping strategies testers use, though this does mean you need an understanding of how much better it could be, so you need a good understanding of best practice in site design. You also often need to ignore what testers say, especially if this contradicts what you have just watched them do. Testers are, in the main, not good at understanding their own behaviour.

So usability testing on its own is not enough to draw meaningful insights. This needs to be combined with a good understanding of best practice in site design and user behaviour so that the right conclusions can be drawn from the user testing.

Technology for Marketing & Advertising (TFM&A) is the UK’s largest and longest running event for the entire Marketing, Media and Advertising industry, and thirteen years on, it remains the flagship must-attend event for.

There are keynote speakers on topical issues and seminars on everything from content management, through social media to mobile marketing.

Join WUP on stand G24 for a chat, to find out what we are up to, and for some free sweeties!

Responsive design seems like a brilliant solution for coping with the rise in mobile users but what are its pros and cons, and what has to be considered to make it effective?

The growth of mobile browsing

Browsing the web from a mobile has arrived in a big way and will only get bigger. The number of smartphone users in the UK will more than double between 2012 and 2016, from 19.2 million to 41.9 million, according to eMarketer’s forecasts.

Tablet ownership among the GB population is at 13%, with non-iPad ownership increasing steadily with the increasing popularity of android tablets in the market (Ipsos MORI)

Shopping and browsing on mobile devices: 66% of tablet owners have made a purchase from their device, whilst 44% have done the same from their smartphone in recent months, according to eDigitalResearch and IMRG.

But 90% of  websites are not optimized for mobile, and even bigger companies are failing to meet mobile needs as 60% of the UK’s biggest 100 advertisers didn’t have a mobile-optimized site.

Responsive design

One solution is to build separate mobile and desktop sites, but an alternative approach is ‘Responsive’ design. This is a way to show content on various devices in different ways depending on the size of the screen. It involves building a single site and using style sheets to reformat the content based on the browser size.

They key advantages of this approach are:

• You only have to build and maintain one site
• The site displays well on all platforms and so should be easier to use
• Lots of users use mobile for everything – they don’t have different goals or want different journeys on the mobile
• Google likes mobile optimized sites

Some drawbacks are:

• If users have goals that are specific to mobile then it’s harder to balance the competing needs of desktops and mobiles
• Users behave differently on touch and swipe devices (mobile) in comparison with point and click devices (desktops). It’s harder to build an interface that works well in both situations
• For responsive design sites to work well you have to think mobile first. It may be hard to take an existing site optimized for desktop (and an organizational culture that thinks ‘desktop’) and change this to be optimized for mobile.
• Simpler images and layouts are needed for small screens that may not be best for larger screens

What to consider

Notwithstanding the drawbacks, there is little doubt that responsive design is a great solution for many sites, but they have to be designed and implemented well. Issues to consider include:

• Whether to adopt a fully responsive design (lots of states) vs. adaptive layout (limited number of states)
• The number and size of breakpoints in the design
• Where to place, and how to handle, site navigation
• Numbers and sizes of columns/grids at different resolutions
• Text sizes at different resolutions (responsive typesetting)
• Image types
• What functionality and content to hide at small resolutions
• The level of compatibility required with older browsers

How WUP can help

If responsive design is something you are looking at then WUP can help in a number of ways. We can:

• Help you develop a responsive design strategy
• User test your own responsive design prototypes on a variety of platforms
• Create responsive design prototypes and even design them if required

If you want to know more please get in touch.

WUP have a new product – ‘Guerilla user testing’

Agile site development approaches means that fitting large set piece user testing sessions into the development schedule can be inflexible and expensive. As a result we offer a ‘Guerilla user testing’ product that is quick, flexible and cheap. It works as follows:

• We recruit and pay 3 testers
• We test concepts and prototypes remotely with users using a shared desktop so we can observe and record what the user is doing from our offices
• The sessions are facilitated by a WUP consultant in the normal user centric way
• We prepare a report that summarises the testing outcomes within 24hrs of the test session
• We provide videos of the test sessions

The approach can be very flexible; we can take prototypes you are developing and test them the following day and get you the results the day after. This way if you are having difficulty identifying the right design solution we can get you customer feedback within 48hrs. As we are remote testing it means we can more easily get hold of testers who are difficult to get into the lab.

The cost of this service is £1,950 (plus VAT)

If you want to know more please get in touch

WUP have teamed up with a very experienced local design company so we can now offer fully designed and built web solutions for desktop/laptop and mobile devices.

We are still very much a UX business – user research and testing is at the heart of what we do – but we now also offer beautiful, usable and effective sites.

We combine our UX research and expertise with our partner’s creative talent and provide you with complete tested solutions that:

• Work harder to achieve your goals e.g. optimise conversion rates, reduce back office costs
• Work for users e.g. make it easier for them to buy, make it easier for them to find information
• Reinforce and strengthen your brand

And our process for turning research and ideas into action means that you will:

• Maximize internal buy-in to new concepts and designs
• Reinforce a user centred culture in your organization
• Reduce the development time and, therefore, cost

Our design partner has worked with both large and small brands, B2B, B2C and ecommerce sites while we are still working with the likes of Waitrose, Sony Pro, Disney, Petplan, The Charity Commission, Companies House, so between us we have unrivalled experience.

We are still happy to test your, or your agencies designs, but we can now go further when you need it.

If you want to know more please get in touch.

Are you thinking about how to cater for your mobile users? If so these examples of responsive design may be of interest.

Because sites now need to be designed to work on all platforms – desktops, tablets, smartphones – responsive design is a great way to address this problem. There are now some nice examples out there – you can see how they work by just resizing the browser. Examples are:

• Currys
• United Pixel Workers
• Attika
• The Boston Globe
• Food Sense

However, they are not without their challenges: how do you decide what content shows at what browser size? What will work for users on different platforms?

If responsive design is something you are looking at, WUP can help in a number of ways. We can:

• Help you develop a responsive design strategy
• We can user test your own responsive design prototypes on a variety of platforms
• We can create responsive design prototypes and even design them if required

If you want to know more please get in touch.

Nicola O’Connor (Digital Content Strategy Specialist) commented “The project has been a catalyst for moving the organisation to a truly user-centred approach”

Read how WUP changed Cancer Research UK’s thinking

WUP is now registered on this database

When we were explaining this to someone at the eCommerce Expo 2012 at Olympia last week he said “So you don’t mark your own homework”. Exactly! Thank you – a brilliant summing up of what we don’t do.

A large part of what we do is usability testing – user testing designs developed by other people: consequently, we’re not wedded to the design solution – we just look for ways to make the site work better for users. We champion the voice of the user throughout the process and constantly bring the conversation back to thinking about ways to reduce the customer struggle. By doing this we help clients to:

• Understand users’ needs
• Improve website task completion, conversion, cross and up selling rates
• Improve online transaction rates
• Improve social media/email campaigns

But we deliver more than just reports and ‘a mark’ – our collaborative approach ensures research gets turned into action. Because we reference all discussion back to the user evidence, we get stakeholder buy-in and alignment – this includes people from different functions in the client and their external agencies: as Craig Sullivan of Belron says “User testing removes any opinion, whim and ego from the design process”. Our approach also means that recommendations that fit the client’s technical, financial and political constraints, and reduces time from research to action.